New drug trafficking routes

Traffickers are increasingly looking for new routes to supplement the old ones: new land routes for heroin smuggling seem to be emerging, e.g. in addition to the established Balkan and northern routes, heroin is trafficked southward from Afghanistan via the Islamic Republic of Iran or Pakistan, leading through the Middle East via Iraq. While the Balkan trafficking route remains the most popular one, a decrease in the amount of heroin being trafficked on this route has been noted.

Moreover, Afghan opiates seem to be emerging as competition to opiates produced and consumed in the East and South-East Asia subregion, as seizures made in countries of that region show.

While it is clear that the African continent is becoming increasingly important and vulnerable in terms of the proliferation of trafficking routes, the availability of data is very limited. In order to effectively monitor this worrying trend, there is an urgent need to improve the data collection and analysis capacity of countries in the region.

Cocaine seizures in Colombia indicate that the Atlantic route may be gaining in prominence as compared with the Pacific route in maritime trafficking; linguistic ties appear to play a role in cocaine trafficking from South America to Europe via Brazil, Portugal and lusophone countries in Africa. The cocaine market seems to be expanding towards the emerging economies in Asia.

Overall trends across drug categories

Opiates

Trends with regard to the production and consumption of opiates witnessed some major shifts.

The limited available data suggest that opioid use (prescription opioids, heroin and opium) has gone up in parts of Asia and Africa since 2009.

Use of opiates (heroin and opium), on the other hand, remains stable (around 16.5 million people, or 0.4 per cent of the population aged 15-64), although a high prevalence for opiate use has been reported from South-West and Central Asia, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe and North America.

In Europe specifically, there are indicators that heroin use is declining, due to a number of factors, including an aging user population in treatment and increased interdiction of supply. Nevertheless, non-medical use of prescription opioids continues to be reported from some parts of Europe.

Production-wise, Afghanistan retains its position as the lead producer and cultivator of opium globally (74 per cent of global illicit opium production in 2012).