Word: europeanizer
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...year, Spanish police seized 46 tons of cocaine in joint operations with British, Italian and Dutch drug patrols, while Portuguese officials intercepted about 30 tons. By comparison, only about 74 tons of cocaine were seized in all of the E.U. countries in 2004, the latest figure available from the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction. Civil Guards at Madrid Barajas Airport have found cocaine on thousands of small-time mules, who hide the drug in bullfighter's swords, guitars and tubes of toothpaste or shaving cream...
...European governments are faced with the challenge of outwitting traffickers thousands of kilometers away. "They are looking for safer routes and methods," says María Marcos, director of Spain's Intelligence Center Against Organized Crime in Madrid. The routes and methods vary. Some cocaine is shipped on large vessels directly across the Atlantic, often having been processed at sea. Marcos says this cocaine is sometimes dropped overboard attached to floating buoys, then collected by Africa-based traffickers. The rest is flown from Latin America on twin-prop planes to West Africa, where it is offloaded and shuttled to Europe...
...been enormous. In May, a Cessna 441 twin-prop aircraft registered in the U.S. offloaded 630 kg of cocaine at an airport in Mauritania, and took off again. The crew then abandoned the aircraft in the desert about 125 km away and fled. Mauritanian police believe the scheme involves European dealers, and have questioned Belgian and French citizens. In early June, police in Belgium said they had cracked a cocaine network that had shipped about 350 kg in unchecked luggage through Brussels International Airport from Sierra Leone and Gambia. Airport staff apparently slipped the drugs into Europe without inspection, according...
...clubs and bars in the past two years. On a recent Saturday night in one of Madrid's hottest nightclubs, a long line formed outside the restrooms as people waited their turn to snort cocaine inside. "It's one of the most popular drugs, like ecstasy in other European countries," says Federico, a music producer in Madrid. "Most people sniff a line or two at weekends. You have a drink, you have dinner with friends, then you go to a club and share a gram or so of coke. It doesn't mean we're addicted...
Beyond the risks of addiction, however, officials warn that there are dangerous links between the drug business and funding for terrorism - an argument that U.S. authorities use to press European governments to crack down on drug networks. They point to the fact that the explosives used in the Madrid train bombings of 2004, which killed 191 people, were bought with hashish. "We are seeing increasing incidents of the use of drug barter for munitions in terror attacks," U.S. Drug Enforcement Administrator Karen Tandy told international law-enforcement officials at a meeting in Madrid...