"Everywhere, every day": how the EU's drugs agency is tackling a new surge

Across the European Union there is a growing diversification of illegal drugs and increasing violence linked to organised crime. But there are also new solutions and enhanced forms of cooperation, according to Alexis Goosdeel, Executive Director of the European Union Drugs Agency. He outlined these in detail to Isabel Marques da Silva in The Global Conversation.  

Goosdeel began by clarifying that new illicit substances, including so-called 'pink cocaine' are not classified as drugs. "This is why we call them, also, new psychoactive substances," he says. "They have a psychoactive effect on the brain, but they are not yet classified as a drug. So over the last 27 years, we have established and developed a European drug alert system on those substances and we have detected more than 950 of them, that never appeared on the European market before. And some of them have the potential to be harmful for health or to have even lethal consequences.

"So, the "pink cocaine" is also called 2C in Latin America or in Spain, for instance. It is coming from the chemical name, which is to 2C-B." Goosdeel continues. "But what we observe is that, in many cases, there are other substances - for instance, ketamine,  which is a specific substance becoming more problematic - appearing a bit everywhere. For instance, we made a survey on the Internet among people who declared they are consuming substances, and up to 10% of them have declared consuming, at least once in the last two months, ketamine.

"The major trend and the major risk is, as we describe it, "everywhere, everything, everyone". Drugs are everywhere today, whether they're being smuggled to Europe or produced on the territory of the EU," Goosdeel stresses. "Everything can be the object