The Korea Customs Service will establish a "Narcotics Information Center" to integrate and manage information on drug offenders, pharmaceutical prescriptions, travelers, and cargo, and will introduce an enforcement system to preemptively block drug inflows at the border stage. The plan is to analyze and use information that has been managed separately by route in one place to fundamentally shut down all types of smuggling, including travelers, express cargo, and international mail.
On Dec. 5, the Korea Customs Service held a meeting of the "2025 Special Task Force on Drug Smuggling Countermeasures" and announced "comprehensive drug enforcement measures" containing these details. As of October this year, 1,032 cases and 2,913 kilograms of drugs were seized, a 384% surge by weight from a year earlier, marking an all-time high.
The core of the comprehensive measures is the integration and refinement of narcotics information. The newly built "Narcotics Information Center" will collect and integrate various data, adding to existing information held by the Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Supreme Prosecutors' Office, and Ministry of Science and ICT, including the Ministry of National Defense's information on military drug offenders, the Ministery of Food and Drug Safety's information on excessive prescribers of controlled substances, passenger name records (PNR) from European Union (EU) airlines, and information on the manufacture of precursor chemicals.
The key is to bundle into one the information systems that have so far been managed separately by route—travelers, express, and mail—so as to analyze risk comprehensively and to standardize selection criteria for high-risk travelers and cargo.
Enforcement will also be strengthened by route of entry. Simultaneous inspections conducted immediately upon aircraft landing will be expanded to all terminals at Incheon Airport, and the legal basis will be updated to allow body searches when drug concealment is suspected.
For express and international mail, dedicated entry lanes will be established and an intensive reading system will be introduced to secure at least seven seconds for X-ray interpretation. For container cargo, a second-stage inspection will be added, and "NICE teams (dedicated drug special inspection teams)" will be deployed at Busan, Incheon, and Pyeongtaek ports to intensively analyze high-risk cargo. A dual first- and second-stage reading system using artificial intelligence (AI) X-ray will also be introduced to create a framework for cross-verification by personnel and AI.
International cooperation will also be greatly expanded. Joint crackdowns, previously conducted with five countries—Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, the United States, and the Netherlands—will be carried out with a total of 10 countries next year with the addition of Cambodia, Laos, Germany, Canada, and France. A so-called "Korean desk for narcotics" will be established to simultaneously select high-risk cargo and travelers at the country of departure and Korea's border. "Two-way enforcement," which blocks at the source by providing information on overseas suppliers to the sending country's agency, will also be strengthened.
The Korea Customs Service plans to gradually expand enforcement infrastructure, including millimeter-wave scanners, AI X-ray, a dedicated narcotics analysis center, and expanded training of detection dogs, and to run a public campaign that shares year-round enforcement activities in a story format.