Drug dealing offences in London have hit their highest level in more than five years, police records show.

There were 883 ‘drug trafficking’ offences in May 2023, around four times the figure of 223 in January 2018 - as far back as the Met’s Crime Data Dashboard shows.

At the same time, drug possession offences in London hit a five-year low, which the Met stated is “absolutely not” due to a more lenient approach towards lower level drug possession.

Detective Superintendent Adam Ghaboos, the Met’s lead responsible officer (LRO) for drugs, puts the rise in trafficking cases largely down to the Met’s “additional activity over and above what we've done before”.

The Met’s new policing operations have used new tactics and technology to locate drug lines in and around London.

Opened in 2020, Operation Orochi aims to dismantle the typical county lines drug operation and protect “exploited vulnerable people”, while Operation Yamata focusses on drug lines within London and reducing drug-related violence.

“London is different to everywhere else with internal lines, say between Hackney and Tower Hamlets,” DSI Ghaboos explains.

He said that Operation Yamata, started in 2022, was a “big input of change of tactics and operational activity” in looking for drug lines and is “very successful at taking people out for drugs offences that we know are on the way to committing more serious violence”.

DSI Ghaboos said the Met are now better at finding drug operations which have “always been there”, as they have “started to find it and pursue it more” with their new operations.

But have drug dealing levels really increased?

DSI Ghaboos said: “I think there must be [an increase] because the money goes up, but it's a very complex question because it’s ever changing.”

Judging whether drug dealing has actually increased in London is difficult due to the “constant ebb and flow” of global drug production.

While the Taliban have switched off the opium supply from Afghanistan, Columbia has stopped suppressing cocaine production: fluctuating global supplies make monitoring drug levels difficult, DSI Ghaboos explained.

But the creation of new synthetic drugs has rocketed in the past five years.

“The biggest way I think drugs are increasing is the chemical creation - new drugs are being designed and created every day, and they're done to try and avoid detection.

“A lot of synthetic drugs that are created can't be detected by machines, can't be detected by dogs, can't be detected by a human - it could look like a sweet,” said DSI Ghaboos.

“That's a whole new world that only came in its vastness in the last four or five years.”

The simultaneous drop in possession offences is less clear to understand.

DSI Ghaboos said: “It’s about whether historically we’ve charged people with possession because the trafficking wasn’t as well known, but actually now it fits into a trafficking offence.

“I can’t answer that as an accurate response, we’d have to deep dive into it.”

“What’s really interesting is that usage has actually gone down. Since 1992 to today, use of illicit drugs has vastly dropped.”

The Met’s Crime Data Dashboard is publicly available on their website, showing offence rates across London since January 2018.