🌊 Europe’s New Narco Port

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By Max Frost

In yesterday’s deep-dive, we looked at how a boom in Colombian cocaine production has fueled a crime wave in France. Today, we look at a neighboring country that faces a similar challenge. 

Germany has long been one of the world’s safest countries, with a homicide rate that’s around 20% of the US’. For that reason, it was unusual last year when port workers in Hamburg, Germany’s second-largest city, requested that they be given submachine guns for self-defense. 

Germany is also typically found to be one of the world’s least-corrupt countries. So, again, it was unusual when investigators brought a series of cases against prosecutors and police across the country. 

Both situations highlight the South American cocaine boom, as detailed in yesterday’s deep-dive, and raise the question of whether Europe’s war on drugs is guaranteed to fail.

Three years ago, outlets couldn’t publish enough reports about the wave of narco-crime that was hitting ports in Belgium and the Netherlands. 

“Mob-style killings shock Netherlands into fighting descent into ‘narco state,’” wrote The Guardian in 2022. 

“Narco-state' fears in Belgium after summer of violence,” headlined the BBC.

At the time, both Antwerp, Belgium’s largest port, and Rotterdam, the Netherlands’ largest, were experiencing exploding crime. So bad was the situation in Antwerp that the city’s mayor was placed under 24/7 police protection, while the DEA’s number-two official in Europe called the city, “A repeat of Miami in the 1980s.”

Rotterdam and Antwerp were the EU’s first and second busiest ports, respectively. Today, the drug trade has shifted to its third – Hamburg. 

Last month, The Guardian published an article, “Cocaine, corruption and bribes: The German port under siege by Europe’s criminal drug gangs.”

The story documented how crime and threats had forced Hamburg security workers to request submachine guns; how the lead prosecutor of a major drug trafficking case was accused of being on the payroll of a gang he was supposed to be prosecuting; and how corruption enabled drug traffickers to escape to Dubai before their arrests. 

According to The Guardian, drug money has transformed Hamburg’s streets. One bouncer told the outlet, “Every weekend you see more and more young men in Ferraris, Lamborghinis and €150,000 SUVs…This is cocaine money.”

But, like in France, the situation is now spilling from ports into the rest of Germany.

Last month, a police officer was arrested hundreds of miles from Hamburg over allegations that he was on the ‘Ndrangheta’s (the Italian mafia’s) payroll. Between then and last August, officers were arrested in at least three other cities for allegedly taking bribes from a drug trafficking network, passing classified information to the Dutch-Moroccan mafia, and “aiding and abetting” drug dealers. 

Enabling this corruption is a massive increase in Germany’s drug business: Germany announced a 750% increase in cocaine seizures between 2018 and 2023. Last month, authorities announced a further 5% increase in cocaine-related offenses between 2023 and 2024. 

Drugs are either being brought into Hamburg’s main port, on small boats into more isolated ports, or even through what is known as “parasite smuggling,” when cocaine is attached to a ship’s hull and divers are then sent to retrieve it after docking.

Germany’s booming drug trade has raised questions about whether there’s any way to actually stop it. Antwerp and Rotterdam both made substantial efforts to crack down on drug trafficking and yielded results, with each port reporting a nearly 50% decline in drug interceptions last year. Since then, though, trafficking has just moved to other EU ports, like Hamburg or Marseille (as documented in yesterday’s story). 

Some say the situation is proof that a European counter-narcotics strategy can only work if it’s done at the EU level, with all countries and ports participating in a crackdown. Yet others have said that’s impossible and that the various efforts are only once again highlighting the futility of the war on drugs. 

Editor’s Note

Thank you for reading. Let us know what you think. Is Europe’s war on drugs a waste of time and money? Or should countries crack down? Let us know by replying here. 

And if you’d like to read our most recent stories, here they are:

• Inside the Global Cocaine Boom

• Will BRICS Beat the Dollar?

• Is There a “White Genocide” in South Africa?

• Trump’s reversal of foreign policy in Saudi Arabia

• Inside Trump’s Crypto Empire

That’s all, see you tomorrow.

—Max and Max