A rising number of organized crime groups are turning their attention to Europe’s lucrative drug trafficking market, Europol said on Wednesday. By now, one-third of the 5,000 gangs operating in the European Union is involved in the production, trafficking, distributing and selling of drugs.

Mexico’s former security minister has been arrested in the United States on charges of cocaine trafficking and accepting millions in bribes to help the Sinaloa cartel traffic drugs.

Two customs agents and a man were charged with drug trafficking in what authorities are describing as Australia’s largest-ever seizure of methamphetamine after investigators discovered the drugs hidden inside a shipment of stereo speakers.

Philippine police have seized hundreds of kilograms of methamphetamine - with an estimated street value of US$49 million - hidden inside Chinese tea packets.

It’s an invention normally seen seen in South America, but British and Spanish police say they’ve intercepted a submarine carrying hundred of millions of dollars-worth of cocaine into Europe for the first time ever.

Over the past seven days, a string of anti-drug and organized crime busts by authorities across Ohio have led to dozens of indictments and huge loads of seized drugs and weapons, according to reports. 

Ten people have been arrested on suspicion of smuggling more than £15.5 million (US$20 million) out of the United Kingdom into Dubai, hidden in suitcases over the past three years, British authorities say.

Russian authorities seized more than 100 kilograms of narcotics, over 600 kilograms of chemicals that could be used to manufacture illegal drugs, along with a lot of other drug paraphernalia from drug traffickers, the Ministry of Internal Affairs announced Tuesday. 

Italian authorities seized a record amount of cocaine, worth an estimated €250 million (US$277 million), hidden among cases of bananas.

Four members of a family have turned over more than a dozen properties across the United Kingdom and Spain worth US$10.3 million after British authorities accused them of buying them with dirty money.

An Ohio drug trafficker has pleaded guilty to laundering more than US$19 million of narcotics profit on the dark web over the course of two years.

Swedish police said that a violent Nigerian sex and drug trafficking gang, which allegedly often uses black magic - voodoo - to coerce people into crime, has started spreading throughout the country, theSVT Nyheter reported last week.

Police found more than 40 skulls, 70 bones and a fetus in a jar during a raid on a suspected drug trafficking hideout in Mexico City on Saturday. The odd find came a few days after 31 cartel member suspects were arrested.

The man who was until last week in charge of Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte’s infamous war on drugs is now being accused of having resold the confiscated drugs along with a dozen colleagues, the BBC reported this week. 

A U.S. court found the brother of Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez guilty of participating in the smuggling 200,000 kilograms of cocaine into the United States while relying on "state-sponsored drug trafficking."

Following a two-year investigation codenamed Operation “Gangster’s Paradise,” a judge sentenced 34 people for drug trafficking and money laundering, the US Attorney’s Office in the Western District of Tennessee announced in a Thursday press release.

The family of imprisoned drug kingpin Joaquin ‘El Chapo'' Guzman is planning on building Mexico’s first indigenous university and hopes President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrado will lay the cornerstone, according to a lawyer claiming to represent him.

Authorities in 16 European countries have arrested hundreds of suspects and seized drugs worth more than US$90 million in a Europol-coordinated crackdown.

A new study is linking the United States’ attempts to enforce stricter border controls to increased corruption among officers at the nation’s crossings, with the author warning it’s “only the tip of the iceberg.”

The Dutch government is looking to hire 445 more officers for a specialized narcotics unit, as the fallout continues from the assassination of a criminal defense lawyer.