The evolution of the drug market in Sardinia: Investigating legal judgements as social facts

The affirmation of illicit activities linked to the production and trafficking of drugs at the local, national, and international levels represents the most significant change in Sardinian crime over the last 20 years. The various legal judgements issued by the Italian judiciary are bringing to light the existence of minimal and poorly articulated structures, as well as more locally rooted organisations with precise hierarchies regarding the tasks, actors involved, and roles performed. These new trends profoundly affect Sardinian crime, which is traditionally characterised by violent phenomena, such as murders, kidnappings, robberies, and intimidating attacks. How is illicit drug trafficking becoming structured in Sardinia? In order to answer this question, we resorted to legal judgements as a means to analyse criminal behaviour, by considering them as concrete ‘social facts’ in the sense attributed by Émile Durkheim in 1895 (1982). Legal judgements were described and analysed as ‘things’ with the aim of identifying the social causes of facts. From a sociological point of view, the legal judgements offer interesting insights into the social identity of the defendants, on the trafficking networks and on the roles played by the offenders. In this article, we analyse 36 legal judgements issued by the Court of Cagliari regarding the national and international trafficking of narcotic substances between 2014 and 2018. In particular, we highlight the criminal networks, movements and ‘discrepant roles’ as theorized by Goffman, (1956) of drug trafficking actors with the aim of highlighting how the intertwining of new forms of organised crime and historical peculiarities of local criminality is taking root in Sardinia.