The largest criminal market in Europe is drugs. It is estimated up to even 30 billion euros.

Europe is in the grip of a fresh drugs epidemic.

Up to 600 new psychoactive substances are wreaking havoc and threatening the lives of millions of people.

I wish we could say to people use real drugs because we know how to treat them.

The biggest problem we've got is knowing how to treat something that we don't know what's in it.

And the law enforcement agencies tell us they're struggling to contain the problem

as traffickers use the so-called darkness to ply their trade.

But it starts from identifying the right jurisdiction.

You're looking at the internet, so you don't even know which is the country,

where you need to localize the vendor or who are the buyers.

The ever-evolving battle against drugs

just got that much more sophisticated,

and in some cases even more bloody.

Street thugs are given an AK and a target, and they at it and they are very brutal in the kind of violence they use.

You're listening to the BBC World Service and this is Europe's Drugs Wars.

My name is Paul Williams.

I'm a crime journalist based in Dublin, Ireland's capital. For the past 30 years I've been covering the issue of drugs

trafficking and the violent and organized crime associated with it. It's not been an easy task.

I've had many death threats and have spent several years under 24-hour armed police protection.

But it's a subject I pursue with passion, a subject that has become much more personal than mere business, especially after the

events of 21 years ago this week.

An award-winning Irish journalist who specialised in investigating organized crime has been shot dead in Dublin.

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