The Safe futures: Identifying promising approaches, opportunities and barriers for interventions designed to prevent youth recruitment and participation in European drug markets projects was launched in June 2025.1,2 It is a 2-year project that aims to identify effective ways to prevent young people’s involvement in European drug markets.

Project team

The project is a collaboration between the European Union Drugs Agency (EUDA) and the Research Evidence into Policy, Programmes and Practice (REPPP) team at the University of Limerick. Through its work, this team will bring together policy-makers, researchers, law enforcement agencies, and practitioners from across Europe to collaborate in a new multidisciplinary Community of Practice with the aim of sharing knowledge and research and of informing and designing future interventions in the field.

Policy context

The prevention of young people from becoming involved in drug markets is a priority for the European Commission and the EUDA. One of the actions (Priority 4, Action 12) of the European Commission’s EU Roadmap to Fight Drug Trafficking and Organised Crime focuses on preventing criminal networks from recruiting children and young people.3 Alongside this, Action 9 of the EU Drugs Action Plan 2021-2025 specifically seeks to reduce recidivism among young drug-related crime offenders.

A European conference on drug-related violence was held in November 2024. Discussions at the event underlined an urgent need for cross-sectoral collaboration in order to address drug-related violence and highlighted that targeted prevention mechanisms should include a focus on preventing young people and other at-risk groups from becoming involved in organised crime.

It is in this policy context that Safe futures has come about.

Project aims and objectives

The overall purpose of the Safe futures project is to enhance drug-related crime prevention efforts in Europe by: 1, 2

• evaluating existing models and strategies for preventing the involvement of young people in drug markets and drug-related crime
• supporting linked network-building activities
• identifying possible facilitators of and barriers to the implementation of programmes in this area.

The specific objectives of the project are to:

establish a multidisciplinary and jurisdictional Community of Practice in order to support and contribute to the project’s activities

• conduct a desk review of literature on interventions, initiatives, and evaluations
• identify and review existing examples of practices and interventions
• identify critical success factors of and barriers to the development and implementation of interventions
• develop a conceptual framework and model in order to inform the development and implementation of interventions.

The project outputs are expected to contribute to a better understanding of future research, policy, and developmental needs and to inform future investments in this area at national and European level.1

1    European Commission (2023) Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament and the Council on the EU roadmap to fight drug trafficking and organised crime. COM(2023) 641 final. Brussels: European Commission. Available from: https://www.drugsandalcohol.ie/39778/

2    European Union Drugs Agency (2025) Launch of ‘Safe futures’: a project tackling the recruitment of young people into drug markets. Available from: https://www.euda.europa.eu/news/2025/launch-safe-futures-project_en REPPP, University of Limerick (2025) Research Evidence into Policy, Programmes and Practice (REPPP) newsletter, (1). Limerick: University of Limerick. Available from: https://www.drugsandalcohol.ie/43641/