The mafia held no drug-market monopoly before the late 1960s

Evidence

Although once, in 1952, a firm in Turin was convicted of reselling morphine legally acquired for pharmaceutical purposes, drugs were otherwise purchased directly from producing countries, mostly in the Middle East—Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and so on. Until the late 1960s the Italian marker was virtually nonexistent, except for limited quantities of cocaine consumed chiefly in Milan, imported by dealers from South America—where most cocaine comes from—and distributed by Milanese, Neapolitans, and Sicilians, among others. No one had a monopoly, and the mafia played no outstanding role (CPM: 1022, 1520, 1607). — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 630

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Gambetta’s broader thesis that mafia specializes in protection, not commodity markets — here the drug trade pre-1970s was a competitive market without mafia dominance, complicating the private-protection-cartel fit.