The Mafia Is Not Keeping Fentanyl Out of Europe, a Scholar Argues

The Conversation has published an essay arguing that the theory Italian mafia groups are choosing to keep fentanyl out of Europe does not fit what is known about drug markets or organised crime. The essay is an opinion piece, not a report of a new event, and La Veduta treats it as an argument to be examined rather than a development to be announced. Its author points to the gap in the numbers: fentanyl and its derivatives were linked to around 210 drug-induced deaths across 16 reporting countries in 2024, against roughly 38,000 of about 70,000 US overdose deaths in 2025 involving fentanyl and other synthetic opioids, according to the CDC.

The essay cites Italy's government report on addiction, which counted only five fentanyl-related deaths in 2025. It attributes Europe's comparatively low figures to the absence of an American-style prescription opioid wave: painkillers were prescribed far more cautiously in Europe, so there was no large population cut off from a legal supply and looking for a substitute. Heroin, the essay notes, never went away and remains Europe's most commonly used illicit opioid, per the EU Drugs Agency, with most of it historically coming from Afghanistan through the Balkans.

The argument matters in Sicily because the island has long been read abroad through the grammar of the mafia, and a story in which the mafia declines a profitable drug is flattering in a way that should invite suspicion. The essay's point is that restraint is being credited where the market simply did not ask. If that is right, the credit belongs to European prescribing practice and a stable heroin trade, not to a decision taken in a room.

The essay's account of the American crisis is a story of legal channels: from the late 1990s, aggressively marketed prescription painkillers such as OxyContin were handed out widely with their addictive potential played down, and millions developed dependence through entirely legal means. When access tightened in the 2010s, the essay says, that dependence moved to the illicit market — first heroin, then fentanyl, which is cheap to make, easy to smuggle and potent enough that tiny amounts go far. Trafficking groups already supplying heroin to the US added a product to their range.

That sequence is the heart of the argument, and it is a caution against reading European outcomes as the product of European virtue or European criminal strategy. A market with no established demand does not need a cartel to keep a product out. The essay also notes that nitazenes, another class of potent synthetic opioids, have driven recent peaks in deaths in several countries, which complicates any tidy story of Europe being spared.

The Conversation piece is careful about what it claims. It does not say fentanyl is absent from Europe, only that the death toll is of a different order and that the mafia explanation is unsupported. It also flags that part of the recent rise in the 16-country figures may involve medicines rather than illicitly made fentanyl — a distinction that matters for policy, since a pharmaceutical pathway calls for prescribing rules, not border crackdowns.

For the anti-mafia institutions that foreign correspondents still come to Sicily to write about, the essay offers an uncomfortable kind of relief. It suggests that the island's organised crime is not a benevolent gatekeeper of the European opioid market, which is not the same as saying it is absent from the drug trade. It is simply that the specific claim — that the mafia is holding fentanyl back — does not survive contact with the demand figures. The essay's conclusion is that the real explanation is less cinematic, and that is usually the more useful one.