In the quiet town of Coria del Río, on the tranquil banks of Spain’s Guadalquivir River, the morning calm was shattered one December dawn by the roar of police helicopters. Spanish Civil Guard officers had tracked two speedboats from the river’s mouth, following their cargo upriver to a remote farm ringed by guards. What they discovered there captured global attention: two buried shipping containers filled with seven metric tons of cocaine-worth an estimated €420 million on the street.

The stash was emblematic not of a triumphant trafficking operation, but of a problem few expected-Europe’s cocaine market has become so oversaturated that criminal syndicates are literally burying their product.

For decades, drug trafficking has thrived on scarcity, risk, and profit margins. But in 2025, Europe finds itself in a strange new phase of the narcotics trade: cocaine has become too cheap to sell profitably at the wholesale level. The continent is awash in “white gold,” prices have collapsed, and gangs are hoarding-or burying-tonnes of cocaine to manipulate the market.

This crisis of abundance reveals deep changes in the global cocaine economy, from the jungles of Colombia to the docks of Antwerp. It’s a story of booming coca cultivation, fractured criminal structures, new trafficking methods, and the unpredictable economics of an illicit commodity.

Across much of Europe, the wholesale price of cocaine has plummeted to historic lows. In the Netherlands, a kilogram that fetched €30,000 just two years ago now sells for around €15,000-or even less, according to Dutch prosecutors. Spanish anti-drug police chief Alberto Morales noted that traffickers have set an informal floor price: “I won’t traffic for less than €12,000 per kilo because the numbers don’t add up for me.”

Meanwhile, on the streets of Europe’s cities, the retail price for a gram of cocaine remains largely unchanged. Dealers simply increase purity rather than lower prices, absorbing the cost difference themselves. The result: users enjoy stronger cocaine for the same price, while criminal wholesalers face shrinking profits and rising risks.

Faced with collapsing margins, some networks have chosen to withhold supply-hiding or even burying vast stockpiles of cocaine in bunkers, warehouses, or rural farmlands. The goal is simple: throttle the market, drive up scarcity, and push wholesale prices back up.

“There are huge stockpiles,” said Robert Fay, head of the drugs unit at Europol. “In Spain, you have examples where cocaine is buried underground. Everybody is asking: ‘What on earth has happened?’”

The answer lies thousands of miles away, in the coca fields of South America.

Cocaine’s European oversupply begins in the Andean highlands. Colombia remains the world’s dominant producer of coca-the plant used to make cocaine-and the country is now cultivating more of it than at any time in its history.

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