What is the future of illicit drug profiling in Switzerland? Condemned to disappear or forgotten treasure (2022)

Illicit drug profiling bears a long history. Developments in the field from mid-90s have led to several international profiling programs. Several countries have put their efforts to develop and implement the routine use of illicit drug profiling in the investigation and prosecution of illicit drug-related crimes. For more than 20 years, the School of Criminal Sciences (ESC) at the University of Lausanne has, through its illicit drug expertise laboratory, played a main role in promoting the use of illicit drug profiling. In Switzerland, there is no national illicit drug profiling practice and the ESC laboratory is the only one offering such service. However, only a limited number of Swiss jurisdictions send regularly all or part of their seized specimens for analysis to the ESC laboratory. Profiling results are furnished to investigators and prosecutors regardless if they have been requested or not and are stored in a database with limited contextual information with no further data treatment. In 2020, the interruption of a project intended to develop and implement an intercantonal database gathering traditional police data, forensic data (e.g., DNA, fingerprints, etc.), and physical and chemical links, to produce intelligence and support investigation, led to the fundamental question: Is illicit drug profiling in Switzerland condemned to disappear or is it a forgotten treasure, a neglected approach that deserves to be revalued? This paper reports the Swiss situation regarding illicit drug profiling practices and discusses some factors that are thought to impact its use in day-to-day work.