Roadmap on anti-drug trafficking

Key points

The EESC:

• recommends that Member States provide their customs administrations and police forces with adequate human and technical resources, decent pay and working conditions and continued training;
• highlights that combating the abuse of drugs and hard drugs necessitates a more differentiated, whole-of-society approach. Drug use should be tackled more by means of preventive and accompanying measures and less through repression;
• remarks that other routes and points of access for illicit trafficking – like airports, roads and rail – are not to be neglected;
• finds the use of the term "public-private partnership" (PPP) very unfortunate when applied to cooperation between public authorities and private parties in the given context, and advises the Commission to speak of a multi-actor approach instead;
• welcomes all effective initiatives for dismantling criminal networks, underlining that banking secrecy and the existence of tax havens, money laundering and corruption are of the utmost importance for organised crime;
• advocates better cross-border law enforcement coordination between police and customs authorities, and better cooperation between law enforcement and judicial authorities as well as fiscal authorities in order to combat organised crime as effectively as possible;
• urges Member States to invest sufficiently in their public administrations and to speed up their digitalisation to counter organised crime;
• recommends the inclusion of trade unions representing police and customs officials in order to properly identify their human resources and equipment needs and taking into account their expertise;
• recalls that drug addicts are victims and not perpetrators, as long as their use of drugs does not give rise to crime associated with acquiring those drugs or to dangers to third parties. The EESC strongly recommends studying the experiences of countries and regions where the use of certain drugs is now tolerated and/or the use of cannabis has been decriminalised;
• recommends that there be more initiatives to protect Europeans from the dangers of addiction and that these not concentrate only on hard drugs, and specifically calls for using confiscated funds for prevention projects.