Cocaine prices hit record level due to drug seizures, says Britain's FBI

Published on Tuesday 12 May 2009 22:06

DRUG busts by Britain's top organised crime-fighting agency have helped force dealers to hike their wholesale cocaine prices to record levels, its boss claimed yesterday.

Trevor Pearce, head of enforcement at the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca), said prices per kilogram had jumped from 39,000 last year to more than 45,000 as a result of undercover work and seizure operations.

But his findings come amid a warning that UK cocaine's purity level is currently the lowest on record, as gangs use increasing amounts of chemicals to dilute the drug sold on Britain's streets.

Mr Pearce said: "There is a discernible effect that we are now seeing in relation to the availability of cocaine both in Europe and also across the UK.

"We are seeing high-quality cocaine at about 45,000 per kilo wholesale in the UK. That's significantly higher than it has been and has to be indicative of the pressure the importers are under."

Mr Pearce said: "We are seeing wholesale prices of cocaine rising across Europe, in Spain and Belgium. We think that is due to a large degree to the strategy of working in South America, the Caribbean, across the Atlantic and with European partners – tackling it in a different way."

Soca, which was billed as the UK's answer to the FBI when it was set up in 2006, has come under pressure over the past year to prove its worth.

The agency said its activities in the run-up to Christmas stopped ten tonnes of street-quality cocaine being sold in Britain.

But new figures suggest almost a third of police cocaine seizures are now less than 9 per cent pure, the lowest recorded purity level. The data, collected by the Forensic Science Service, suggests drug gangs are using more and more chemicals to increase the drug's availability on the UK's streets.

But Danny Kushlick, of the drugs policy foundation Transform, said the changes in cocaine price and purity were no more than a temporary blip.

"The war on drugs was lost a long time ago," he said. "We know the long-term evidence shows drug prices are falling, drugs are more available and more pure than they have ever been before over the long term.

"These things need to be seen in terms of their ability to sustain. However, we can buck the trend temporarily. This does buck the trend. It would be disingenuous to claim that this is the beginning of the end of the cocaine trade or anything like it."

Mr Kushlick claimed the government and Soca were "grabbing at straws and cherry-picking statistics in order to dupe us into believing we are winning (the war on drugs]".

Street prices of cocaine have fallen over the last decade. Recent estimates put the price of a line at as little as 1.

Charity DrugScope said it was "too soon" to say whether recent seizures would have a sustained impact on supply.

Chief executive Martin Barnes said: "To suggest that the world cocaine market is 'in retreat' is probably premature. The street price and purity of cocaine have been falling for some time – it has become more affordable and has lost its image as a drug exclusively for rich celebrities."