{"id":18701,"date":"2025-02-02T18:51:34","date_gmt":"2025-02-02T17:51:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/?p=18701"},"modified":"2025-05-20T19:08:09","modified_gmt":"2025-05-20T18:08:09","slug":"cocaine-consumption-soars-globally-as-traffickers-find-new-markets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/2025\/02\/cocaine-consumption-soars-globally-as-traffickers-find-new-markets\/","title":{"rendered":"Cocaine consumption soars globally as traffickers find new markets"},"content":{"rendered":"

INTRODUCTORY NOTE BY MAGGIE PETITO (OF DRUGWATCH INTERNATIONAL) WHO SUBMITTED THIS ARTICLE TO US:<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

“Albania, a nation of 11,000 square miles and population <\/span>today<\/span> of some <\/span>2.5 million, saw a recent exodus of half of its people, mostly claiming to be “refugees” – exiting to global outposts. Today\u2019s Albania offers numerous benefits besides a lovely landscape. Resort and golf course maestros plan safe havens for Albanians and \u201cfriends\u201d to relax, launder their dirty money, escape Interpol and wash with crypto-Bitcoin. This statement is not racist: it is a fact. NATO member Albania is half Sunni Muslim. Albania is still under a multi-year consideration to join the EU”. Maggie P.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Opinion piece in Washington Post, by Samantha Schmidt,\u00a0 Arturo Torres, and Anthony Faiola<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

December 28, 2024<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A global boom in cocaine trafficking defies decades of anti-drug efforts<\/strong><\/p>\n

The cocaine trade is far bigger and more geographically diverse than at any point in history as Albanian traffickers expand the market in Europe for the drug.<\/p>\n

Ecuadorian military officers seized what they said amounted to 22 tons of cocaine in January 2024 \u2014 one of the world\u2019s largest single cocaine seizures on record.<\/p>\n

In Guayaquil, Ecuador \u2014 Dritan Rexhepi, the drug lord, had already escaped the law in three countries, and he planned to do it again.<\/p>\n

In less than a decade, Dritan Rexhepi had built a smuggling business that ran from the fields of Colombia to the ports of Ecuador and on to the streets of Europe, Italian and Latin American investigators said, rivaling the influence of Mexico\u2019s powerful cartels. His brand, carved into cocaine packages, was \u201cBello\u201d \u2014 beautiful.<\/p>\n

The Albanian\u2019s rise from gunman in his home country to transatlantic kingpin is part of a global explosion in the cocaine industry, a trade that is far bigger and more geographically diverse than at any point in history. South America now produces more than twice as much cocaine as it did a decade ago. Cultivation of coca crops in Colombia, the origin of most of the world\u2019s cocaine, has tripled, according to U.S. figures, and the amount of land used to grow the drug\u2019s base ingredient is more than five times what it was when the infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar was killed in 1993. And production keeps soaring. A record\u00a02,757 tons\u00a0of cocaine was produced worldwide in 2022, a 20 percent increase over 2021, according to the most recent global drug report from the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s going up and up and up,\u201d said Thomas Pietschmann, a research officer at the UNODC. \u201cA few years ago, people were saying the future is synthetic drugs. \u2026 Right now, it\u2019s still cocaine.\u201d<\/p>\n

For decades, cocaine consumers were primarily Americans, and interdiction was a U.S. government priority. But despite the tens of billions of dollars spent in the U.S. war on drugs in Latin America, the industry has not only grown, it has globalized, with\u00a0new routes, new markets and new criminal enterprises.<\/p>\n

Nearly every one of Latin America\u2019s mainland nations has become a major producer or mover of the drug, with Ecuador now one of the most important cocaine transit points in the world. Demand is soaring in Europe, which rivals the United States as the world\u2019s top cocaine destination. Cocaine seizures in E.U. countries\u00a0<\/strong>grew fivefold\u00a0<\/strong>between 2011 and 2021, and exceeded those in the United States in 2022.\u00a0<\/strong>While the United States remains a huge market, cocaine use has declined by about 20 percent since 2006, according to UNODC.<\/p>\n

Balkan, Italian, Turkish and Russian criminal groups have all swept into Latin America for a piece of the action. Few have managed to muscle their way into cocaine trafficking quite like Albanian criminal networks, investigators and analysts say.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe know there\u2019s not only one channel for cocaine,\u201d said Marco Martino, a senior Italian police official in charge of coordinating counternarcotics operations. But \u201cthe Albanians,\u201d he said, \u201care the best and the biggest.\u201d<\/p>\n

As cocaine production was exploding, investigators said, Albanian criminal networks rode the opportunity it presented. They were critical to getting the drug to Europe and fueling consumption across the continent.<\/p>\n

Rexhepi, 44,\u00a0<\/strong>built much of his empire from an Ecuadorian prison cell, fostering connections with Latin American gangs and turning his cellblock into an executive suite. A lawyer representing him in Albania declined to comment. Rexhepi, in a 2015 appeal, denied any involvement in drug trafficking, \u201ceither as a perpetrator, accomplice or accessory.\u201d But in 2021, Italy sought his extradition, warning the authorities in Ecuador in a letter from its embassy in Quito that Rexhepi was the \u201cundisputed leader\u201d of an Albanian drug trafficking network with global reach and access to \u201cinfinite quantities of cocaine.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rexhepi\u2019s emergence as a feared power broker within a federal prison in Cotopaxi province was symptomatic of the collapse of government control in Ecuador. But with the authorities in Rome seeking to imprison him for drug trafficking, he decided it was time to move again.<\/p>\n

A local judge, citing a medical need, ordered him into home detention in an upscale neighborhood here in the port city of Guayaquil in August 2021, according to Ecuadorian officials. Then, predictably, Rexhepi vanished.<\/p>\n

This investigation into the global expansion of the cocaine business and the rise of Albanian drug traffickers is based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former officials in Ecuador, Colombia, Europe and the United States, gang members in Ecuador, and thousands of pages of court documents from Ecuador, Albania and Italy. It reveals how criminal networks led by Albanians infiltrated Ecuador\u2019s ports, judiciary, prison system and security forces to gain control of key parts of the cocaine supply chain and trigger a deluge of the drug in Europe \u2014 a more than $12 billion annual cocaine market, according to the E.U. Drugs Agency.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith these profits, these organizations manage to permeate all public and private institutions, corrupting any structure,\u201d said Ecuador\u2019s former\u00a0<\/strong>anti-narcotics director, Gen. Willian Villarroel, in an interview.<\/p>\n

Drug trafficking entrepreneurs from Albania, a country of only about 2.8 million people, have begun to rival the world\u2019s most powerful cartels by working with them, not against them, transforming how the trade is run. The new networks, investigators say, are often criminal coalitions of disparate and independent groups, rather than hierarchical, violently competitive cartels.<\/p>\n

A boom in cocaine production and the expanding power of criminal organizations pose a growing threat in Latin America, the United States\u2019 biggest trading partner. In a multipart series, The Washington Post is examining how organized crime groups have vastly expanded their influence, corroding the region\u2019s democracies, strangling commerce and propelling thousands of people to the U.S. southern border.<\/p>\n

Latin America is producing more than twice as much cocaine as it did a decade ago. Nearly every one of its mainland nations has become a major producer or mover of the drug, feeding booming markets in the United States, Europe and South America.<\/p>\n

Organized crime groups have moved well beyond narcotics. They\u2019ve created sprawling illicit industries in extortion, migrant smuggling and gold mining. Their power has become so great that they form a new kind of insurgency, infiltrating government operations.<\/p>\n

Europol is aware of dozens of \u201cAlbanian-speaking\u201d clans or organized criminal networks currently operating in Europe, Robert Fay, the head of Europol\u2019s drug unit, said in an interview.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not about how many people you have,\u201d said Fatjona Mejdini, an Albanian analyst with the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. \u201cIt\u2019s about the right alliances you can form.\u201d<\/p>\n

From his prison cell in Ecuador, Rexhepi paved the way. He befriended leaders of Ecuador\u2019s most powerful gang,\u00a0Los Choneros, who were already working for Mexico\u2019s Sinaloa cartel, according to one of the gang\u2019s founding members, who, like some others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of security concerns. That led to strategic partnerships with both South American traffickers and gang leaders across Europe. His goal was simple, investigators and analysts said: sell as much cocaine as possible with abundant profit for all parties to the deals. \u201cRexhepi is the pioneer,\u201d Mejdini said.<\/p>\n

Soaring cocaine production<\/strong><\/p>\n

The explosion in cocaine production can be traced back to the demobilization of Colombia\u2019s largest leftist rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). A historic peace deal with the country\u2019s government in 2016 ended the longest-running civil conflict in the hemisphere, a conflict in which the United States played a critical role.<\/p>\n

Since the start of the counternarcotics and security package known as\u00a0Plan Colombia\u00a0in 2000, the United States has sent about\u00a0$14 billion\u00a0in funding to Colombia, at least 60 percent of it for the military and police. The plan focused in large part on combating the country\u2019s cocaine production and export, which the FARC controlled, using the proceeds to fund its insurgency and secure territory.<\/p>\n

When the guerrillas laid down their weapons, a proliferation of smaller armed groups, driven by profit rather than ideology, swept into coca-producing areas.<\/p>\n

These drug traffickers \u201cno longer have political interests,\u201d said Leonardo Correa, the head of the UNODC mission in Colombia. \u201cWhat they want is to get the drug out as fast as possible, to make the most money possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

Source: https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/world\/2024\/12\/28\/cocaine-consumption-soars-europe-asia\/<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

INTRODUCTORY NOTE BY MAGGIE PETITO (OF DRUGWATCH INTERNATIONAL) WHO SUBMITTED THIS ARTICLE TO US: “Albania, a nation of 11,000 square miles and population today of some 2.5 million, saw a recent exodus of half of its people, mostly claiming to be “refugees” – exiting to global outposts. Today\u2019s Albania offers numerous benefits besides a lovely […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,32,82,20,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cocaine","category-crime-violence-prison","category-economic","category-others","category-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18701"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18701\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}