Sara Van Cotthem, a customs officer at the port of Antwerp, carefully slices open a box containing an aluminium stepladder made in China, taps it with a magnet to confirm it’s not secretly made of something more sinister, and sends it on its merry way to Germany. It’s all very routine - unless you’re a drug smuggler, in which case the routine is considerably more stressful.
Antwerp, one of Europe’s busiest ports - handling the equivalent of 13.6m 20ft containers last year - has become the continent’s unofficial welcome mat for cocaine. Between January 2019 and June 2024, authorities seized 483 tonnes of the stuff, the largest haul among 17 ports reporting to the European Union Drugs Agency. That’s a lot of nose candy, and it’s only gotten more creative: cocaine has been found mixed with orange juice, disguised in fake pineapples, embedded in cardboard, hidden inside wooden beams, and packed around paving stones. Apparently, smugglers have watched too many heist movies.
Seizures fell to 55 tonnes in 2025 from a record 121 tonnes in 2023, but don’t pop the champagne just yet. “It is like a cat and mouse game,” says Van Cotthem. Customs has responded by buying nine new mobile scanners (six are parked at the port, ready to check suspect containers at any hour) and aiming to scan 350,000 to 400,000 containers annually on fixed conveyor-belt machines. In 2025, they scanned 65,000 risky containers - up from the previous year - but smugglers, ever the innovators, have shifted tactics.
Kristian Vanderwaeren, head of Belgium’s customs and excise, notes that traffickers are now routing South American cocaine through West Africa, with Ghana becoming the third most significant origin country for drug seizures in Belgium in 2025, behind Ecuador and Costa Rica. Colombia, the traditional source, slipped to fifth place. Smugglers are also trying to bypass ports entirely by dropping illegal cargo at sea: “mother vessels” transfer cocaine to smaller boats or toss waterproof bundles with GPS trackers into the ocean for later recovery, as far south as the Canary Islands and up to the Kattegat strait. Europol reported this year that semi-submersible vessels equipped with antennas and modems “are likely already capable of crossing the Atlantic without a crew onboard.” Vanderwaeren says his agency is looking at how to intercept aircraft, drones, and submarines, adding, “But it’s not an easy job to do. Very often you need the military also to support or help us with this.”
As Antwerp and nearby Rotterdam tighten controls, smuggling has shifted to France and Spain - a “waterbed effect,” Vanderwaeren calls it. Spain reported a record 123 tonnes of seizures in 2024, while France saw a doubling of impounded cocaine from 2023 to 2024. Letizia Paoli, chair of criminal law and criminology at KU Leuven, says nobody knows how much cocaine is actually getting through, but she suspects smugglers are now sending smaller, more frequent shipments to distribute risk. Data supports this: seizures of cocaine under 100g rose between 2023 and 2025, while big hauls declined.
Paoli dismisses claims that Belgium is becoming a “narco-state,” noting that drug-related corruption remains “quite rare” and “low-level,” especially compared to Mexico and Honduras. But cocaine use is widespread and purity is sky-high. “The drug traffickers here do not even bother to cut the cocaine with other substances, they sell it almost pure at 80%, 90% purity,” she says. With 2.1bn tonnes of goods entering EU seaports each year from the rest of the world, even an estimated 250 tonnes of cocaine could blend in easily. “You have to come to the conclusion that one way or another, the traffickers will find a way.”
In other words, the cat and mouse game continues, and the mice have GPS trackers.