The Border Force confiscated almost 15 tonnes of cocaine worth more than £1bn between 1 June and 31 August, the Home Office has announced – ‘equivalent to the weight of a London double decker bus’.
The amount is more than half of the total seized last year and is greater than combined seizures for the whole of 2022-23. More traffickers are now concealing their drugs in high value equipment to deter enforcement action ‘with the threat of a large damages bill’, the Border Force adds, with officers ‘using technology and intelligence more than ever to overcome these tactics’.
A report by the Insight Crime think tank earlier this year said that record breaking cocaine seizures were ‘now the norm’ globally, the result of huge increases in Colombian cocaine production in recent years. Deaths involving cocaine in England and Wales rose by 30 per cent between 2022 and 2023.
Meanwhile the Scottish Parliament has voted by 63 votes to 52 to reject the Right to Addiction Recovery (Scotland) Bill, which would have given people with alcohol and drug issues the legal right to treatment within three weeks of a diagnosis. ‘By rejecting the Right to Recovery Bill, MSPs have turned their backs on 80 per cent of public respondents who supported it, and on the thousands of families still burying their children while bureaucrats debate definitions,’ stated FAVOR UK CEO Annemarie Ward.