Drug murders in France: how organised crime moves in and ruins communities

France has reached what has been called a “turning point” in its relationship with drugs cartels after Medhi Kessaci the innocent 20-year-old brother of anti-drug activist Amine Kessaci was shot dead in Marseille last November.

The murder was taken as a warning to Amine, who had lost another brother five years earlier. Brahim had been found burnt in a car, a casualty of internal drug rivalries and business. Amine has since been very outspoken about the need to understand what is happening in Marseille and in France.

But he continues to risk his life by being outspoken. He was recently evacuated from a meeting in Aix en Provence, after a threat was made on his life.

Between 2023 and 2024, 73 people were murdered in Marseille in crimes related to the drugs business. Many of them were young people freshly recruited on the internet to make easy money by selling drugs. Similar drug-related murders have taken place in Grenoble, Paris, Nimes, Montpellier, Nice and Lyon.

Experts and commentators have invented labels such as “narcobanditism”, “narcomurder”, “narcoterrorism”, “narcostate” and “narcocracy” to try to explain what is happening in France.

Marseille is emblematic of a state’s failure to understand how drug networks function, and their relationship with local communities and drug consumers. Although the current drug group dominating in France at the moment uses the term mafia in its name (Mafia DZ), it is still different from the mafia-type associations that have developed in Italy.

These waves of drug-related crime reflect the contemporary cosmopolitan and capitalist cities that our society, governments, value systems and economic systems have created. These are places where the welfare state, with its sense of belonging and collectivity, has been downgraded in favour of individualism, money, technology and bureaucracy.

Organised crime groups in their different forms, whether local drug lines, more sophisticated drug networks or traditional mafias, do not appear out of nowhere overnight. They do not become embedded in local communities against citizens’ will. They don’t develop links with local politicians and professionals for no apparent reason. These crime groups fill the gaps that the state and society should occupy because they offer jobs, support and votes.

We know that criminal organisations take hold through two different mechanisms.

In Italy, the US, Colombia, Albania and Russia, mafia and cartel structures have developed during major state transformations. These periods of upheaval create space and even vacuums, which can be filled by other non-state organisations and structures. The classic example of this is the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when there was significant economic upheaval, rapid urbanisation and industrialisation, developing political institutions and changing social makeup. Another is Naples and Sicily during the 1860s, when Italy went from being a peninsula of kingdoms to a unified state.

In other cases, as has happened in the 20th century, the state has established itself but its capitalist structural conditions create the conditions for organised crime to thrive. Social, racial, educational and economic inequalities drive crime.

Political economist Susan Strange explained how the state’s authority has evaporated and how the markets now dictate terms. Communities are left with no safety net in the wake of the state’s retreat. Gangs seize on this vulnerability and propose an alternative model for young people. They offer instant and easy money to local people and enjoy visible respect in neighbourhoods where despair has become the daily background music. They dictate the law to their drug dealing employees and seek social consensus from the local community, which feels abandoned and has little option but to live with the violence.

This is not a French-only phenomenon – it is taking place in many liberal democratic systems where the welfare state is becoming a privatised, bureaucratic and technological state based on individualism and profit.

The French government has proposed new solutions such as police and judicial tools to tackle these drug groups. The French state has made some inroads in the past, but these groups just reorganise, often controlling operations from Dubai.

France hopes to learn from the Italian anti-mafia legislation of the 1990s. It is bringing in a new anti-organised crime directorate (PNACO), which includes 16 prosecutors who will tackle drug networks across France and Europe.

In addition, it wants to introduce a new state witness protection programme for former criminals to collaborate with the state to go with their new harsh prison conditions for drug bosses and laws on confiscation of assets.

It also wants to target the consumers and increase fines for drug possession and even take away people’s driving licences or jobs if they get caught with drugs.

But when states implement reactive and punitive measures of this kind, they aren’t dealing with the roots of the problem. As Amine Kessaci recently wrote in his book, ending drug trafficking isn’t just about combating the networks in Marseille. It’s about resisting a societal model that makes these networks desirable. It’s about promoting other values and offering an alternative to escape or downfall. It’s about giving the foot soldiers of the drugs trade a positive horizon other than a cell or a grave.

Felia Allum does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.