Over four days in November, Milipol Paris once again gathered security and justice professionals from across the world. On the morning of the third day, one standout session, “Dismantling Drug Trafficking Networks: Analytical Approaches and European Coordination”, laid bare both the scale of the threat and the limits of current tools.

Bringing together OFAST, Europol, the French Gendarmerie’s Criminal Research Institute and the Paris Judicial Court, this Milipol Paris session explored how data, science and European coordination can be used against drug trafficking networks, while highlighting structural weaknesses that traffickers still exploit with alarming ease.

Christian De Rocquigny, Deputy Head, French Anti-Narcotics Office (OFAST), opened the discussion with a blunt reminder that France is confronting “organisations that are richer, more violent and more agile than ever”. The numbers alone tell the story. Cocaine seizures in France have risen from six tonnes in 2014 to more than seventy tonnes in 2025, with the year’s total already surpassing 2024 with one quarter still to count. Synthetic drugs are following the same trajectory, with spectacular increases in amphetamines, methamphetamines and ecstasy tablets.

Panel at Milipol Paris focusing on justice-system challenges in tackling drug networks
Behind these figures lies a human cost that is often reduced to abstractions. De Rocquigny cited recent cases of children fatally poisoned by cocaine in domestic settings to counter what he described as the myth of a “clean” drug. He argued that debates about legalisation cannot be detached from the reality of products that are chemically aggressive, heavily adulterated and increasingly accessible.

Mapping a threat that looks more like terrorism

For OFAST, the picture is not limited to kilograms and tablets. It is the evolution of criminal structures that most worries investigators. De Rocquigny described organisations that exploit every vulnerability on French soil, from unaccompanied minors used on street dealing points to corruptible intermediaries in strategic infrastructures. Retaliatory violence has escalated, with targeted assassinations spilling over onto relatives when direct rivals cannot be reached.

In some neighbourhoods, the modus operandi of narcotics gangs now resembles low-level urban terrorism. De Rocquigny noted that this comparison was initially resisted, because the public image of terrorism is still shaped by religious extremism. However, the pattern of intimidation, targeted killings and the corrosion of local democracy is increasingly similar.

Despite this, he pointed out that the most powerful technical tools in France are still allocated to counter-terrorism. While he stressed that nobody wishes to see a return of mass-casualty attacks, he questioned why comparable capabilities are not systematically deployed against networks that “shed blood and undermine democracy” through drug profits. The recent legal framework allowing remote activation of microphones in vehicles and the capture of digital data was presented as a step in the right direction, but still only a partial answer.


From chemical signatures to joined-up European analysis

While OFAST works at the intelligence and investigation end of the chain, Captain Anna Berthelot represents the scientific link. As Head of the Narcotics Toxicology Department at the Criminal Research Institute of the French National Gendarmerie (IRCGN), she focuses on what the product itself can reveal once it is seized.

Until recently, the primary questions were basic: is this cocaine, and at what purity? Today, the ambition is far higher. Using increasingly sensitive analytical instruments, her teams track cutting agents, solvent traces and microscopic chemical markers that together form a “signature” tied to a production batch, a manufacturing method or even a specific region in South America. “Two suspects can claim not to know each other,” she explained, “but if they hold cocaine with the same signature, there is necessarily a common intermediary higher up the chain.”

This chemical profiling allows investigators to connect personal possession cases with large maritime seizures and to link individuals to locations where drugs have been stored or repackaged. IRCGN is now pushing further, working on origin-determination methods that could distinguish, for example, between cocaine arriving by container through Le Havre and that carried through French Guiana by body-packers, and then cross-matching those patterns with preferred routes and networks.

Berthelot underlined that this work makes little sense in isolation. Laboratories across Europe, North America and Australia are already sharing methods and comparing results. The goal is interoperable databases, where an expert in one country can upload a chemical profile and instantly see matches generated elsewhere. At the European level, however, Europol does not yet centralise this scientific layer; that role currently sits with a specialised EU drugs agency, though Jean-Christophe Belle stressed that channels of cooperation remain active.

Belle, a senior analyst in Europol’s Drugs Unit, broadened the lens to the continental scale. Half of the eight hundred most significant criminal networks identified in the EU have drug trafficking among their activities, and a third focus exclusively on it. Cocaine still enters in huge quantities, cannabis routes are diversifying, and Europe itself has become a hub for the production and export of synthetic drugs.

Europol operates as an intelligence hub rather than a front-line agency. It relies on Member States to feed it with case data, then uses advanced analytical tools, including artificial intelligence, to find connections across borders. Belle insisted that AI is “not a magic wand”, but it does save vast amounts of time and makes some analyses possible that would otherwise be unthinkable, given the volume and complexity of the datasets.

He described new joint analysis models, where analysts from several countries will be able to work together on the same data under Europol’s roof or remotely via the upcoming Joint Analyst Platform. This will allow, for example, a French and a Swedish investigator to access a shared subset of Europol data directly from their home services and build a common picture of a network that spans ports, logistics hubs and financial channels across the EU.


Justice on the back foot and the race for “criminal memory”

If the law enforcement side is slowly catching up with the digital and scientific sophistication of traffickers, the justice system is lagging behind. Béatrice Brugère, Deputy Prosecutor for the Paris Judicial Court, painted a stark picture of courts overwhelmed by enormous case files, still largely processed with tools and staffing levels unsuited to the digital era.

Her intervention made a crucial distinction. The justice system is only one segment in a much larger ecosystem that includes foreign policy, international cooperation and domestic security. France is primarily an import market for cocaine and other hard drugs, not a producer. Criminal organisations treat the country as an attractive destination partly because they judge the balance of risk and repression still manageable. Brugère argued that it is an error to look at narcotics through the product alone: the real object of prosecution should be the diversified criminal organisation, with its capacity to launder money, reinvest profits and adapt faster than legal systems.

She highlighted the EncroChat case as a turning point, showing both the power and the burden of technological breakthroughs. Once encrypted criminal communications were decrypted, investigators and courts were confronted with an “almost cinematic” flow of real-time information. Yet only a fraction has been exploited judicially, because the volume of data far exceeds current capacity. Defence lawyers, naturally, have challenged the admissibility, authenticity and collection methods of these digital traces, forcing courts to dedicate enormous effort just to secure procedures.

Prison corridor illustrating detention facilities and the challenges of managing organised crime
Delays have very concrete consequences. Hundreds of major organised crime cases are waiting to be heard in some appeal courts, she noted, and when hearings are not scheduled in time, suspects are released, disappear or continue running networks from behind bars. Even imprisonment is no guarantee of disruption. Without secure detention regimes and robust prison intelligence, leaders can continue to manage trafficking operations through smuggled phones and encrypted applications.

On this point, Brugère contrasted the French situation with Italy, where high-security 41-bis prison regimes and a highly specialised penitentiary intelligence service have, in her view, played a decisive role in weakening the traditional mafia. The Italian model shows that it is possible to maintain very strict detention conditions that remain compatible with human rights jurisprudence.

Looking ahead, she placed strong hopes in the creation of the new National Anti-Organised Crime Prosecution Office (PNACO), due to become operational in January 2026. Its mission will be to act as a national “entry point” for the most serious transnational cases, to pool data from local courts, police, customs and intelligence services, and to build what she called a genuine “criminal memory”. That means being able to map networks over time, understand their financial and territorial strategies, and send back to local prosecutors analyses that improve charging decisions and trial preparation.

For that to work, she argued, magistrates will need multidisciplinary teams around them, including financial analysts, cyber specialists and data experts, and a long-term investment in recruitment and training. Without this, even the best scientific tools, the most advanced AI systems and the strongest international partnerships will struggle to compensate for the basic bottleneck of human capacity.

As the session closed, one message ran through all four perspectives. The fight against drug trafficking in Europe is no longer about chasing individual consignments. It is about understanding and disrupting complex systems that stretch from coca fields to encrypted phones, from chemical signatures in a laboratory vial to a property title in Dubai, and from a street corner in Marseille to a courtroom calendar months or years later.

Image credit: Matthew Ansley - Unsplash

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