A new report says the global drug trade has entered a new era dominated by synthetic narcotics, warning that traditional enforcement models are failing to keep pace with the rapid expansion of synthetic drug production, echoing the findings of the UN's latest World Drug Report that identifies synthetic drugs as one of the fastest-growing threats worldwide.
The ‘Synthetics and the New Drug World’ report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime (GI-TOC) found that synthetic drugs are entrenched in 186 of 193 countries, and are now the defining feature of the illicit drug market.
Synthetic drugs are man-made chemical compounds created in laboratories to mimic the effects of natural narcotics, hallucinogens, or stimulants.
Because their chemical structures are frequently altered to bypass legal restrictions, their exact ingredients and potency remain largely unknown, making them highly unpredictable and dangerous. An example is methamphetamine.
The report found that only seven countries were assessed as having little or no synthetic drug market presence, a smaller footprint than illicit heroin markets.
The report argues that although cocaine remains a major focus for law enforcement agencies and security assets globally, it has not transformed the structure of the global drug economy in the way synthetic drugs have.
“What was once described as the future of drug trafficking has already become its present. Unlike cocaine and heroin, synthetic drugs do not depend on agricultural cycles or geographically fixed production areas.”
“They can be synthesised almost anywhere, using an evolving range of precursor and pre-precursor chemicals sourced through both licit and illicit channels, and distributed via the same global logistics infrastructure that moves legitimate goods. The barriers to market entry that once contained traditional drug economies no longer apply, drawing both large transnational criminal networks and smaller entrepreneurial actors into the market,” the organisation says.
In its latest reporting period, the United Nations identified 688 new psychoactive substances globally, including 101 detected for the first time.
At the same time, the EU Drugs Agency reported monitoring approximately 1000 substances, of which 47 were newly identified. Synthetic opioids, including fentanyl, nitazenes and their analogues, have been detected in multiple regions, with evidence from North America, Europe, West Africa and Australia pointing to growing public-health risks.
“We continue to underestimate the extent to which the rise in synthetic drugs has re-shaped the global drug economy, and the way that organised crime has changed because of it,” Jason Eligh, GI-TOC Senior Expert on Drugs and Drug Markets, and author of the report.
The report adds that in many affected countries, authorities lack the capacity to identify what substances are circulating, let alone what risks they pose.
The expansion of the scale of the synthetic drugs market is unfolding at a moment of acute geopolitical fragmentation, and as such, the consensus-based multilateral cooperation architecture that has shaped international drug policy for decades is now under severe strain.
“In the last two annual meetings of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs, no resolution achieved consensus, a signal that what had looked like a strained global drug policy environment is now a fractured one. National security priorities and unilateral interventions are increasingly filling the space left by eroding multilateral consensus, even as synthetic drug supply chains remain inherently transnational,” the document adds.
The report also casts a spotlight on leading global chemical and pharmaceutical sources, noting that the projected 20 per cent growth of the sector in the next two decades could intensify challenges surrounding precursor chemical supply chains and the diversion of licit chemicals into illicit synthetic drug production.
“The decoupling of drug production from agricultural ecosystems has lowered barriers to market entry, enabling entrepreneurial criminal actors to enter the market alongside established transnational networks,” the report adds.
It also cites the growing contamination and adulteration of street supplies, including the emergence of opioid analogues as a third generation of novel synthetic opioids, as creating unprecedented challenges for public health systems and law enforcement.
At the same time, it says that clear web and dark web crypto-markets, encrypted messaging platforms, and social media sales channels are reshaping the distribution and retail landscape, producing business models that can quickly reconstitute after interdiction.
Comments
Sign in with Google to comment, reply, and like comments.
Continue with Google