Sara Van Cotthem takes a safety knife and precisely slices open the side of a cardboard box to unpack its contents, an aluminium stepladder made in China. Working under harsh fluorescent lights at the border inspection post at the port of Antwerp, Van Cotthem checks the paperwork and taps the ladder with a magnet to check if it really is aluminium and not another metal.

It is an everyday operation for customs officers at Antwerp, one of Europe’s main commercial gateways, which handled the equivalent of 13.6m 20ft-long (6 metres) containers last year. Everything is in order and the lorry, jam-packed with identical boxed ladders, can get on its way to Germany.

But it’s not always so straightforward. Along with routine attempts to evade duties or import counterfeit goods, customs officers are grappling with relentless efforts by violent criminals to smuggle drugs, especially cocaine, into Europe.

Antwerp is one of Europe’s main entry points for cocaine: authorities seized 483 tonnes of the drug between January 2019 and June 2024, the largest amount among 17 ports reporting to the European Union Drugs Agency. The port, Europe’s second largest, has been the victim of a confluence of factors. Cocaine production in South America – above all, Colombia – has soared over the last decade, while Dutch drug gangs that had been prioritising the even larger Rotterdam port shifted their attention to Belgium.

Much of the cocaine arriving in Belgium is thought to be taken to the Netherlands for further distribution. But enough stays in Belgium to cause serious harm, while homegrown criminals have established a foothold in the lucrative trade. The power of the drug gangs has prompted judges to warn that Belgium risks becoming a narco-state, with international drug crime threatening social stability.

While cocaine seizures at Antwerp fell to 55 tonnes in 2025, from a record-breaking 121 tonnes in 2023, the problem remains formidable. “It is like a cat and mouse game,” says Van Cotthem, a communications officer for Belgium’s customs and excise. “Every time, the smugglers find new ways to smuggle the drugs.”

A few metres away from where she is speaking, six brand-new mobile scanners are parked, ready to check a suspect container any time of day or night. Customs authorities bought nine scanners (the other three are deployed elsewhere) to ensure suspect containers will be checked more quickly, minimising the risk of drug gangs extracting any drugs before a control point. In 2025, 65,000 risky containers were scanned at Antwerp, up on the previous year, and the goal eventually is scanning 350,000 to 400,000 containers along fixed conveyer-belt machines.

Scanning is getting more sophisticated in response to fiendishly inventive ways criminal gangs have found to disguise drugs. Cocaine was traditionally packed around fruit. In recent years, port authorities have discovered it mixed with orange juice or coal, disguised in fake pineapples, embedded in cardboard boxes and textiles or hidden inside wooden beams and paving stones.

Antwerp customs officers spend at least a year training to spot telltale marks on a scanned container – a break in a pattern, or “something off” in the spaces between the official goods.

Drug traffickers’ modus operandi is changing in other ways, says Kristian Vanderwaeren, the head of customs and excise in Belgium. Smugglers are shifting routes: for instance, sending South American cocaine to Europe via west Africa. The circuitous route is an attempt to outwit authorities’ risk protocols on whether to check a container, which are based partly on the country of origin. In 2025, Ghana became the third most significant country of origin for drug seizures in Belgium, behind Ecuador and Costa Rica, while Colombia – the traditional source – slipped to fifth place.

Smugglers are also trying to avoid major ports altogether by dropping illegal cargo at sea. “Mother vessels” from South America transfer cocaine to smaller boats or toss waterproof bundles with floats and GPS trackers into the sea to be recovered later. Police have identified these practices as far south as the Canary Islands and up to the Kattegat, the strait separating Denmark and Sweden.

It may be only a matter of time before drugs can be sent across the Atlantic without any crew. Europol reported this year that semi-submersible vessels equipped with antennas and modems “are likely already capable of crossing the Atlantic without a crew onboard”. Drug traffickers have also been known to take to the skies: Vanderwaeren recalled Brazilian authorities a few years ago intercepting a cocaine-laden private jet that was destined for Belgium. He says his agency is looking at how to intercept aircraft, drones and submarines. “But it’s not an easy job to do. Very often you need the military also to support or help us with this.”

Authorities have hired more police, including a specialised unit to fight smuggling in the port. “We are very tough, we have put in many more state capabilities in order to tackle the problem,” Vanderwaeren says. As Antwerp and nearby Rotterdam have tightened controls, he notes, smuggling had shifted to France and Spain, “a waterbed effect”. Spain reported a record 123 tonnes of seizures in 2024, while France reported a doubling of impounded cocaine from 2023 to 2024. “You see more seizures in Spain, you see more seizures in France, because it’s getting tougher and tougher for the Antwerp mob to enter their stuff into the port,” Vanderwaeren says.

Letizia Paoli, the chair of criminal law and criminology at KU Leuven, says nobody knows for sure how much cocaine is getting into Antwerp. She believes smugglers are now trying less-protected ports and have changed tactics when targeting Antwerp. “Traffickers more rarely send multiple tonnes in a shipment, but rather they send more shipments with small amounts in order to distribute the risk,” she says. That hypothesis is supported by data showing a rise in seizures of cocaine under 100g and decrease in big hauls between 2023 and 2025 at Antwerp.

Paoli considers claims that Belgium is becoming a “narco state” unfounded as drug-related corruption remains “quite rare” and “low-level”, she says, especially when compared with countries such as Mexico and Honduras, where very senior figures have been convicted of taking bribes from cartels. Moreover, she found a low level of drug-related violence in Belgium, while emphasising she had a lot of empathy with the warnings. But cocaine use is widespread.

“Cocaine remains widely available at a very high level of purity,” Paoli says. “The drug traffickers here do not even bother to cut the cocaine with other substances, they sell it almost pure at 80%, 90% purity, which didn’t happen in the past. So this suggests that there is really more cocaine that they can get rid of.”

With academic colleagues, she estimated in 2021 that EU consumers were using 160 tonnes of the drug, which she says police consider an underestimate. But even were it much higher – say, 250 tonnes – she suggests that could still easily blend into legal trade: 2.1bn tonnes of goods enter EU seaports each year from the rest of the world. Given this, she says: “You have to come to the conclusion that one way or another, the traffickers will find a way.”