PRESS RELEASE 

ARIEN Final Workshop highlights innovation and cooperation against illicit drug trafficking 

Palermo, Italy – 23 September 2026 

The ARIEN project brought its research, operational experience and technological developments together in Palermo for its Final Workshop, “Strengthening the Effective Fight Against Illicit Drug Production and Trafficking”, hosted by the Polizia di Stato. 

The event marked a key moment in the final phase of the Horizon Europe project, offering an opportunity to review the main achievements of ARIEN and discuss how research and advanced technologies can contribute to the fight against increasingly complex drug-related crime. The workshop brought together practitioners, policymakers, researchers and Law Enforcement Authorities, with a particular focus on project results, policy recommendations, sustainability and the future exploitation of the solutions developed in LEAs in the investigation, detection and disruption of illicit drug production and trafficking.

The Palermo programme combined the European strategic perspective with concrete operational challenges. Following the opening session and an overview of ARIEN, conversation turned to the EMPACT (European Multidisciplinary Platform Against Criminal Threats) Drugs Trafficking priorities.  The programme then moved to concrete operational challenges, with a real case addressing synthetic cannabinoids in Eastern Sicily and a presentation of the NARCOSIS (Non-tArgeted foRensic multidisCiplinary platfOrm for inveStigation of drug-related fatalitieS) project. The morning concluded with a session dedicated to the societal impact of drug trafficking providing a basis for discussion on policy recommendations and priorities for strengthening the European response to evolving drug-related threats.strengthening the European response to evolving drug-related threats.  

A central part of the afternoon was dedicated to the ARIEN Demo Session, where consortium partners presented the project’s technological framework and showed how AI-supported tools can assist investigative activities. ARIEN combines source monitoring, multimodal data analysis, knowledge-graph technologies and collaborative investigation workflows to support the analysis of online drug markets, emerging trends, suspicious financial transactions and other forms of intelligence relevant to drug-related investigations.  

The workshop concluded with a forward-looking discussion on exploitation, sustainability and the further evolution of ARIEN results, reflecting on how the project’s knowledge, tools and approaches could continue to support future research, cross-border and cross-institutional cooperation and operational practice beyond the funded project period.  

The Final Workshop therefore represented not only an opportunity to present what ARIEN has achieved, but also a moment to connect technological development with operational needs and to strengthen dialogue among the different communities involved in the fight against illicit drug trafficking. 

As ARIEN approaches the end of its 36-month journey, the Palermo event highlighted one of the project’s core messages: addressing a rapidly evolving and increasingly interconnected criminal landscape requires better intelligence, stronger investigative capabilities, deeper knowledge of emerging threats and effective international cooperation to jointly address these challenges through a coherent and coordinated European approach to detecting, investigating and disrupting illicit drug production and trafficking.

ENDS