TheEconomistNovember 23rd 2019 551O
ne of africa’sbiggest-ever drug sei-
zures took place on September 1st at a
modest bungalow outside the town of Can-
chungo in Guinea-Bissau. Hidden behind a
fake wall, Bissau-Guinean judicial police
found 1,660kg of cocaine—enough to cut
100m lines. At two other houses nearby,
they found a further 250kg of drugs. They
arrested a dozen people, including three
Colombians and a Mexican, and nabbed 18
cars and a speedboat. The drugs were des-
tined for Mali and ultimately, Europe.
The seizure was the second big one this
year in Guinea-Bissau. In March police got
their hands on almost 800kg. Before that,
they had reported no drugs hauls to the un
Office on Drugs and Crime for over a de-
cade. For most observers the surprise was
not that a big shipment of drugs was pass-
ing through the country, but that the police
stopped it. In Guinea-Bissau, a small, poor
west African state of just 1.9m people,
where over 90% of formal exports are ca-
shew nuts, cocaine-smuggling has been a
huge business since at least 2005. unoffi-
cials warned more than a decade ago thatthe country risked becoming a “narco-
state”. The drugs trade has only become
more embedded since then. International
officials in Bissau, the capital, guess that at
least ten tonnes of cocaine pass through
each year, probably more. At European
street prices, that would be worth about the
same as Guinea-Bissau’s gdp. Across west
Africa, coke is propping up kleptocratic po-
litical systems and fuelling violence.
Having fallen during the global finan-
cial crisis, production of hard drugs is now
as high as it has ever been (see chart over-
leaf ). In Colombia, since a peace deal with
the farc, a Marxist insurgency, was signed
in 2016, the coca crop has increased dra-
matically. When the farcdisbanded, new
traffickers rushed to take control of their
territory. Competition between buyers has
pushed up coca prices so farmers have
planted more. Opium in Afghanistan has
flourished since most natoforces pulled
out of the country in 2014. The Afghan
state, battling the Taliban, has all but given
up on trying to stop the drugs trade. Pop-
pies bloom outside Kandahar, the second-biggest city. And the production of synthet-
ic drugs such as ecstasy is up everywhere.
In the rich world, too, drug use is climb-
ing again. In Britain the share of 16- to 24-
year-olds who say they have taken a class a
drug (such as ecstasy or cocaine) in the past
year almost doubled between 2012 and
2018, to 9%. In America cocaine use is ris-
ing and drug overdoses, mostly of opiates,
continue to kill around 70,000 people a
year. And in countries from eastern Europe
to Asia, demand for recreational drugs is
growing with incomes.
Most of these drugs have to be smuggled
from places such as Afghanistan and Co-
lombia to users, mostly in America and Eu-
rope. Traffickers are finding ever more so-
phisticated ways to hide their product, says
Lawrence Gibbons of Britain’s National
Crime Agency (nca). Some hide cocaine
within the walls of shipping containers, or
inside fruit. They are also exploiting new
routes. Police from Britain and the Nether-
lands have cracked down on shipments
through the Caribbean, so traffickers are
moving their product through west Africa
instead. That means that the violence and
corruption that has long afflicted Latin
America is spreading.
The increase in production of drugs
“probably affects Africa more than any-
where else”, says Mark Shaw of the Global
Initiative against Transnational Organised
Crime, a think-tank, because many African
states are fragile. Smugglers easily bypass
or co-opt their institutions and officials.Drug-traffickingChanging gear
BISSAU, MEXICO CITY AND SÃO PAULO
The illegal drugs industry is booming again—and weak states are most vulnerableInternational