Cocaine production rises to record high, UN reports

According to a United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) report, “The COVID-19 pandemic has had a disruptive effect on drug markets. With international travel severely restricted, manufacturers struggled to get their product to market. Nightclubs and bars have been shuttered as officials ramped up their attempts to combat the virus, causing demand for drugs often associated with these attitudes, such as cocaine, to plummet.

“However, the latest data suggests that this slump had little impact on longer-term trends. The global supply of cocaine is at record levels. Almost 2,000 tonnes were produced in 2020, continuing a dramatic increase in production that began in 2014 when the total was less than half of today’s levels.”

According to The Guardian, production “of coca, the drug’s basic ingredient, increased by 35% in 2020-21, exceeding pre-pandemic levels.”

“The pandemic was a small blip in the expansion of cocaine production, but now it has recovered and is even higher than before,” said Antoine Vella, a researcher at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime who contributed to the Report on cocaine.

The UN report states that the “increase is partly due to an expansion in coca bush cultivation, which doubled between 2013 and 2017, peaking in 2018 and picking up sharply again in 2021.

“But it’s also due to improvements in the conversion process of coca bush to cocaine hydrochloride. At the same time, demand has grown steadily, with most regions seeing steady increases in user numbers over the past decade. Although these increases can be partially explained by population growth, there is also an increasing prevalence of cocaine use. Law enforcement interception has also increased, faster than production, meaning that prohibition has curbed the growth in the amount of cocaine available for consumption worldwide,” the report continues.

While the cocaine trade has long been centered in major hubs like Colombia, that could be changing. As Vella told The Guardian, “I think we need to move away from looking at cocaine as a European/North American problem because it’s also a very South American problem.”

“The cocaine trade in Colombia was once controlled by just a few major players. As a result of a fragmentation of the criminal landscape following the demobilization of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) in 2016, it now includes criminal groups of all sizes, structures and targets. Recently, however, there have been signs of consolidation in some of these groups. These developments have led to an increasing presence of foreign actors in Colombia. Mexican and Balkan criminal groups have moved closer to the production center to gain access to stockpiles and wholesale quantities of cocaine,” the report said. “These foreign groups are not aiming to take control of the territory. Instead, they are trying to make supply lines more efficient. Their presence helps to encourage the cultivation of coca bush and to fund all stages of the supply chain.”

The report continues: “In established cocaine markets, the proportion of the general population using the drug is high. But these markets only cover around a fifth of the world’s population. If prevalence increases in other regions to keep up with established markets, the number of users worldwide would increase enormously due to the large underlying population. This type of market convergence has already taken place in western and central Europe, where purity levels and prices have been harmonized with the United States, although the prevalence of cocaine use in western and central Europe has not yet reached the level of the United States.”