Spain’s cocaine problem

InSight Crime, a think tank and media organisation specialising in crime investigations, recently revealed that Spain had reclaimed its position as the No. 1 cocaine gateway to Europe, leapfrogging Holland and Belgium, whose ports of Rotterdam and Antwerp had previously been the key continental entry points for drug traffickers. In 2023, 142 tonnes of the narcotic powder were seized by Spanish authorities, compared with 121 in Belgium and 60 in the Netherlands. 

There has been a litany of busts in Spain or involving Spanish police recently, from the dismantling of huge labs in Galicia and neighbouring Portugal to the discovery in July of a “narco sub” in the Caribbean and the subsequent arrest of 50 people – more than half of them in Spain.

Fuelled by increasing production in South America, evolved distribution practices and societal normalisation of use, Europe is in the middle of a proverbial cocaine blizzard, and a report in June by the European Union Drugs Agency (EUDA) stated that there was “growing evidence of the health and social costs of high cocaine availability”.

So how has Spain re-assumed this position – or is it just part of the eternal ouroboros that is drug trafficking? And how is the European thirst for cocaine affecting lives?

In his book Snow on the Atlantic, the investigative journalist Nacho Carretero documents the growth of “contrabandistas” on the rugged coast of Galicia, Spain’s north-west shoulder, throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Beginning as a pathway for essential goods from Portugal to its more economically deprived Iberian sibling, the business really hit its straps during the 1960s when smugglers zeroed in on tobacco.

Far from lawbreakers, the capos moving cigarettes were seen as crucial pivots within society who “rubbed shoulders with politicians, mayors, bankers and impresarios of all kinds,” writes Carretero. “The climate was one of tolerance, and the authorities, politicians included, were part of it.”

It was this casually embedded corruptive infrastructure – along with cultural and linguistic similarities, plus their intimate knowledge of the famously inhospitable Galician coast – that made these local clans so appealing to growing Colombian cartels hoping to ship their product to Europe during the 1980s.

In 1984, Colombia’s president, Belisario Betancur, “declared war on the narcos”, and the Medellín cartel’s infamously hirsute leader, Pablo Escobar, fled to Nicaragua. Two of his generals – Jorge Luis Ochoa Vásquez and José Matta Ballesteros – bolted for Spain along with the Cali cartel’s boss, Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela.

The connections forged thereafter became the locus for a pan-Atlantic cocaine corridor to Spain from South America – often via Africa or the Caribbean – from where the drugs would be placed into the hands of other criminal organisations such as Sicily’s ’Ndrangheta and, latterly, the Balkan mafia, who then sell it on throughout Europe.

Antwerp and Rotterdam, respectively Europe’s busiest and second busiest ports, became the primary gateways as the continent’s use of cocaine began rising around 2016. This helped propel the Netherlands’ reputation as a “narco state” during the early 2020s. 

The investigative journalist Peter R de Vries was killed on a busy Amsterdam street, and a torture room within a shipping container was discovered in the Brabant area, bringing fears that the kind of violence we associate with South American drug groups would arrive wholesale in mainland Europe. (A report in the Spanish newspaper El País estimated that organised crime resulted in more than 170,000 Mexican civilian deaths between 2006 and 2016.)

“It [violence] has always been there. It is part of drug trafficking because disputes are not settled in court, but with violence. But now it is increasing alarmingly,” says Manuel Couceiro, president of the Galician Foundation Against Drug Trafficking, an NGO founded in 1994. 

“The reckoning is increasing largely because the organisations and people who are controlling drug trafficking come from places where violence is extreme, frequent, and human life is worthless. These forms are being installed in Europe in a very, very dangerous way,” Couceiro adds.

Nevertheless, Peter Appleby from InSight Crime says that, in Europe, crime groups welcome the benefits of working in collaboration, for example sharing the financial risks of shipping cocaine. “There’s an understanding that they can all profit as long as they’re staying in their lanes in terms of the territories they control,” he says.

Appleby suggests that a large factor behind the recent fall in the number of Benelux-based seizures has been the pivoting of cocaine traffickers to smaller, secondary ports. “They’ve moved away from ports like Antwerp and Rotterdam where authorities got wise to the various tricks used by traffickers,”  he says. 

Over the last year there have been significant seizures in Helsingborg in Sweden, Southampton in the UK and Koper in Slovenia. “This was to get away from the focus of authorities and go to places where there’s going to be less scrutiny,” Appleby adds.

While there have been a number of recent initiatives to reduce trafficking – like increased scanning of containers, or the EU’s Ports Alliance, which will inject €200m of funding into modernised equipment and cooperation between ports, authorities, businesses and governments – pivoting away from those major hubs has helped to ensure that very few corners of Europe remain un-dusted by cocaine.

This trend has been supercharged by the emergence of drug dealers on apps like Snapchat, Instagram and particularly Telegram or Signal. On the latter two, conversations can be encrypted and money sent (normally via cryptocurrency) to vendors, many of whom have migrated from the dark web and peddle every chemical in the psychoactive pharmacy. They can then post them to wherever the buyer is based. 

According to the European Web Survey of Drugs in 2021 – since when the number of users of Telegram has risen from around 400 million to circa 900 million, 8% of European cocaine users buy on social media and 7% on the dark web.

Recent EUDA wastewater analysis showed that cocaine use, which tended to be concentrated around the densest urban areas, is now far more evenly spread among smaller towns and cities within the western and southern European countries. (Eastern European countries, barring Slovenia, which perhaps non-coincidentally is a popular route for cocaine smuggling, tend to be more in thrall to methamphetamines or synthetic stimulants.)

“As you have more product on the market, it spreads, and it’s now much easier to get access to a substance in a rural area than it was before,” says João Matias, a scientific analyst from the EUDA, who also suggests that the Covid-19 pandemic has contributed to this milieu of democratised consumption. “During coronavirus, in Portugal and I know in other countries, many people moved into rural areas from big cities – and those who used [drugs] didn’t just stop. So there’s probably this movement in their patterns of use.”

A curious anomaly of these factors, or perhaps a confluence of them, is the emergence of locations with unexpectedly high cocaine use. According to wastewater analysis, Tarragona, a small Catalan city whose 138,000 population makes it the size of a large town, has the second-highest rate of cocaine use in the EU (Antwerp is top.)

When asked about Tarragona’s lofty placement, Matias laughs and says: “This is the one-million-dollar question. No one is able to explain it. It could be influenced by a variety of geographical, social or demographic factors. Apparently there are a lot of students there, but it is only a small city. So that might explain it.” It does, notably, also have a port. The Tarragona Port Authority did not respond to a request for comment.

The public health effects are starting to show. Cocaine is the second most common substance for acute drug toxicity presentation in the Euro-DEN Plus – European Drug Emergencies Network countries, which include Norway and the UK – while, according to the EUDA, it was involved in around a fifth of all drug deaths in 2022, though both of these cohorts would have included a high volume of alcohol and possibly polydrug use.

In the UK – that archly hedonistic isle where Matias says “new drug trends often show up first then move to the continent” – the most recent drug death stats for England and Wales revealed a startling 30.5% increase in cocaine-related fatalities in a single year. They’ve gone up ten-fold across 10 years – from 112 in 2011 to 1,118 in 2023.

Though these mortality stats don’t differentiate between cocaine and crack, they do suggest that cocaine – which tends to kill through myocardial infarction (read: a heart attack) but also synthesises a uniquely damaging substance in the liver called cocaethylene, which is made when the body metabolises coke and alcohol – is starting to turn the screw. 

It doesn’t help that cocaine purity here, as in Europe, is at record levels. (In 2009, the average UK street purity was just 20%. A 2018 report put it at 63%, though many dealers now offer a virtually pure option.)

“I do see that, probably, the negative health consequences of cocaine use are going to get worse in the coming years,” says Matias. So what can we do?

Last year, Amsterdam’s mayor, Femke Halsema, released a manifesto called “Dealing with drugs – Cities and the quest for regulation”, which explored how the regulation of drugs could ameliorate the global challenges brought about by the illegal drugs trade – from public health to violence to its ruinous effects on the environment. 

Meanwhile, over in Colombia, the president, Gustavo Petro, labelled the war on drugs a “failure” in his 2022 inauguration speech and has since initiated a scheme that seeks to transition coca leaf farmers towards legal crops. This was intended to cut the drug off at source, but has not been very successful, as coca cultivation grew by 10% in 2023, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Production is also booming in Bolivia and Peru.

For the time being, seemingly, the boats and their illicit cargo will continue to dock in Spanish ports among the bananas. “Spain had high numbers of seizures in previous years, but Belgium’s were higher because of its ports. I think it’s just this year’s trend,” says Matias. “Next year could be somewhere different.”`

Surely only a fool would bet against the cartels staying lucky.

David Hillier is a freelance writer on the subject of drugs. Follow him at @dhillierwrites