Illicit markets on the darknet: buying drugs by mouse click

Ms. Tzanetakis, how do you conduct research on markets that operate in secret?

In simple terms, I conduct field research – or digital ethnography, in technical jargon – on the internet. On various platforms, we observe how dealers, buyers, and platform operators present themselves, and the way they interact or compete with one another.

We can also collect and analyze a great deal of data on supply and demand, types of drugs, feedback, and prices using web scraping, a method for extracting large amounts of data from websites. This enables us to track trade volumes, shipping destinations, drug quality, and consumer satisfaction. These market data make what we call the “dark field” of drugs a little more accessible.

How does that work? Did you create fake accounts?

There is no need for that, because we're operating in more or less public digital spaces. The darknet is not illegal per se, as people often assume. Research tells us that around 50 percent of its content is legal. Drug trafficking in the hidden part of the web amounts to around four percent of the overall content. Hence, the difficult thing is not so much gaining access to illegal online markets. It only gets difficult when you actually want to engage in drug deals.

How has digitalization changed drug trafficking?

Illicit drug trafficking benefits from new digital technologies, which have also fundamentally changed legal trade. By shifting to the internet, the drug trade follows the market rationales of the platform economy, because it is a lucrative business. What has changed is the way a rising number of young dealers and younger consumers communicate. Dealers organize sales and payments through encrypted messenger services, social media, and digital payment systems such as cryptocurrencies.

This can result in conflicts and fraud, just as we see on legal platforms, when ordered goods do not arrive, are delayed, or are unsatisfactory in quality. There are several options to deal with this, because platform operators, sellers, and customers all want to protect themselves. Ultimately, a system needs to work. If the technology is not user-friendly, it will not be used. Which is something we also know from our daily lives.

Are you saying that digital drug platforms work in a similar way to Amazon or eBay?

Drug platforms on the darknet are quite comparable to commercial digital markets. They involve rating systems, marketing, and discussion forums. These elements are essential for illegal online trade in order to build trust between individuals who will probably never meet. Products are rarely sold without leaving a rating. Some purchases are also linked to feedback systems. Potential customers derive guidance from such feedback.

What role do algorithms and artificial intelligence play?

They are used, for instance, to optimize search results or determine exactly what content is visible. We have also discovered that platform operators occupy a special position. Not unlike large platforms such as Google, Amazon, or Microsoft, they collect user and behavioral data in order to exploit them economically. By commercializing the illegal status of drugs, they generate additional value.

The United Nations speaks of a “dramatic” increase in cocaine consumption in Europe. Do you detect a correlation with the growth of digital markets?

One might be tempted to think that there is a connection. After all, digitalization makes it possible to buy drugs without any restrictions of time or place. But this is not corroborated by the numbers. What we do see is a concentration of drug markets on the darknet in five countries worldwide. These are the US, the UK, Australia, Germany, and the Netherlands. This begs the question:  why only in these rich Western industrialized countries and not in countries of the Global South?

Why is the trade concentrated in the West?

Drug trafficking is a lucrative business, but there is a wide gap between affluent customers in Western industrialized countries and the poor population in countries of the Global South. To secure their livelihood, small farmers there are willing to grow coca plants if it earns them ten times more than growing coffee. As a result, more cocaine is produced in the grower countries and shipped to Europe in high quality. In the case of Venezuela, it must be said that it is a transit country and not even a very relevant one. Research shows that illegal markets are very dynamic and shift their business as a function of need.

How do policy-makers respond to developments in the illegal drug trade?

Mainly with conventional methods, addressing individual issues. For example, cocaine consignments have been successfully seized at major ports, but drug trafficking has shifted to new routes and locations. Where there used to be fewer and less well known routes, there are now just too many to keep under control. The global supply chain is not being disrupted, just scattered, with unintended consequences.

The situation is similar on the darknet: if platforms are shut down, dealers simply switch to others – after a short time, everything is back to how it was before and the problem is not solved, but has merely shifted. This makes the markets resilient, dynamic, and difficult to combat. It would be necessary to address the entire system and the framework conditions, but too little is being done in this respect. It has been proven that drug policies based on criminalization do not solve the problem, but are instead a part of it. Illegal economies cannot function without legal infrastructures.

Can your research help to develop counterstrategies?

In my current project, I am pursuing various aspects. One aspect is on health consequences of drug use and my focus is on harm mitigation, which is a very important approach. We are also working with checkit!, an information and counselling center on the subject of recreational drug use in Vienna. Since drug users never know what the drugs contain, impurities and high concentrations of active ingredients can easily lead to overdoses and deaths. Prohibition has led to the spread of highly potent synthetic drugs such as fentanyl and nitazene, which have produced the opioid crisis in the US. The primary goal here is not to reduce consumption, but to reduce deaths and damage to health.

In cooperation with the European Union Drug Agency, I am also investigating the role of darknet markets in the distribution of these substances and which countries are supplying them. Afghanistan, which had supplied over 90 percent of the world's opioids, banned opium cultivation in 2022. This will skew the market, and there are fears that Europe is facing an epidemic, which we already observe in the Baltic countries. Our research enables us to provide decision-makers with an important basis for prevention campaigns and possible interventions.

About the researcher

Meropi Tzanetakis conducts research at the Institute for Sociology and Empirical Social Research at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. Currently, she is the principal investigator of the project “A socio-technical framework for online drug markets,” funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF under its Elise Richter funding stream. The project builds on her FWF Schrödinger Fellowship at the universities of Essex, Oslo, and Vienna. From 2022 to 2025, Tzanetakis was Assistant Professor of Digital Criminology at the University of Manchester.

Her research focuses on illegal digital markets and the way they are embedded in society and the economy. Tzanetakis' latest book, co-authored with Nigel South, “Digital Transformations of Illicit Drug Markets,” was published by Emerald Publishing in 2023.