Raids trendy bars to seize cocaine essentially (7)
I believe the answer is:
inroads
'raids' is the definition.
(I've seen this before)
'trendy bars to seize cocaine essentially' is the wordplay.
'trendy' becomes 'in'.
'bars' becomes 'rods' (I can't explain this - if you can you should give a lot more credence to this answer).
'to seize' means one lot of letters goes inside another.
'essentially' says to take the centre.
The centre of 'cocaine' is 'a'.
'rods' placed around 'a' is 'roads'.
'in'+'roads'='INROADS'
Can you help me to learn more?
(Other definitions for inroads that I've seen before include "advances" , "Hostile attacks" , "Sad iron (anag.)" , "raid" , "Hostile incursions" .)