Drug dealers have taken to social media

“We were wondering if you would be interested in taking a trip with our products,” one Instagram account recently messaged me. Meanwhile, on X, drug-related posts are regularly hacked by bots that direct traffic to dealers. “Almost all psychedelic posts are followed by bots selling microdoses,” said Matthew Johnson, a leading psychedelic researcher. It was published on X in December. “All the blocking and spam reporting seems useless.” One account recently responded to one of my posts, with a link to their virtual boss’s profile: “He’s got all the meds and psychoacids.”

Some traders lurking on social media are more suspicious. Drug Information Organization Pill Report He said From people transferring cash to merchants and getting scammed, without sending them anything. When one person WIRED interviewed sent money to buy cannabis through a money transfer app, but didn’t receive anything in the mail, he reported the account. “It became a threatening match, and they sent pictures of armed thugs saying they would come for me,” he says.

In vice documentary On drug sales on social media, it took the host just five minutes to contact a dealer in London. “Anyone can sell these days,” another trader told the reporter. “You see kids as young as 12 years old and everything creating accounts. It’s easy, right? You can sit at home, create an account, and make money. Who doesn’t want to do that?” As part of a separate research project, he is 15 years old Enables you to locate the selling account Xanax pills in seconds on Instagram.

Telegram’s drug markets are still fairly complex for the average person, but they are still much easier to access than those on the Dark Web. “The problem with dark web markets is that you need to install Tor, get PGP, and get cryptocurrencies,” says François Lamy, an associate professor at Mahidol University in Thailand, who researches the sociology of drug use. “It’s a little harder to navigate. With Telegram, you can type in some keywords, and that’s what you do. You can find everything.”

When Telegram founder Pavel Durov was arrested outside Paris in August, prosecutors cited the scale of drug trafficking on the platform as part of the justification. Next month, a new user policy for Telegram will be launched It was submitted To “discourage criminals” and hand over data of users accused of illegal behavior on the platform by authorities under search warrants. “While 99.999 percent of Telegram users have nothing to do with crime, the 0.001 percent involved in illegal activities create a bad image for the entire platform, endangering the interests of our nearly one billion users,” Durov said in a statement at the time. .

But experts warn that any surge in Telegram enforcement will simply cause dealers to move elsewhere, disrupting a market that has largely established itself as a safer source of drugs. “If one supply route is closed by enforcement, another is quickly found to take its place,” says Steve Rolls, senior policy analyst at Transform Drug Policy, a UK-based NGO. “Somewhat ironically, implementation has actually accelerated these innovations – leading to the development of ever more sophisticated sales models. The only way such markets can be defeated in the long term is to replace them through legal regulation.”