Tomorrowland's opening weekend of 2026 (17-19 July, at Tomorrowland's De Schorre site in Boom) drew hundreds of thousands of ravers, and with them, the festival's now-annual drug enforcement operation. Belgian police report 38 arrests, 192 people fined for personal possession, and just over 48,000 euros collected in on-the-spot settlements, according to the Antwerp public prosecutor's office and VRT NWS.

What actually happened over the weekend?

Of the 38 people arrested, 21 were held judicially and 17 administratively, the latter mostly for public drunkenness and disorder. Thirteen were accused of dealing, pulled from a genuinely international cross-section of the crowd: dealers came from Australia, France, China (two arrests), North Macedonia (three, including one person picked up twice in the same weekend), the Netherlands, Japan, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Separately, 192 festival-goers were caught carrying user-level quantities. Rather than face judicial proceedings, they were offered immediate out-of-court settlements, which they paid on the spot, for a combined 48,150 euros. Every one of them lost their festival wristband and was walked off the grounds. Police also flagged 34 theft suspects, arrested six for pickpocketing (targeting watches, handbags and wallets), logged 107 traffic and parking violations, towed 7 vehicles, impounded 8 unlicensed taxis, and seized 4 drones flown without authorization over the site.

What did the drug-testing lab actually find?

The more interesting number sits underneath the arrest count. Belgium runs a mobile forensic lab on major festival sites, and this weekend it registered 471 seized samples and screened 358 of them. Eighty-one percent came back containing an actual controlled substance; MDMA, cocaine and ketamine were, once again, the three most common finds, and 15 percent of the people caught were carrying more than one type of drug at once.

The detail worth sitting with is that the lab results didn't always line up with what people told police they'd bought. "This may mean that users do not fully know what they're buying, or that dealers are selling the wrong products," said Kato Belmans of the Antwerp Public Prosecutor's Office. Twenty separate reports of unusually high-dose MDMA tablets were flagged to Sciensano, Belgium's public health institute, which issues public alerts when a dangerous batch is circulating.

"This may mean that users do not fully know what they're buying, or that dealers are selling the wrong products.", Kato Belmans, Antwerp Public Prosecutor's Office

How does this compare to previous years?

The headline numbers are up on 2025's first weekend, but not by much: 180 people caught with drugs a year ago against 192 now, 9 dealers arrested against 13, and 45,900 euros in fines against this year's 48,150. Belgian and Dutch coverage of the operation both frame it as a "relatively calm" weekend by Tomorrowland's own standards, which says as much about how large this enforcement machine has become as it does about the crowd's behaviour.

The 13 people arrested for dealing were directly summoned to appear at a dedicated Tomorrowland court session in Antwerp on 25 November 2026, a fixture the local justice system now schedules every year to clear the caseload the festival generates.