On February 26, nearly a ton of cocaine was discovered by maritime police on a beach in northwest France on the English Channel. The drugs were found in two large packages tied together with a rope, weighing around 1,875 pounds (850 kilograms) and located near the town of Reville on the Cotentin Peninsula. French authorities suspect that the drugs either fell from a vessel or were intentionally brought to the shore for traffickers to retrieve. On March 1, an additional amount of drugs was discovered washed up on the northern French coast.
The surge in cocaine and crack smuggling into Europe has led to unprecedented drug violence in some regions. Latin American drug cartels have been using the North Sea port cities of Antwerp in Belgium and Rotterdam in the Netherlands as the main gateway to Europe. Two Dutchmen aged 27 and 46 were recently arrested, and roughly 8,818 pounds (4,000 kilograms) of cocaine were seized by Belgian police on February 14. Subsequently, police tracked down an address in a navigation app used by the two men, leading authorities to a hangar containing 68 bags of cocaine and the arrests of seven additional men.
In addition, the EU drugs agency published an estimate in January indicating that narcotics production continues to grow in Europe. There has been an emergence of new psychoactive substances being sold and consumed on the continent, and the EU drugs agency warns of the continent becoming a global hub for narcotics, rather than solely a consumption market. Synthetic drug production in Europe continues to increase, with illegal laboratories producing significant quantities of amphetamine, methamphetamine, and other synthetic drugs for both local consumption and export outside Europe. Europe continues to import drugs and the chemicals needed to produce them primarily from South America and Asia. The EU agency reported more than 350 labs for synthetic drugs were detected and dismantled in 2020 in Europe. The report was compiled with assistance from The Associated Press and Reuters.