Kansas City has spent the past two years preparing for World Cup security.
Missouri and Kansas landed grants to help prevent drone attacks. Police officers from 11 states will supplement the Kansas City Police Department’s 1,200 members.
And, it turns out, the department was preparing for cocaine. Lots of cocaine.
“One of the things we were told was that you're going to see an influx of a lot of narcotics you hadn’t traditionally seen in this area for a while,” said Major Jim Buck, who runs the KCPD Special Investigations unit. “The biggest one being cocaine.”
He told the Jackson County Legislature that last year KCPD saw a 200% spike in cocaine seizures. As the first World Cup match approaches later this month, interdictions have ramped up.
“We've even had a seizure in the last three months of almost 400 pounds of cocaine that was heading to the Kansas City area,” he said.
KCPD said it couldn’t release any additional information on that bust.
“The large seizure is still part of an ongoing investigation, so those details aren’t available,” spokesman Sgt. Phil DiMartino told KCUR in an email.
Buck was testifying in favor of a $3.9 million grant from the county’s COMBAT fund, the anticrime program paid for by a countywide quarter-cent sales tax. Much of that money pays for KCPD’s Special Investigations unit.
The department doesn’t know why cocaine comes with the World Cup, and KCPD isn’t doing anything differently to monitor drug activity.
“It was through normal investigative methods we are seeing the increase,” DiMartino said.
Why the increase in cocaine cases?
Cocaine production, seizures and use have all been increasing. The United Nations 2025 World Drug Report notes that 2023 was a record-breaking year for the global cocaine market. The number of cocaine users jumped from an estimated 17 million in 2013 to 25 million in 2023, the report said.
A study in England found that drug use, especially cocaine and ketamine, “significantly increases” during World Cup games and during the Eurovision song contest.
Cultivation of coca, the plant used to make cocaine, fell dramatically between 2000 and 2015, according to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
But researchers said two policy changes have led to a “rapid resurgence in coca cultivation” since then. The Colombian government stopped a U.S.-backed fumigation program and instead signed a peace deal with FARC, the guerrilla group that tightly controls coca production.
The consequences of those actions have now landed on area law enforcement. KCPD says it’s working with “state and federal partners to identify patterns and trends,” DiMartino told KCUR.
