Cocaine Trade Thriving Globally

The cocaine trade reportedly is thriving like never before due to new international routes, markets, and criminal enterprises.

The U.N.'s Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in June reported that a record high of 2,757 tons of cocaine was produced in 2022, a 20% increase over 2021.

South America now produces more than twice as much cocaine as it did a decade ago, The Washington Post reported Saturday. Colombia, which turns out most of the world's cocaine, has tripled its output.

The amount of property used to grow cocaine's base ingredient in Colombia is more than five times what it was when drug lord Pablo Escobar was killed in 1993, the Post added.

In addition, nearly every Latin American country has become a major cocaine producer or mover, with Ecuador considered one of the world's most important transit points.

Smugglers moving cocaine from South America to the U.S. and Europe have made the Galapagos Islands a covert refueling point, the Post reported earlier this year.

"It's going up and up and up," Thomas Pietschmann, a research officer at the UNODC, told the outlet of cocaine production. "A few years ago, people were saying the future is synthetic drugs. … Right now, it's still cocaine."

Following decades of cocaine consumption primarily being done in the U.S., the industry has globalized.

Europe now rivals the U.S. as the world's top cocaine destination.

In June, The Guardian reported drug cartels are forcing unaccompanied child migrants across Europe into working as soldiers for the gangs.

Cocaine seizures in European Union countries grew fivefold between 2011 and 2021 and exceeded those in 2022 in the U.S., where cocaine use has declined by nearly 20% since 2006, according to UNODC.

While Balkan, Italian, Turkish and Russian criminal groups are involved in the cocaine trade, Albanian criminal networks have taken the lead.

"We know there's not only one channel for cocaine," Marco Martino, a senior Italian police official in charge of coordinating counternarcotics operations, told the Post. But "the Albanians," he added, "are the best and the biggest."

European criminal organizations have offered Colombia the prospect of new routes to avoid intensified U.S. patrols along the country's coast.

Colombia's cocaine business changed after the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) laid down their weapons in 2016. Smaller armed groups then grabbed coca-producing areas and focused on profit rather than ideology.

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