Europe can’t stop the tide of cocaine
The drug is more available now than in its 1980s heyday as street prices tumble and purity improves
On a naval base on Haulbowline Island, south-east of Cork, officers stationed inside a screen-filled room keep watch over a vast stretch of the Atlantic Ocean that has become a front line in Europe’s war against drugs.
“It’s needle-in-the-haystack stuff,” says the commander directing Ireland’s navy fleet operations, who asks not to be named. Part of his job is to spot anomalies in satellite and other imagery that may indicate small boats increasingly used by drug traffickers.
But even if he sees something worrying, the navy can only deploy “three maximum, and usually two” of Ireland’s eight vessels at a time, he says, due to staff shortages, repairs and the fact that two of the ships are unfit for the rough Atlantic waters. “We’re policing a million square kilometres,” he adds. “To be anywhere comfortable, I need at least 12 vessels.”
In the battle for the seas, drug traffickers are often coming out on top — making Europe, in the words of the UN, the new “primary destination” for cocaine.
The drug, once the preserve of rich European partygoers, has gone mainstream, with street prices falling by an average of 18 per cent between 2014 and 2024 while the products sold became 44 per cent purer, according to the EU’s drugs agency.
As authorities have stepped up interceptions at major ports, traffickers have kept ahead through sophisticated drop-offs at sea, enabled by encrypted communications, powerful speedboats, unmanned submersibles and GPS spoofing, which involves vessels faking their locations.
“You always have to stay up-to-date, because there’s always a new modus operandi,” says Jürgen Ebner, acting chief of Europol, the EU’s law enforcement agency. He warns of a “waterbed effect” — when authorities come down hard in one area it can just push problems somewhere else.
The scale of the problem is vast. Cocaine production in Latin America has quadrupled in the past decade, with criminal networks in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia exploiting global trade routes to shift vast quantities of the drug. Cocaine is also increasingly shipped from Brazil into Europe via west Africa.
The UN warns that supply could soon exceed demand, increasing traffickers’ incentives to dump even more product on to Europe’s streets.
“We’re not in a position to stop these flows,” says Mark Mellett, former chief of staff of Ireland’s Defence Forces, adding that European law enforcement agencies would require “real-time information of what’s happening on the ocean surface, seabed and in the aerial space above”.
The result is that more cocaine is available in Europe today than in the 1980s — often seen as the drug’s heyday — according to the UN. Last year alone, its residue in city wastewater rose by more than a fifth, according to the EU’s drugs agency.
In 2021, the agency estimated the European market was worth €11.6bn; Michael O’Sullivan, a former head of the Maritime Analysis and Operations Centre-Narcotics, a police and military patrol agency made up of nine European countries, believes its value is closer to €15bn today.
Lower prices and frictionless dealing on popular encrypted messaging apps have made cocaine more attainable. The idea that the typical user is someone looking to add a thrill to their night out is “not really true any more”, says Julien Garsany, head of the UN drug agency’s office in Brussels. “It really has penetrated all age groups and all layers of society.”
The drug is increasingly taken by teenagers, Garsany says. “Obviously their brain is not developed yet. So this is how you create a strong path towards addiction.”
European authorities have stepped up their fight by investing in port security and closer judicial co-operation. But drug gangs remain one step ahead.
The Irish fleet operations officer reckons law enforcers catch “maybe 10 per cent” of the cocaine shipped to Europe. Despite his stretched resources, he must also keep tabs on increasing visits by Russian spy ships and monitor maritime threats during several EU summits Ireland is hosting this year.
When it comes to drugs “you can only say you’re winning if you’re completely cutting off the supply”, the officer says. European navies and law enforcement share information but “are they getting it all? Is it killing the problem on land? Let’s be realistic, it’s not.”
Spraying cocaine on to charcoal
Cocaine smuggling to Europe began in earnest in the 1980s when Colombian cartels sought to diversify from a saturated US market. At first, traffickers used yachts and motorboats. But from the 1990s surging volumes led them to use containers transporting goods such as fruit as well as ever more innovative methods, including dispatching “narco-submarines” direct to Europe.
Smugglers mix cocaine powder with other materials such as food, plastics, textiles, cardboard and even cowhides to disguise it for transport before extracting it in clandestine chemical labs later on. One technique involves chemically altering the drug and spraying it on to charcoal.
Over the past decade European countries have made seizures of staggering amounts of cocaine, particularly in large ports such as Rotterdam in the Netherlands and Antwerp in Belgium, where a record 118 tonnes was seized in 2023.
Since 2019, the number of seizures on the continent has outnumbered those in America.
But in the past three years there has been a “tremendous drop”, according to Kristian Vanderwaeren, Belgium’s head of customs. Belgian authorities seized 5.4 tonnes of cocaine in the first six months of this year in Antwerp, a 68 per cent fall from the same period last year — and a further decline from the total 55 tonnes impounded in 2025.
Many see the fall as an indicator that improved security is deterring drug dealers from channelling their products through big ports. Belgium has worked closely with private terminal operators and invested in equipment, such as mobile scanners, meaning they can now X-ray 15 to 17 per cent of containers deemed high risk immediately upon arrival, compared with just 5 per cent in 2023.
“Definitely there has been change, in the sense [that] there are not that many huge and massive cocaine shipments anymore,” says Robert Fay, head of the drugs trafficking unit at Europol.
But, as security at the big ports is stepped up, criminal groups are turning to GPS and satellite-enabled deliveries in the middle of the Atlantic as an alternative.
These at-sea drop-offs can involve fishing boats or large merchant “mother ships” carrying legitimate cargo unloading to smaller “daughter ships”. Sometimes low-value cargo, such as second-hand tractors, is used to put a veneer of legitimacy on what is really a drug shipment.
Alternatively, vessels such as fishing boats, speedboats or semi-submersibles controlled by criminals and only carrying drugs meet for cargo swaps at sea. Traffickers also sink containers that later open on a timer, allowing the drugs to float to the surface for collection.
The sheer size of the Atlantic provides drug gangs with a major advantage. Europol’s Fay says one area where criminal networks conduct drop-offs is around the Azores and Canary Islands, making Portugal and Spain key entry points for cocaine into Europe. “It’s quite a big piece of the Atlantic,” he says. “So you really need to know where to look.”
As part of the common European effort, Ireland, with its maximum of three ships, is tasked with patrolling a piece of the Atlantic that is more than 10 times its landmass. “If you do not have a physical presence delivering maritime enforcement, you’ve just left the doors wide open,” says one former Irish senior commander who asked not to be named.
The country is also feeling the effect of the narcotics onslaught back at home. Cocaine has become Ireland’s biggest problem drug, with the number of people receiving treatment for use rising by 336 per cent since 2017. Cocaine use in the past year — at 46 per cent of respondents who took drugs, according to the country’s Health Research Board — was far higher than the EU average of 29 per cent.
The cocaine surge has come just as the resources deployed by Ireland have shrunk.
“Back in 2018, before this massive increase of drugs happened on the streets of Ireland, the navy had nine operational ships,” says the former commander. But then things “hit the rocks”.
Between 2019 and 2025, Irish crew numbers dwindled due to recruitment and retention problems, meaning patrols were spotty and ships barely operational, the former commander says. “And the floodgates [for cocaine in Ireland] opened . . . Ireland became a soft touch.”
Even when law enforcement knows where the trafficking is happening and can dispatch a ship and crew, the criminals often get away. Speedboats carrying cocaine can be difficult to track compared to the more contained environment of large ports, and chases on the open sea can be fatal. Two Spanish Guardia Civil officers died this year, and a Portuguese official last year, during collisions involving drug operations.
“The main issue here is how do we stop them?” says Paulo Gomes da Silva, head analyst at the maritime narcotics centre, which is based in Lisbon. “Even if we have the same assets as they do, it’s still very dangerous.”
The maritime narcotics centre seized a record 92 tonnes of cocaine from “go-fast” crafts and small vessels last year. But that was only the tip of the iceberg: it estimates 700 tonnes escaped, a rise of more than 40 per cent on 2024.
While the French navy is legally able to shoot at the boats to disable their motors, not all countries can follow suit due to differing national legislation “but this is definitely a goal,” says da Silva.
Law enforcement agencies’ efforts to interrupt the criminals’ communications have also enjoyed some success.
In 2021, Europol and other European police agencies cracked a key app used by traffickers called Sky ECC, yielding a treasure trove of decrypted messages that led to hundreds of arrests and is still being used in investigations today.
“Before Sky ECC we needed to go after the small criminals in the network and then try to move up in the chain to the big gangsters, but now we had a view on the way that they communicated among the leaders of the gangs themselves,” says Annelies Verlinden, Belgium’s justice minister.
Decoding the app helped law enforcement identify high-ranking traffickers. But for years, authorities across Europe struggled to get to them. Senior members of a “Super Cartel” that was believed, at its peak, to have supplied a third of Europe’s cocaine, lived openly in Dubai and other friendly jurisdictions, where they seemed untouchable.
That has changed, as one by one, Dubai has extradited top bosses including the Netherlands’ Ridouan Taghi and Italy’s Raffaele Imperiale. Both were jailed in their home countries in 2024. The biggest prize was April’s capture of Daniel Kinahan, an Irish cartel boss and leading Super Cartel kingpin. He is in jail in Dubai awaiting extradition to Ireland.
But Verlinden also acknowledge a “waterbed effect” as criminals flee to other jurisdictions. Jos Leijdekkers, the Netherlands’ most-wanted drug trafficker, who has been sentenced in absentia both in the Netherlands and in Belgium, is hiding out in Sierra Leone, a country that the maritime narcotics centre and Europol consider a hotspot for drug transshipments.
According to Europol, criminals are now moving back to more fragmented modes of communication. “They’re adapting, they’re using different ways of communication and it’s always one step in front of us,” says Europol’s Fay.
Drugs insurance
The money made through cocaine trafficking lies at the heart of Europe’s problem. Laurent Laniel, an analyst at the EU drugs agency, says that as the drug travels from Latin America to Europe’s streets, “the profit margins explode”, adding: “You can multiply your investment by 1,000 per cent.”
Most of the profit is made by intermediaries who organise logistics, operate like a service provider and even provide insurance. “The trade functions like a sand clock,” Laniel says. “You have a lot of producers at the top and then [a] very narrow number of logisticians, people who can organise the traffic, from there to the bottom part of the sand clock, which is full of consumers. In the middle, those people make the most money.”
Groups that control this part of the trade include Brazil’s largest cartel, the Primeiro Comando da Capital, the Mexican giants the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels, and various Balkan groups.
Lower wholesale and retail prices for cocaine and higher purity “tells you that there’s a lot of cocaine available to be purchased in South America, and a lot transiting the Atlantic Ocean somehow,” says Laniel. He sees poverty as “a major driver” of criminal activity and consumption.
One country where the retail price has risen rather than fallen, according to UN data, is the UK, which one former senior European police officer says may be linked either to stronger demand or to traffickers’ perception that it is riskier to smuggle cocaine into the country than elsewhere.
Cocaine now accounts for more than a quarter of drug-related deaths in Europe. While most people take the drug at clubs, bars or at home, 9 per cent of users — and 8 per cent of crack cocaine users — report having taken it at work, according to a 2024 survey by the EU drugs agency.
“The missing element in the anti-drug efforts of the European Union is really treating demand,” says Garsany of the UN’s drug office, citing stigma around treating addiction as one of the factors. “If you only look at supply it’s called a war on drugs, and we know what happens: nothing gets solved.”
The war on the small drug boats of the Atlantic shows little sign of abating. Ireland, whose defence budget is growing but remains the smallest in the EU, operates blind at times with no sonar to look under the sea or military-spec air-surveillance radar.
The country’s defence department is looking to harness other technology and is working with Ubotica, an Irish tech company that conducts AI-enabled satellite monitoring. As it tries to keep up with gangs using GPS spoofing, the group uses its technology to spot anomalies in shipping patterns and monitor at-sea transfers. The navy is also looking into remotely piloted aircraft systems as they have greater reach than boats.
But Eugene Ryan, a former Irish commander who helped deepen European co-operation in the drug fight, is downbeat and says Ireland is “a hole” in Europe’s drug defences. “We’re losing the battle, unfortunately.”
