News
The drug ecosystem ultimately affects us all
Smugglers, gangsters, addicts and occasional party users – all are affected, though some more than others.
Most users of the drugs being smuggled in today are people just like you and me. They get together with friends, have families, go to work every day. They are not marginalized, desperate or addicted in the sense of feeling they need drugs to deal with everyday life. For them, drugs have become a normalized alternative to alcohol. Various recent articles have identified the problem, including one at DN, Stockholm’s leading news site. Even if the media figure who DN interviewed in one article describes himself as a “very occasional user”, with every purchase, he is sponsoring criminal activity. This leads to increased gang criminality, which in turn has resulted in the explosive increase in shootings Sweden has experienced in recent years. This affects us all, including very occasional users.
Drug use is on the rise. The Customs Service needs to push back with resources and manpower, but expresses frustration that they currently lack both. The mules who bring the drugs in are too far away from the rest of the smuggling activity to make much difference, but dealing with them is undeniably part of the day-to-day lives of customs officers. It is for them, among others, that we are introducing NaRQ. For customs services, for prisons, for care facilities – any place where dealing with drugs smuggled inside people’s bodies affects the working environment. NaRQ is an automated system for separating drugs from human waste. It is a toilet system that handles processing and monitoring all by itself. In three easy steps.
“The eyes of the world are on Sweden, and illegal drug imports are on the rise,” the Director of the Swedish Customs Service told DN. “South American cartels view Sweden as a transit country where drugs can be brought in and then smuggled to other countries. Currently it’s hard to know what percentage of the drugs smuggled in are intercepted by Customs, but we estimate that it’s very low. The price of cocaine has gone down, for example, suggesting there is a large supply.”
