Lower thirds:

0:02 Report by / Christine Mhundwa & Finlay Duncan
0:27 Robert Fay, Head of EU Drugs Unit, Europol
1:35 Robert Fay, Head of EU Drugs Unit, Europol

Script:

This is what European drug raids look like. 

This was one of a string of coordinated operations across nearly 50 sites in seven countries. 

Police arrested dozens of people and seized millions of euros worth of cocaine. 

And yet such successes barely make a dent in the market. 

00:27 
SOT (English) Robert Fay, Head of EU Drugs Unit, Europol:
We see a lot of cocaine in the European streets. The price of cocaine that we see at a European wholesale and retail market, which has been significantly dropped in the past two years from, for example, 40,000 per kilogram of cocaine, too. In some member states to 12 or €14,000 euros per kilogram. It means that basically, the European cocaine market is always oversaturated with the amounts of cocaine that are being exported.

The cocaine comes from Latin America, from the countries in yellow on this map — Colombia, Bolivia and Peru.

Transit countries are shown in red. They include Ecuador, Panama, and Costa Rica.

Countries along the West African coast are also part of the system, sometimes even serving as logistics hubs where the origins of cocaine shipments are obscured....

Making them harder to detect when they arrive into Europe.

The main European points of entry include the major ports of Antwerp in Belgium and Rotterdam in the Netherlands — and increasingly French ports.

Even though the authorities know all this, they’re failing to stop it. 

There's even been a drop in the volume of cocaine being seized at those ports.

01:35 
SOT (English) Robert Fay, Head of EU Drugs Unit, Europol:
We see different, different diversification of the methods and and, and the modus operandi of the trafficking of cocaine. Primarily, we see more and more shifting of cocaine to the different member states or the different smaller ports. We call this waterbed effect, for example France. France has has a boom of the cocaine seizures in the ports. They are also changing their methods of the of the transportation. Primarily, this is what we are seeing in the high seas transshipment operations. 

The demand for cocaine in Europe has made its trafficking and distribution a major focus of  drug gangs in the EU.

Law enforcement agencies here say they want to collaborate more at an operational level with their counterparts in Latin America.