Recently an Instagram account messaged me, “We were wondering if you would be interested in traveling with our products.” Meanwhile, on X, posts related to psychedelics are regularly infiltrated by bots directing traffic to dealers. “Virtually all psychedelic posts[s] “Bots selling microdoses follow suit,” said leading psychedelics researcher Matthew Johnson. Posted on X in December“All my blocking and spam reporting seems to have been in vain.” One account recently replied to one of my posts, which linked to the profile of their apparent boss: “He has all the psych drugs and acid.”
Some dealers lurking on social media are even more suspicious. Drug Information Organization Pill Report It has been told People are sending cash to dealers and are being cheated even though nothing has been sent to them. When one such person interviewed by WIRED sent money for cannabis through a cash transfer app but received nothing in the mail, he reported the account. “It turned into a threatening match and they sent pictures of thugs with guns and said they were going to come for me,” he says.
in a vice documentary On drug sales on social media, it took only five minutes for the host to connect with a dealer in London. Another dealer told the journalist, “Anyone can sell these days.” “You see little kids, 12-year-olds and everything in between setting up accounts. It's easy, right? You can create an account and earn money sitting at home. Who doesn't want to do that?” As part of a separate research project, a 15-year-old Was able to locate a sales account Xanax tablets on Instagram in mere seconds.
Access to Telegram's drug markets is somewhat complicated for the average person, but they are still much easier to access than the dark net. “The problem with dark-net markets is that you need to install Tor, get PGP, and have cryptocurrency,” says Francois Lamy, an associate professor at Thailand's Mahidol University who researches the sociology of drug use. “It's a little more difficult to navigate. With Telegram, you type in a few keywords, and you're there. You can have 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 Telegram user policy was introduced To “discourage criminals” and hand over the data of users who have been accused of illegal behavior on the platform by authorities with search warrants. “99.999 percent of Telegram users have nothing to do with crime, but the 0.001 percent involved in illegal activities create a bad image for the entire platform, putting the interests of our nearly billion users at risk,” Durov said in a statement at the time. Let's go.” ,
But experts warn that any increased enforcement on Telegram will cause dealers to go elsewhere, disrupting a market that has largely established itself as a safe source of drugs. “If one supply route is closed off by enforcement, another route is quickly found to take its place,” says Steve Rolls, senior policy analyst at the Transform Drug Policy Foundation, a UK-based NGO. “Somewhat ironically, enforcement has actually accelerated these innovations – and led to the development of more sophisticated sales models. The only way to defeat such markets in the long term is to replace them through legal regulation.