In a study that was originally published late last year, researchers unveiled the risks for former cocaine users who may relapse by taking methylphenidate.

Methylphenidate is used as a treatment for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and is often recognized through brands such as Aptensio XR, Concerta/Concerta XR-ODT, Jornay PM, and most commonly, Ritalin. As a stimulant drug, these medicines increase brain neurotransmitters such as dopamine and norepinephrine, to help a patient achieve better focus and behavior control. To a lesser degree, methylphenidate can also be used to treat narcolepsy as well.

Methylphenidate is currently a Schedule III substance in the U.S., and has a history of misuse. According to Psypost.org, college students sometimes use methylphenidate to help them focus. Although methylphenidate has shown some promise in studies as a treatment to help people abusing cocaine, it comes with a few concerning side effects such as cravings and relapse. Researchers also found that methylphenidate use in conjunction with fluoxetine (a treatment for depression) actually mirrors the effects of cocaine.

The study entitled “Methylphenidate with or without fluoxetine triggers reinstatement of cocaine seeking behavior in rats,” was originally published in the December 2023 issue of Neuropsychopharmacology, and lead by researchers Lorissa Lamoureux, Joel Beverly, Heinz Steiner, and Michela Marinelli.

Study author Michela “Micky” Marinelli works at the University of Texas as an associate professor, and explained the history behind this unique study topic. “The interest started many years ago, from a creative graduate student I worked with in Dr. Frank White’s lab: Cindy Brandon. Cindy had school-aged children and noticed that more and more children at school were being diagnosed with ADHD and treated with methylphenidate,” Marinelli explained. “She wondered if this could pose a risk to develop stimulant addiction and she set out to study this in rodent models. She found that rats are not likely to self-administer very low doses of cocaine (they are too low to have an effect) but they will self-administer these low doses of cocaine if they have been previously exposed to methylphenidate (Brandon et al., 2001). She continued this line of research as a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Heinz Steiner’s lab. Dr. Steiner was an expert in studying gene expression and together they found that methylphenidate alters gene expression in the brain in ways that were similar to cocaine, but not quite the same.”

She added that according to Dr. Steiner’s research, methylphenidate elevates just dopamine and norepinephrine in the brain, but cocaine elevates those two as well as serotonin. Because of these similarities. “So he asked: what would happen if people taking methylphenidate also take antidepressant drugs like selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), which elevate serotonin. Would the methylphenidate + SSRI combination become cocaine-like?”

Dr. Steiner observed gene expressions in the brain, which revealed the answer to his questions. Together, Dr. Stein and Marinelli wrote a grant study revealing the risks of using both a methylphenidate and an SSRI. “At this point in time, methylphenidate started to be taken not just in the clinic, as a medication for ADHD but also recreationally or as a ‘cognitive enhancer’ so we set out to examine both low and high doses of methylphenidate, to mimic (as much as possible in a rat) doses used in the clinic (low doses) vs. those used recreationally or as a cognitive enhancer (high doses),” Marinelli explained.

In the most recent study, researchers studied male Sprague Dawley rats in a controlled setting. Rats were trained to self-administer cocaine as a way to mimic youth cocaine use. This was followed by a withdrawal phase when cocaine access was removed, where rats exhibited “cocaine-seeking behavior,” which included “nose poking” whenever they would receive the cocaine. Then an extinction phase followed, where the rats would learn to no longer exhibit that behavior.

The next step included giving the rats either a high dose of methylphenidate or a combined dose of methylphenidate and fluoxetine to see if the rats would relapse and begin exhibiting cocaine-seeking behavior once again. “One needs caution extrapolating studies in rodents to human,” Marinelli said to PsyPost in an interview. “But at least in rats, if one has previously taken cocaine, taking methylphenidate can push that individual (rat) to seek cocaine again. This happens at high doses of methylphenidate, comparable to those used recreationally or as a cognitive enhancer.”

Researchers also observed that there was no significant difference between rats who took methylphenidate alone, or the combined methylphenidate with fluoxetine, showing that fluoxetine doesn’t impact the effect. “We were surprised that adding a SSRI (fluoxetine) to methylphenidate did not exacerbate the effects of methylphenidate,” said Marinelli. “The effects we saw were due to methylphenidate alone.”

It’s easier to study rats in an isolated, controlled environment versus studying humans, which leaves much to be desired in human observations. “It will be important to examine how much this work translates to human populations,” said Marinelli. “These are difficult to study as, unlike rats, they are not in a controlled environment, where we can determine the dose, duration, and manner in which they are exposed to different drugs or medications or treatments.”

The rats also did not have ADHD, which could lead to different results in a human trial. “When I teach about addiction in summer camps or to undergraduate students, I ask how many of them know of someone who has taken methylphenidate as a cognitive enhancer. Almost all raise their hand. When I then ask them if any of them have, nobody raises their hand—so self-reported use of methylphenidate might be difficult to obtain. Anonymous questionnaires are helpful, but not if one wants to obtain more information from a person, which is only done face-to-face.”

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The Mayor of Amsterdam wants to legalize and regulate the sale, possession and use of cocaine. 

In an interview with Dutch newspaper Financieele Dagblad, Mayor Femke Halsema very strongly voiced her opinion on drug prohibition and how the decriminalization and legal sale of drugs like cocaine would take power away from organized crime groups who threaten the safety and stability of Amsterdam. 

“We have handed the market to unscrupulous criminals. They earn billions. And in the meantime, the war on drugs is disrupting entire countries, causing countless victims and strengthening the criminal business model,” Mayor Halsema said. 

Indeed Dutch Customs has recently released a report which supported the notion that organized crime surrounding cocaine trafficking is on the rise in Europe. Dutch Customs seized over 60,000 kilograms of cocaine in 2023 and 51,000 kilograms in 2022. Mayor Halsema has arranged a public debate on the matter which has been scheduled for January 26 in Amsterdam.

Cocaine seizures around Europe have followed the same trend with hundreds of metric tonnes seized around the EU year after year. Many reports have attested that the average price of European cocaine has been cut almost in half and the UN reported in March of last year that cocaine production was at an all time high. 

“Let us conclude that hundreds of years of discouragement and repression have achieved very little,” Halsema said to Financieele Dagblad. “Apparently people have a need for stimulants. There is a market for that.”

Mayor Halsema has been a vocal advocate for change in the City of Amsterdam since her appointment to the role in 2018. She wrote an opinion piece for the Guardian earlier this month in which she expressed that the Netherlands risks becoming a narco-state if steps are not taken to reign in organized crime. 

“The widespread use of drugs is integrated into society. The market is enormous. But there are risks to public health and then you should not leave the market to criminals,” Mayor Halsema said to Financieele Dagblad. “Abusing drugs can have serious consequences. But often the risks are exaggerated. Cocaine, for example, is less harmful than alcohol. People make their own choices.”

Mayor Halsema also told Bloomberg in July of 2022 that she would be taking steps to cut back on problematic forms of tourism post-COVID. She intimated that Amsterdam needed to pull back from the reputation it has garnered as a sort of safe haven for ne’er do wells who came to her city to take a “vacation from morals.”

“In Amsterdam, there’s a state of mind of tolerance. We always argue that cannabis should be legalized and prostitution shouldn’t be criminalized. That is also a part of Amsterdam’s history, a history that we’re very proud of,” Mayor Halsema said to Bloomberg. “But drug culture and prostitution have been internationally commercialized. That is not the way it was intended. We should correct the way we advertised the city in the last 15 years.”

This may seem a bit disconnected for a Mayor advocating for legal cocaine sales but from a harm reduction perspective, it makes sense. Mayor Halsema likened it to Amsterdam’s famous red light district which from her perspective is there to provide safety and security to sex workers who, as she puts it, will always be there to serve customers so long as there is a demand for sex work. 

The same can be said of cocaine sales. A 2023 report from the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction found that cocaine was the second most commonly abused drug in Europe next to cannabis and cocaine seizures in major seaports around the continent have consistently risen every year since 2016. A survey found that almost 2.3 million Europeans between the ages of 15 and 34 had used cocaine in the preceding year.

These record increases in use and trafficking led Switzerland to recently open discussions to consider the launch of a pilot program for adult-use recreational cocaine sales in their capital city of Bern. Mayor Halsema appears to have followed suit by doubling down on what she considered to be a common sense approach to drug policy. 

“What the Netherlands’ problems reveal is the need for a global shift in the current approach. It’s not a matter of retracting our user-centred policy, but rather advocating for international recognition that the war on drugs is counterproductive,” Mayor Halsema wrote to the Guardian. “The prohibition of drugs is enshrined in international treaties that limit the space for national drug policies, meaning we will have to forge new international alliances that prioritise health and safety over punitive measures.”

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A former member of the Inglewood Police Department is expected to plead guilty to drug distribution charges for allegedly selling large amounts of cocaine while serving as a police officer. 

47-year-old John Abel Baca of Whittier, California was originally arrested on October 2, 2021 after being indicted by a federal grand jury on charges that he sold cocaine to an informant on two occasions in 2021. A recent announcement by the United States Department of Justice indicated that Baca recently agreed to plead guilty to one charge of cocaine distribution. 

Baca served as an officer with the Inglewood Police Department for 21 years before being accused of drug dealing. He also served as the police union representative. The DOJ press release said that Baca brought a federal informant an undisclosed amount of cocaine on April 29, 2021. A recording of this meeting would later show that this was for the pseudo-purpose of the cooperating witness showing the cocaine to potential buyers. 

According to the DOJ, a second meeting was then arranged in which Baca agreed to provide the witness with one kilogram of cocaine for $22,000 USD. That meeting was arranged for May 4 of the same year when Baca reportedly delivered the kilogram of cocaine to the informant’s workplace and then collected $22,000 from the informant’s residence later that same day. 

A plea agreement entered by Baca would later show that before these exchanges, Baca allegedly told the witness in February that he could get him one kilogram of cocaine, two kilograms of “white china” heroin and an unlimited supply of black tar heroin which the witness said Baca claimed he had stolen during traffic stops in his capacity as a police officer with the IPD. 

The DOJ said that in Baca’s plea agreement he admitted that he “abused his position of trust as a police officer, including by stealing drugs from IPD’s lock-up and reselling them.”

Another man involved in this case is also awaiting trial after authorities said he may have helped Baca distribute the drugs while Baca was still a police officer. 

44-year-old Gerardo Ekonomo of South Los Angeles was arrested on October 28, 2021 in connection with the John Baca case, who was arrested just a week prior to Ekonomo. CBS Los Angeles said in 2021 that Ekonomo’s arrest is what ultimately led to Baca’s downfall. 

Federal authorities alleged that Ekonomo, who had previously been approved to serve as a police informant for Baca, was culpable in helping Baca distribute drugs. When Ekonomo’s home was raided in 2021, police found drugs and a firearm in his home as well as a kilogram of heroin and half a kilogram of suspected cocaine buried in his backyard.

Ekonomo was also arrested in Las Vegas in June of 2021 with three kilograms of heroin in his car, according to the article by CBS LA. It was after this arrest that Baca reportedly contacted the Las Vegas Police Department to see if Ekonomo could help his case by cooperating with IPD. The charges were not dropped but Ekonomo was then registered to work as an informant for Baca.

However, according to an FBI affidavit, Ekonomo never actually did any work as an informant. The FBI alleged that Ekonomo ‘conducted no documented operations after he was signed up as an informant,” and that Baca “[was] willing to abuse his position as a law enforcement officer in furtherance of his drug trafficking activities and to assist and protect his co-conspirators.”

Ekonomo faced a minimum of 10 years in prison and a maximum life sentence if convicted at the time he was arrested in 2021. Before Baca accepted his plea deal he faced a minimum of five years in prison and a maximum of 60 years. It was not immediately clear how Baca’s plea deal would affect his sentencing or when Ekonomo’s trial was set to begin. 

This case remains under investigation by the FBI and the DOJ said that the Inglewood Police Department has given their full cooperation in this matter. The case is being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Cassie D. Palmer of the Public Corruption and Civil Rights Section. John Baca is due in court on October 17 where he is expected to plead guilty.

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Dramatic new footage released by Mexico’s Navy shows officers carrying out a major drug bust after a high-speed chase at sea.

The footage, which has been widely reported on in the media, depicts a pair of operations carried out by the Navy; in one, an officer can be seen descending from an overhead helicopter to arrive on a boat that was carrying a large amount of drugs.

According to CTV News, “Mexican authorities say they have seized some 9,700 pounds of cocaine during two operations on Aug. 22 and 23 in the Pacific Ocean.”

“Both operations resulted in high-speed boat chases at sea,” CTV News reported. “Mexican authorities say they also found more than 5,000 litres of fuel. Eleven people were detained and handed over to the prosecutor’s office.”

Cocaine trafficking has exploded in recent years.

A report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) released earlier this year indicated that production of cocaine had skyrocketed to record levels after lagging for a stretch during the pandemic.

“The COVID-19 pandemic had a disruptive effect on drug markets. With international travel severely curtailed, producers struggled to get their product to market. Night clubs and bars were shut as officials ramped up their attempts to control the virus, causing demand to slump for drugs like cocaine that are often associated with those settings,” the report said.

“However, the most recent data suggests this slump has had little impact on longer-term trends. The global supply of cocaine is at record levels. Almost 2,000 tons was produced in 2020, continuing a dramatic uptick in manufacture that began in 2014, when the total was less than half of today’s levels.”

According to the report, the surge in cocaine has “partly [been] a result of an expansion in coca bush cultivation, which doubled between 2013 and 2017, hit a peak in 2018, and rose sharply again in 2021.”

“But it is also due to improvements in the process of conversion from coca bush to cocaine hydrochloride. In parallel, there has been a continuing growth in demand, with most regions showing steadily rising numbers of users over the past decade. Although these increases can be partly explained by population growth, there is also a rising prevalence of cocaine use. Interceptions by law enforcement have also been on the rise, at a higher speed than production, meaning that interdiction has contained the growth of the global amount of cocaine available for consumption,” the report stated. 

Given all that, perhaps it isn’t a coincidence that news of major cocaine busts seem to surface regularly these days.

In June, law enforcement officials in Uruguay broke up an international drug ring after police there were alerted to half a dozen surfboards that contained a total of 50kg (110lb) of cocaine.

Three Italians were arrested as part of the bust.

In May, police in Hong Kong seized $82.97 million worth of cocaine and cannabis. 

And in February, law enforcement authorities in New Zealand announced that they had sezied “3.2 tonnes of cocaine afloat” in the Pacific Ocean, saying they had taken roughly a half-billion dollars worth of the drug out of circulation.

The report from the United Nations explained that consolidation has upended the cocaine trade in one of the drug’s longstanding hubs, Colombia.

“The cocaine trade in Colombia was once controlled by just a few major players. As a result of a fragmentation of the criminal landscape following the demobilization of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) in 2016, it now involves criminal groups of all sizes, structures and objectives,” the report said. “But, signs of consolidation of some of these groups have recently emerged. These developments have led to an increasing presence of foreign actors in Colombia. Mexican and Balkan criminal groups have moved closer to the centre of production to gain access to supplies and wholesale quantities of cocaine. These foreign groups are not aiming to take control of territory. Instead, they are trying to make supply lines more efficient. Their presence is helping to incentivize coca bush cultivation and finance all stages of the supply chain.” 

It continued: “In established cocaine markets, the proportion of the general population using the drug is high. But these markets only cover around one-fifth of the global population. If the prevalence in other regions increases to match established markets, the number of users globally would increase tremendously because of the large underlying population. This type of market convergence has already been happening in the case of Western and Central Europe, where purity levels and prices have harmonised with the United States, although prevalence of cocaine use in Western and Central Europe has not yet reached the level in the United States.”

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It’s never a happy ending if you’re a Columbian drug smuggler and your boat breaks down. The feds seized 223 pounds of cocaine and arrested two people headed toward Long Beach after their ship became disabled, FOX11 Los Angeles reports. 

The panga-style vessel, an open and outboard-powered fishing boat commonly used in the developing world, broke down on the 4th of July off the Colombia coast, and it’s far from the first boat filled with cocaine to do so. U.S. pressure on the Colombian government to crack down on the cocaine trade has epically failed. Coke production in Colombia rose in 2021 to its highest levels in two decades of monitoring, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). Reuters reports that the areas sown with the coca plant went up 43% to 204,000 hectares (500,000 acres). 

Needless to say, the two folks aboard the ship didn’t have their cocaine-dusted 4th of July American dream. They flagged down a good Samaritan on their way to Long Beach, according to a press release from the U.S. Coast Guard Sector Los Angeles-Long Beach. Their saviors towed their broken-down boat — but snitched. The rescuers (although the smugglers would likely not use that word) perhaps didn’t want to get in trouble when they sensed the boat was carrying more than people and contacted the Coast Guard, alerting them that they suspected the panga boat had drugs on board. 

Their suspicions were correct. 

The Coast Guard searched the boat and found 223 pounds of cocaine hidden in a false bottom of the ship. U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers detained the two people onboard and seized the blow and the boat. 

“This operation exemplifies the outstanding interagency collaboration with the U.S. Coast Guard and CBP,” said Lt. Commander Keith Robinson, chief of law enforcement at Sector Los Angeles-Long Beach.

Columbia’s leftist President, Gustavo Petro, isn’t in favor of illegal drug smuggling. But he has made some interesting points about the environmental effects of the war on drugs, something too many U.S. cannabis growers who have had their crops burned know about. During his first speech at the General Assembly in 2022, Petro said that the world’s addiction to money, oil, and carbon is destroying the Colombian rainforest through what he describes as a “hypocritical” war against drugs, the UN reports.

“The forest that should be saved is at the same time being destroyed. To destroy the coca plant, they throw poisons such as glyphosate that drips into our waters, they arrest their cultivators and then imprison them,” he said. “The jungle is burning, gentlemen, while you wage war and play with it. The jungle, the climatic pillar of the world, disappears with all its life. The great sponge that absorbs the planetary CO2 evaporates. The jungle is our savior, but it is seen in my country as the enemy to defeat, as a weed to be extinguished,” Petro continued.

Rather than blame the plant, Petro has suggested expanding voluntary crop substitution programs and regulating narcotics by focusing on gang leadership while increasing social funding in coca plant production areas. He argues that the world’s dependence on oil and the adverse climate effects of the failed war on drugs cause more deaths than drugs themselves. 

“What is more poisonous for humanity, cocaine, coal or oil? The opinion of power has ordered that cocaine is poison and must be persecuted, while it only causes minimal deaths from overdoses…but instead, coal and oil must be protected, even when it can extinguish all humanity,” he also said in his General Assembly speech. 

Petro’s point is best understood once you know that the war on drugs fueled Columbia’s mess of a civil war — and there’s a report to prove it. The study was conducted by a commission formed as part of the 2016 peace deal with the leftist rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc). The deal ended five decades of civil war and found that “the union of the interests of United States and Colombia led to the construction of Plan Colombia” (a multibillion-dollar military aid program that began in 2000), “which merged together the counter-insurgency, anti-terrorist and anti-narcotics programmes with the war against narco-terrorism,” The Guardian reports. 

The report also found a “substantial change in drug policy” is needed while calling out the U.S. — who funded Colombia’s armed forces during the war.

And meanwhile, back home in America, cocaine remains only a Schedule II drug, while cannabis continues to clock in at a Schedule I. 

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The White House is putting a new meaning to its name. A white substance found in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue reportedly tested positive for cocaine, according to a preliminary field test, The Guardian reports. From fast food chain bathrooms to childhood bedrooms over Christmas, the infamous “white powder” (and we’re not talking about snow) tends to show up where authorities, whether it’s the federal government or someone’s parents, are going to make a stink about it. This time it landed in the Executive Mansion.

The U.S. Secret Service is investigating how the drugs got into the President’s home. Mind you, although Biden may be open-minded to psychedelic research, before you start any rumors, the alleged cocaine was found in a reference library “in an area accessible to tour groups, not in any particular West Wing office,” The Associated Press reports. So, most likely, some tourist ballsy (or stupid) enough to snort a line in the White House is responsible rather than anyone in the federal branch of government. 

The discovery of the substance led to an elevated security alert and a brief evacuation of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue after authorities discovered it during a routine inspection. At the time of its discovery, President Joe Joe Biden was at Camp David, a country retreat for presidents hidden in the woods of Maryland. The president and first lady Jill Biden returned to the White House on Tuesday morning shortly after the discovery. 

A spokesman for the Secret Service, Anthony Guglielmi, told The Washington Post that there is “an investigation into the cause and manner” of how the substance entered the White House. Authorities note that it did not pose a threat. Another official familiar with the investigation said that the amount found was of small quality. So, anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of drug use can deduce that the alleged cocaine was for personal use, not distribution. This gives credibility to the explanation that a tourist probably thought it would be cool (but dangerous) to do some white lines in the White House.

If so, it’s certainly not the first time a civilian used a visit to the White House as an opportunity to get high. The British actor Erkan Mustafa said he did a line of cocaine and smoked some cannabis while visiting the presidential resident during first lady Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” anti-drugs campaign, The Guardian reports. Considering that The War on Drugs was a generally minor component of federal law-enforcement efforts until Ronald Reagan’s presidency, in part fueled by Nancy’s “Just Say No” campaign, which was a privately funded effort to educate children on the dangers of drug use, it’s hard to be too mad at Mustafa for seeking the thrill of doing drugs in the White House at the time (although please do not try it yourself, we don’t want you to go to prison). The feds have locked up enough people for drugs; after Reagan moved into the White House in 1981, his focus on drug penalties led to increased incarcerations for nonviolent drug offenses, from 50,000 in 1980 to 400,000 in 1997.

Iconic stoner Snoop Dogg said he’d smoked weed in a bathroom in 2013, and fellow famous cannabis enthusiast Willie Nelson smoked a joint on the White House roof during the presidency of Jimmy Carter. 

Late last year, Biden announced he will pardon people with federal convictions for simple possession of cannabis in addition to directing General Merrick B. Garland and Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra to begin the process of reviewing the classification of cannabis at the federal level. As a reminder, according to the Feds, the branch of government associated with the White House, cocaine is a Schedule II drug, while cannabis is still Schedule I. Meaning, despite all we know about the benefits of marijuana, under federal law, it’s more dangerous than white lines. 

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Law enforcement officials in Uruguay last week said they busted an international drug ring that had a gnarly way of smuggling its contraband: inside surfboards. 

The BBC reports that Uruguayan police have arrested three Italians with the “help from counter-narcotics police in Spain, Portugal and Italy.” 

“Sniffer dogs had alerted officers in Uruguay to six surfboards containing a total of 50kg (110lb) of cocaine,” according to the outlet. “Police allowed one board to be dispatched in order to track down those receiving it.”

More from the BBC:

“The dogs alerted their handlers to the suspicious package on 23 May. Officers said the boards were uncharacteristically heavy and when they passed them through a scanner, they spotted hidden packages inside. A photo supplied by Uruguay’s interior ministry shows white powder spilling from one of the boards after it had been cut open. Two Italian nationals were arrested by police in Portugal as they went to pick up the cocaine-filled surfboard which police had allowed through. A third Italian citizen, who police say dispatched the drugs from Uruguay to Europe, was detained in Italy.”

A report earlier this year from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) found that cocaine production has surged to record highs.

The report said that while drug markets were disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, “the most recent data suggests this slump has had little impact on longer-term trends.”

“The global supply of cocaine is at record levels. Almost 2,000 tons was produced in 2020, continuing a dramatic uptick in manufacture that began in 2014, when the total was less than half of today’s levels,” according to the UN report.

The report said that the cocaine “surge is partly a result of an expansion in coca bush cultivation, which doubled between 2013 and 2017, hit a peak in 2018, and rose sharply again in 2021.”

“But it is also due to improvements in the process of conversion from coca bush to cocaine hydrochloride. In parallel, there has been a continuing growth in demand, with most regions showing steadily rising numbers of users over the past decade. Although these increases can be partly explained by population growth, there is also a rising prevalence of cocaine use. Interceptions by law enforcement have also been on the rise, at a higher speed than production, meaning that interdiction has contained the growth of the global amount of cocaine available for consumption,” according to the report.

The BBC reported that drug traffickers “are increasingly using Uruguay, which borders Brazil and Argentina, as a transit country to ship drugs from drug-producing parts of South America to Europe.”

Earlier this year, authorities in New Zealand seized more than $300 million worth of cocaine afloat in the Pacific Ocean, calling it a “major financial blow” to traffickers.

According to New Zealand Police Commissioner Andrew Coster, it was “one of the single biggest seizures of illegal drugs by authorities in this country.”

“There is no doubt this discovery lands a major financial blow right from the South American producers through to the distributors of this product,” Coster said. “While this disrupts the syndicate’s operations, we remain vigilant given the lengths we know these groups will go to circumvent coming to law enforcement’s attention.”

New Zealand Customs Service Acting Comptroller Bill Perry said the bust was “a huge illustration of what lengths organi[z]ed crime will go to with their global drug trafficking operations and shows that we are not exempt from major organi[z]ed criminal drug smuggling efforts in this part of the world.”

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Hong Kong police seized HK$650 million worth of cocaine and cannabis in the biggest haul uncovered this year, South China Morning Post reports. Authorities arrested four men aged 25 to 32 on suspicion of drug trafficking. 

Confiscated in a three-day-long operation, which concluded last Friday, the Hong Kong narcotics bureau seized a whopping 592kg of suspected cocaine and 91.2 kilograms of cannabis buds, worth the equivalent of $82.97 million U.S. dollars. 

There are dozens of lists online of the wackiest places people smuggle drugs, everything from breast implants to sharks. This haul included a relative of the latter. Much of the substances were hidden in boxes of frozen fish to avoid detection, as the odor could help mask that of the cannabis buds (obviously, it didn’t work). 

“The cannabis flower buds seized this time were stored among frozen fish,” Chief Inspector Charm Yiu-kwong said in a press briefing. “We believe the drug cartel used this method … in an attempt to cover up the odor of marijuana with the frozen fish’s pungent smell.”

According to Senior Inspector Law Kai-yin, the bureau ran an ambush against a drug syndicate on Wednesday at two industrial buildings in Kwun Tong, on How Ming Street and Wai Yip Street. They stopped a 32-year-old man, a construction worker with the last name So, leaving the industrial unit on How Ming Street. They discovered 120 packs of cocaine, each weighing 1kg, and arrested him for alleged drug trafficking, Law shared. 

The maximum sentence for drug trafficking in Hong Kong is life imprisonment. 

Additionally, the police stopped a pair of men, one 25-year-old with the surname Chan and another 31-year-old named Leung. They led them to 91.2kg of cannabis at the Wai Yip Street warehouse. The two men, one a kitchen worker and the other in construction, were also arrested on suspicion of drug trafficking. After searching different warehouses nearby, assumed to be controlled by the same group, the detectives seized 472 packs of cocaine, each weighing 1kg. 

The fourth man arrested is 32-year-old Chong, who is currently unemployed. Authorities snatched him as he tried to flee Hong Kong. Allegedly, at least some of the four men are associated with a triad drug trafficking group and are scheduled to appear at Kwun Tong Magistrates’ Courts on Saturday. 

Hong Kong authorities are trying to establish a connection between another case, two weeks ago, which involved 227kg of cocaine and led to the arrests of 10 suspects. On Thursday, Hong Kong customs officials arrested a 20-year-old man on suspicion of trafficking after finding about 3kg of suspected cocaine and 26g of alleged crack cocaine at an apartment in Tai Koo, estimated at HK$3.3 million.

As the bureau’s Senior Superintendent Chan Kong-ming said, Hong Kong is currently turning up the heat in efforts to crack down on drug arrests, with particular attention to cocaine. “Recently, the production of coca leaves in South American countries has continued to increase, resulting in a corresponding reduction in the cost of manufacturing cocaine,” he said, South China Morning Post reports. “The narcotics bureau has stepped up intelligence gathering on the risk of more cocaine flowing into Hong Kong due to the fallen prices.” 

However, with the air of a publicist, Chan continues that drug smuggling and use in Hong Kong was “by and large under control” and did not expect an upwards trend locally.

Back in 2020, the Chinese government imposed the draconian National Security Law (NSL) on Hong Kong with what has been called “devastating consequences for human rights.”

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According to a report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), “The COVID-19 pandemic had a disruptive effect on drug markets. With international travel severely curtailed, producers struggled to get their product to market. Night clubs and bars were shut as officials ramped up their attempts to control the virus, causing demand to slump for drugs like cocaine that are often associated with those settings.

“However, the most recent data suggests this slump has had little impact on longer-term trends. The global supply of cocaine is at record levels. Almost 2,000 tons was produced in 2020, continuing a dramatic uptick in manufacture that began in 2014, when the total was less than half of today’s levels.”

According to The Guardian, production “of coca, the drug’s base ingredient, spiked 35% in 2020-21, surpassing pre-pandemic levels.”

“The pandemic was a bit of a blip for the expansion of cocaine production, but now it has rebounded and is even higher than what it was before,” said Antoine Vella, a researcher at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and who contributed to the report on cocaine.

The UN report says that the “surge is partly a result of an expansion in coca bush cultivation, which doubled between 2013 and 2017, hit a peak in 2018, and rose sharply again in 2021.

“But it is also due to improvements in the process of conversion from coca bush to cocaine hydrochloride. In parallel, there has been a continuing growth in demand, with most regions showing steadily rising numbers of users over the past decade. Although these increases can be partly explained by population growth, there is also a rising prevalence of cocaine use. Interceptions by law enforcement have also been on the rise, at a higher speed than production, meaning that interdiction has contained the growth of the global amount of cocaine available for consumption,” the report continues. 

While the cocaine trade has long been concentrated in major hubs like Colombia, that might be changing. As Vella told The Guardian, “I think we need to shift away from thinking of cocaine as being a European/North American problem because it’s also very much a South American problem.” 

“The cocaine trade in Colombia was once controlled by just a few major players. As a result of a fragmentation of the criminal landscape following the demobilization of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) in 2016, it now involves criminal groups of all sizes, structures and objectives. But, signs of consolidation of some of these groups have recently emerged. These developments have led to an increasing presence of foreign actors in Colombia. Mexican and Balkan criminal groups have moved closer to the centre of production to gain access to supplies and wholesale quantities of cocaine,” the report says. “These foreign groups are not aiming to take control of territory. Instead, they are trying to make supply lines more efficient. Their presence is helping to incentivize coca bush cultivation and finance all stages of the supply chain.” 

The report continues: “In established cocaine markets, the proportion of the general population using the drug is high. But these markets only cover around one-fifth of the global population. If the prevalence in other regions increases to match established markets, the number of users globally would increase tremendously because of the large underlying population. This type of market convergence has already been happening in the case of Western and Central Europe, where purity levels and prices have harmonised with the United States, although prevalence of cocaine use in Western and Central Europe has not yet reached the level in the United States.”

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Officials in New Zealand announced this week that they have completed a massive seizure of cocaine at sea, calling it a “major financial blow” to producers and traffickers of the drug. 

Authorities there said on Wednesday that the seizure was a part of “Operation Hyrdros,” with New Zealand Police working in partnership with both New Zealand Customs Service and the New Zealand Defence Force.

The announcement said that “no arrests have been made at this stage,” but that “enquiries will continue into the shipment including liaison with our international partners.”

Members of those units intercepted “3.2 tonnes of cocaine afloat” in the Pacific Ocean. NZ Customs Service Acting Comptroller Bill Perry said that the “sheer scale of this seizure is estimated to have taken more than half a billion dollars’ worth of cocaine out of circulation.”

(The news agency United Press International described the seizure as a “3.5 ton haul of cocaine with a street value of $317 million in a major anti-drugs operation carried out in the middle of the Pacific.”)

“Customs is pleased to have helped prevent such a large amount of cocaine causing harm in communities here in New Zealand, Australia and elsewhere in the wider Pacific region,” Perry said. “It is a huge illustration of what lengths organised crime will go to with their global drug trafficking operations and shows that we are not exempt from major organised criminal drug smuggling efforts in this part of the world.” 

NZ Police Commissioner Andrew Coster called it “one of the single biggest seizures of illegal drugs by authorities in this country.”

“There is no doubt this discovery lands a major financial blow right from the South American producers through to the distributors of this product,” Coster said.

Coster added, “While this disrupts the syndicate’s operations, we remain vigilant given the lengths we know these groups will go to circumvent coming to law enforcement’s attention.”

The authorities said in the announcement on Wednesday that “eighty-one bales of the product have since made the six-day journey back to New Zealand aboard the Royal New Zealand Navy vessel HMNZS Manawanui, where they will now be destroyed.”

It is believed that “given the large size of the shipment it will have likely been destined for the Australian market,” according to the announcement. 

Coster said that Operation Hyrdos “was initiated in December 2022, as part of our ongoing close working relationship with international partner agencies to identify and monitor suspicious vessels’ movements.”

“I am incredibly proud of what our National Organised Crime Group has achieved in working with other New Zealand agencies, including New Zealand Customs Service and the New Zealand Defence Force. The significance of this recovery and its impact cannot be underestimated,” Coster said.

“We know the distribution of any illicit drug causes a great amount of social harm as well as negative health and financial implications for communities, especially drug users and their families,” Coster added.

The announcement said that Coster noted that the “operation continues already successful work New Zealand authorities are achieving in working together and continues to lessen the impacts of transnational crime worldwide.”

New Zealand Defence Force Joint Forces commander Rear Admiral Jim Gilmour said that his unit “had the right people and the right capabilities to provide the support required and it was great to work alongside the New Zealand Police and the New Zealand Customs Service.”

“We were very pleased with the result and are happy to be a part of this successful operation and proud to play our part in protecting New Zealand,” Gilmour said.

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