Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. For every five nasal scents we have, dogs have 2,500. Unexpected Elements from the BBC World Service. Search for Unexpected Elements wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
Think of cocaine and you might think of Pablo Escobar, maybe Colombia, the world's biggest producer of the drug, maybe even boxes of bananas with drugs hidden inside. But do you ever wonder where all these shipments from South America end up? Well, more and more of it is Europe. Police in Spain refloated a whole
Apparently, it's pretty easy to smuggle the drugs into European ports, and it can be sold for almost double the price you can get it for in the U.S. And as more drugs are routed into Europe, countries in West and Central Africa are increasingly being used as key transit zones.
I'm Ikra Farooq. Welcome to another episode of What's in the World from the BBC World Service. Today we're going to chat about how these illegal drugs are trafficked into Europe, who's behind it, and find out how drug consumption trends are fuelling demand.
So to find out a bit more about this, I'm joined by Anna Holligan. She's a BBC correspondent in the Netherlands and Gabriel Star-Garter, a Reuters journalist in Paris who covers organized crime in Europe. Hey, both. Hello. Hi there. So, Anna, let's start off with you. Give us an idea of the route these drugs are taking into Europe.
Where are they coming from? How do they enter? And where do they end up? Specifically here in the Netherlands, we've seen a meteoric rise of the Macro Mafia. After decades being controlled by the Italian Mafia, Italian authorities cracked down on
on ports. And that left a kind of vacuum. Moroccans having an international network already, many moved here to the Netherlands. Tentacles laid the foundation for the explosion of this new crime, organised crime network. Then there was a peace deal in Colombia. War ended. Government breaks up the monopoly there. Cartel bosses were jailed. And that's when the Macro Mafia really saw an opening. Switched from cannabis to cocaine. Now we're talking astronomical activity.
amounts. This is a highly lucrative industry and it has...
filtered rice across the continent. Right, Gabriel? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, the sort of root of this really, I think, is South American cocaine production exploding. At the same time, you have drug consumption patterns in the United States shifting. So cocaine, which was always a big market in the United States, they start moving more towards opiates, heroin, and then artificial opiates like fentanyl. At the same time, the European market
starts rising. I think it gets a major boost during COVID. You have new delivery methods through sort of these apps where you can just order stuff online and it gets delivered to your door. So that takes some of the danger out of it. For consumers, you've also seen a shift, I think, in the type of consumer as well. So whereas cocaine has traditionally had a much more sort of elitist, glitzy approach,
kind of clientele. I think what's shifted in Europe recently is that it's become a more working class type drug associated with, say, football terraces or people with tough jobs, lorry drivers, things like that. So what that does is that broadens your consumption base, makes the market much bigger. We're seeing on Instagram, Snapchat and X, as well as on encrypted messaging platforms like Telegram and WhatsApp, overpopulation.
open drug dealing, but kind of being able to slip under the radar by using certain emojis that the dealers and consumers know how to avoid detection. So, for example, snowflakes or snowmen used to symbolise cocaine, love hearts, lightning bolts.
representing MDMA or ecstasy, brown hearts and dragons for heroin. Maple leaf might be Canada's national symbol. It's also the universal symbol for all drugs. These platforms, social media platforms, encrypted messaging platforms are really transforming the way in which people are able to buy and sell drugs. Do we have any idea of the scale of the money behind these operations then?
I think it's almost impossible to say. The seizures in the EU have been rising six or seven years in a row, fresh records each year. It's now currently above 300. Tons of cocaine seized per year. Generally, authorities say that they seize about 10% of what comes over. So that gives you a kind of ballpark.
ballpark figure on how much is really making its way into the continent. The other thing to bear in mind, I think, is that Europe has become kind of like the world's global clearinghouse for the cocaine trade. So there are fast-growing markets in the Middle East, in Australia, and in Southeast Asia. And often a lot of those deals are brokered very,
Via Europe the thing that's interesting about the cocaine market as well is that it's a generator of violence Now the sort of corner dealers in in in estates and you know projects across Europe They're shifting away from cannabis sales towards cocaine sales and what you get there is the margins are just so much higher so a kilo of cocaine in Peru costs fifteen hundred to two thousand dollars and that's 96% pure you cut it three times and
And you sell each kilo in Europe for $60,000 to $80,000. The profits to be had are astronomical, and I think the dealers have worked that out. So the ownership of these dealing sites has become much more violent because people want to take them over because the profits are so high. So these profit margins have become a driver of violence as well. People are fighting to maintain regional or local monopolies. ♪
We wanted to find out a bit more about drug consumption in Europe. David Hillier is a British journalist who reports on drugs and he sent us this. So cannabis remains the most popular legal drug in Europe and that's followed by cocaine and MDMA. This is all despite the fact that drug use is actually broadly illegal. There's some exceptions. So Portugal has decriminalized drug use now for about 20 years.
while we're seeing a growth in different countries implementing different models of cannabis legalization, places like Germany and Malta that will probably spread across the continent. Recent analysis of European waste water showed that coke use was spreading out the big cities and into all areas. So for instance, historically Antwerp has had the biggest race of use, which is almost certainly a symptom of the fact that it's a major trafficking hub.
But weird and slash interesting anonymously was the fact that Tarragona, which is a tiny city in Catalonia, had the second highest rates of use of cocaine in the continent. But it's not just cocaine. Another major massive trend is the rise of ketamine. A new generation of labs in Southeast Asia are supercharging use and availability across Europe.
Tusi came over from Colombia and is more often than not a combination of MDMA, ketamine and then sort of something else. It's kind of down to whatever the dealer wants. Often it would be caffeine powder. That came over from Colombia and now it found a home in Spain originally, then found a place within kind of party architecture across the continent.
With more and more of these drugs flowing into Europe, this has implications for parts of West Africa too, which is sometimes used as a stop-off or a transit zone. Lashia Bird is the director of the West Africa Observatory at a think tank called the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime. Most of the cocaine that's coming into West Africa is entering by sea. Containerised consignments are imported into West Africa through maritime ports.
But growing volumes of cocaine are also transhipped from vessels departing from Brazil and other Latin American countries to other vessels in the Gulf of Guinea, either directly or with a cocaine consignment thrown overboard and located via a GPS tracking system.
Some of these consignments are picked up by smaller vessels, known as daughter vessels, that are departing from West African shores that then travel directly to Europe rather than entering West Africa itself.
But others are picked up at sea and then brought into West Africa through porous coastal entry points. These are then stored in the West African countries and then re-exported towards Europe, either again by sea or by land through the Sahel or finally by air.
So we have passengers carrying cocaine leaving from airports in West Africa on their way to Europe, often carrying their cocaine in luggage.
Typically, we see that countries or regions that are operating as transit points on cocaine trafficking routes start to develop a domestic consumption market. And this is what we have seen in West Africa. The data that we've got on drug consumption in West Africa is a little bit patchy. But from the evidence that we have, we do believe that consumption of cocaine, both as a powder form, but also in the form of crack,
is increasing across a number of countries in West Africa. Back to Anna and Gabriel now. Let's hear about some of the groups behind the drug trafficking. What we saw in the Netherlands was this small-time hustler, Ridouan Taghi, a young Moroccan guy. He'd moved over to the Netherlands from Morocco with his family when he was a child, dropped out of school as a teenager, started selling hash.
And then so like many young people here in the Netherlands do this kind of alternative path to success. He was an entrepreneur, big ambitions. I think before people had always assumed here in the Netherlands and beyond that drug dealers would fight drug dealers, there would be killings, but it would all be quite self-contained, these turf wars.
And then when a lawyer, Dirk Veersom, was shot in 2019, it sent real shockwaves through Dutch society. It was a kind of wake-up call that this prominent white lawyer could be gunned down in broad daylight. And then we saw many other ways in which these criminal gangs, or specifically this macro-mafia led by Ridouan Tahy, was able to infiltrate different parts of Dutch society.
And all of this has really focused minds and people are now under no illusion that the violence is spilling out of the cocaine trade and increasingly right into the heart of Dutch society. So Gabriel, tell us about the role Balkan gangs are playing in all this. The Balkans in some ways are just the latest group to kind of try their luck at mastering transatlantic cocaine trafficking.
They have been quite successful because they have a history of maritime work. And then they also kind of were first movers towards Latin America. So they kind of got there in the early 2000s. Many of them came out of the crime and instability after the fall of Yugoslavia and the wars and conflicts that followed it. So they kind of already had this kind of...
of organized crime and also smuggling. I think one of the key things you need for the cocaine, for any drugs business, I would say, and you see this with the Mexicans in the United States, is
is a diaspora network. The diaspora provides you with the distribution, right? So you can move it across the country and the Balkans have been immigrating across Europe for many years now. And that really allows you to get your distribution network into every corner of a country and that's how you really move the product. I wanted to touch on how the authorities are dealing with this across Europe. When I look at the Dutch papers, it's almost every week there's a headline about...
smuggling cocaine in through in shipments of bananas in chocolate impregnated in plastics
The ports handle, so Rotterdam port mainly here in the Netherlands, but also Antwerp in Belgium, they handle such high volumes that only between about 2% and 10% of containers can actually be physically checked by customs staff. It's an ongoing and constant challenge because the techniques being used by the gangs are constantly evolving that the authorities are struggling to keep up. Clearly, this is a major problem and a
Governments across Europe are now really grappling with that. There's no way they can avoid it. However, I think it's also 100% true that they've been slow to act and haven't quite been aware of how bad the situation had got until it was...
arguably too late. They're so nimble, these gangs, they don't have to deal with the same level of bureaucracy. So if there are challenges at the port in Rotterdam or Antwerp, they're increasingly moving to places like Sweden and Finland to bring it in there. And that's why we have seen an increase in drug-related, gang-related crime in Sweden too. It's just spreading. And also, I guess the problem that you've got is that, you know, they've sort of seeded
the cocaine demand now. People want cocaine and they just keep wanting it so they're going to keep supplying it and that's quite hard for the governments to stall. My sense is that this rising drug crime is really dragging Europe rightward politically. So you see this in Sweden, you're seeing this in France, you're seeing this in Belgium. It's empowering right-wing politicians to say we need to crack down on this drug violence.
And what I'm also increasingly seeing is that there's being a link made between immigration and drug crime, which is also empowering this right wing political dialogue. If you look at a lot of the people involved in the European cocaine trade, a lot of them do come from North Africa or other immigrant communities. And, you know, right wing politicians are making a very clear link between those people and European countries.
failures of immigration. You know, this drug violence, it's scaring a lot of Europeans. And I think that it's making them, you know, more open to these right wing views on immigration and policing. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks for having us.
So there you have it. Special thanks to Anna and Gabriel for breaking down the big business behind these drugs and how they're moving around Europe. And a special thanks to you too for listening to this episode of What's in the World from the BBC World Service. I'm Mick Griffith-Rooke and we'll see you next time. Joining me in the studio is a science someone who always makes me smile. Unexpected Elements brings you the most surprising science ever.
Professor Sella is wearing a giant banana costume. This is my first time ever interviewing a banana, especially one that's a professor of chemistry. Bananas are fundamentally hilarious, but it's also the extraordinary lubricant properties of bananas. Unexpected Elements from the BBC World Service. What's banana in Romanian? It's banana, so it's the same thing. Oh, that's disappointing. Search for Unexpected Elements wherever you get your BBC podcasts.