Buying cocaine ’as easy as Uber’

BUYING cocaine is now as easy as ordering an Uber, authorities have warned with dealers suspected of using the taxi service and smartphone chat technology to make deliveries to meet burgeoning demand.

An illicit drug snapshot by the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission has concluded the proportion of the Australian population aged 14 years or over reporting having used cocaine increased in the past 12 months from 8 per cent to 9 per cent.

And those increases were seen not just in the cities but the country too.

“Despite fluctuations, indicators of cocaine demand and supply point to an expanding market in Australia,” the ACIC concluded in this year’s snapshot Illicit Drugs Report 2019.

Australian authorities say the country is following a trend first seen in Europe and branded the “Uberisation” of the illicit cocaine trafficking trade, where demand is matched by volume availability of the drug and technology making it easier to put customer and seller in contact.

The days of the back alleyway “grubbiness” of the trade have gone, replaced by young savvy socialite sellers using encrypted apps on smartphones to take dial-a-drug orders and unsuspecting or otherwise Uber drivers to make deliveries.

“Entrepreneurship in the competitive cocaine market is evident from innovative distribution strategies, such as cocaine-exclusive call centres,” the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction concluded.

“These new methods appear to reflect to some extent the type of disruption seen in other areas facilitated by the common use of smartphones, a potential ‘Uberisation’ of the cocaine trade. [This is] a competitive market in which sellers compete by offering additional services such as fast and flexible delivery options.”

THIS WAS A SOPHISTICATED CRIMINAL OPERATION ... USING MOBILE PHONES FOR CUSTOMERS TO PLACE ORDERS

JUDGE PETER BERMAN

In Australia, authorities suspect those fast delivery options including using taxi and Uber services.

In December 2017 three taxi drivers bragged “we go anywhere” on police intercepted smartphone chats as they delivered cocaine all over Sydney suburbs.

“This was a sophisticated criminal operation which ran a drug dealing network along the lines of that legitimate business, using mobile phones for customers to place orders and, in most cases, taxis driven by an offender to satisfy those orders,” NSW District Court judge Peter Berman said as he described the service “a drug version of Uber eats”.