Spanish
Bangkok, June 27 (EFE).- Australia and New Zealand are the countries with the highest per capita cocaine consumption in the world, according to data published Thursday in a report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
A 3% of people between 15 and 64 years old in both countries consumed cocaine in 2023, almost double that in America (with 1.6%) or slightly less than triple that in Europe (with 1.1%), according to the records of the "World Drug Report 2025".
The wastewater analysis, cited in the report, suggests that the majority of users in oceanic countries consume the drug occasionally, rather than habitually.
The document highlights that global cocaine production stood at 3,700 tons of pure drug in 2023, an increase of 34% compared to the previous year, and that drug trafficking routes have increasingly diversified to Africa, Asia, and Australia, and are no longer limited to their main markets: Europe and North America.
"Pacific islands are increasingly used as transit points for cocaine destined mainly for Australia and New Zealand," the report notes, which also highlights the widespread consumption in these nations of other drugs such as cannabis and ecstasy.
Cocaine seizures also reached "unprecedented figures" in Oceania in 2023, where mafias are attracted by the higher purchasing power of its citizens and the high price of the drug.
Furthermore, drug traffickers take advantage of the thousands of kilometers of coastline of these two large island countries due to the difficulty of monitoring such a vast area.
In December 2023, the Australian Police seized 2.34 tons of cocaine (with a black market value of almost 500 million US dollars), in one of the largest drug operations in the country.
