Business Notes DRUG MONEY

The Bush Administration talks tough about drugs, but its effort to stem the laundering of drug profits through banks is only semitough at best. So says Massachusetts Democrat John Kerry, who last week released a report urging Bush to take sterner measures to interrupt the laundering of an estimated $300 billion in drug profits around the world.

Kerry commended the White House for demanding changes in the banking system of Panama, where the former regime of General Manuel Noriega had allowed banks to become a transit point for billions of dollars in drug profits. Yet Kerry's Foreign Relations Committee found the Administration's campaign against laundering to be halfhearted.

"Federal agencies responsible for enforcement are being funded at inadequate levels to accomplish the mission," said the report. The Administration is going slow on the issue, Kerry maintained, because "it involves big money, big profits and big questions about the structure of our banking system."