Italy has extensive opioid use, established illicit drug markets and criminal organizations capable of moving substances across continents, yet fentanyl remains remarkably scarce. Theories range from mafia groups protecting established cocaine and heroin markets to simple differences in demand, while a recent hospital theft of 80 vials raises new questions about how long that absence can last.
A recent article in The Economist opens with this reference: in The Godfather, Don Vito Corleone refuses to get into the heroin business. Not because he doubts it could make him money, but because he considers it “a dirty business,” one capable of jeopardizing his political relationships and the empire he has already built.
The outlet draws a comparison between the fiction and a very real-world anomaly. While fentanyl has radically altered the illicit opioid market in North America and remains a concern in Europe, it appears to have a surprisingly limited presence in Italy.
The numbers paint a very different picture from the reality on U.S. streets, for example, where as many as 70,000 deaths caused by the drug were recorded at the height of the crisis. In Italy, one theory offers an explanation that is as uncomfortable as it is difficult to prove: perhaps Italian mafia organizations have something to do with it.
Not because the bosses have discovered moral limits to drug trafficking. History shows exactly the opposite. The hypothesis is much more mundane. Fentanyl may simply be too dangerous for the businesses they already have.
It’s a theory. And for now, it remains just that, but there are enough oddities surrounding the Italian case for investigators, prosecutors and organized crime specialists to have begun asking why one of the most profitable and easiest-to-transport substances on the illicit market barely appears in a country whose criminal groups have been moving …
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Author: Camila Berriex / High Times
