Reliable information about the financial scale of the drugs trade is often difficult to ascertain beyond the anecdotal and the second-hand.

Even the Police are reduced to saying that they expect to stop a certain small percentage from reaching the Island, and then extrapolate what the likely total value of drug imports are from that sum.

But two recent seizures given some idea of the amounts concerned.

Norman O'Donnell Rayner, a Bermudian from Pembroke, is now in prison after being stopped in January on a yacht off the Bahamas. That yacht was carrying around a ton of cannabis destined for the streets of Bermuda – where it would have had a value of $40 million.

And Dennis Pamplin, the estranged husband of Opposition MP Patricia Gordon-Pamplin is remanded in custody in the US facing charges of conspiring to smuggle $15 million worth of the drug to Bermuda. In this case, as in all criminal cases, it is important to note that Mr. Pamplin has not been found guilty of any crime.

But the two cases do at least give some idea of the enormity of the drugs trade. One has to assume that these were not the only shipments allegedly destined for Bermuda. The total number of shipments could well put the value of the drugs trade in Bermuda in any given year in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

In economic terms, that means that a large part of the Bermuda economy is fuelled by illicit crime. It means that Bermuda residents, for the most part, are spending possibly hundreds of millions of dollars on illegal drugs.

To put that in perspective, Bermuda residents returning to Bermuda declared $69 million worth of goods in 2007.

Importers declared $190 million worth of food, beverages and tobacco, which was then sold to the local consumer after adjusting for transport, Customs duty and the local mark-up.

If the amounts cited in the recent crime reports are accurate, that means residents probably spend far more on drugs than they do in a year's worth of shopping overseas, even allowing for under-declarations at the Airport. And they may well spend almost as much on drugs as they do on food and those two other legal addictive substances – alcohol and tobacco.

Nor does this take into account the tremendous cost of rehabilitation, the cost of crime fuelled by the drugs trade or the economic and social costs to business, families and the Island's social fabric as a result of addiction. To the extent that those costs can be quantified, the costs are almost beyond belief.

The other fundamental question concerns how the trade is being financed. For decades, the existence of a "Mr. Big" or several major drugs financiers has been dismissed. The common theory was that syndicates of people put together relatively small amounts of money to finance the importation of drugs.

But the amounts being talked about belie this possibility. Even allowing for the lower cost of drugs elsewhere, those financing this trade must have extremely deep pockets and must also dispose of, or launder, their profits without much notice.

It is obvious, although that does not mean that it will be easy, that following the money is the answer to cutting off the source of drugs, assuming that the authorities do not just throw up their hands and legalise the lot.

This amount of money also gives the operators of the trade enormous amounts of power to corrupt at all levels of society. For all those reasons, it needs to be stopped.