Europol seeks contaminated-cocaine culprits

By David Cronin

Date: 27/01/05

Europol is probing whether crime gangs have laced cocaine sold in several European countries with a highly toxic substance.

The EU's police office began its investigations after it was discovered last month that cocaine in the Netherlands contained high amounts of atropine, a drug generally used in eye operations.

After being alerted of this discovery by the Trimbos Institute, a Utrecht-based drugs awareness body, the EU's Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction issued a 'public health' warning to national authorities across the Union, as well as Europol's headquarters in the Hague. As a result, the centre learned that the 'poisonous' cocaine had previously been detected in Italy during November. It subsequently spread to France and Belgium, affecting 70 people in the four countries involved. It is suspected that two deaths may have been resulted from atropine in Italy but this has not been scientifically proven.

EU sources say it is significant that all of the cases have been found along a known route for drug-traffickers. Europol is, therefore, assessing whether criminals deliberately added the potentially lethal ingredient. Atropine can cause eye and hearing aberrations, dilation of the pupils, irregular heartbeat and a decline in the amount of sweat normally produced by the body. A spokesman for the Trimbos Institute said he was "puzzled" as to how the contamination of cocaine could have occurred. Twenty victims showing acute indications of poisoning were treated in several Dutch hospitals in December but no new series of cases has been found since then. The institute circulated leaflets at nightclubs, to raise awareness about the risks of poisoning.

Atropine was previously detected in ecstasy pills in the Netherlands in 1997. But the amounts used were much smaller than in those found recently in cocaine.

Article reports that Europol was probing whether crime gangs had laced cocaine sold in several European countries with a highly toxic substance. The EU's police office began its investigations after it had been discovered in December 2004 that cocaine in the Netherlands contained high amounts of atropine, a drug generally used in eye operations.