‘What if you live on top of a bakery and you like cakes?’—Drug use and harm trajectories before, during and after the emergence of Silk Road

Abstract

Background

Cryptomarkets are digital platforms that use anonymising software (e.g. Tor) and cryptocurrencies (e.g. Bitcoin) to facilitate peer-to-peer (P2P) trade of goods and services. Their emergence has facilitated access to a wide range of high-quality psychoactive substances, according to surveys of users. In this paper, we ask the question ‘How does changing access to drugs through cryptomarkets affect the drug use and harm trajectories of their users?’

Methods

We conducted a digital ethnography spanning 2012–2014, a period that included the seizure of the original Silk Road marketplace and forum by law enforcement. Using encrypted online chat, we interviewed 17 people who reported using Silk Road to purchase illicit drugs. The interviews were in-depth and unstructured, and also involved the use of life history timelines to trace trajectories. Transcripts were analysed thematically using NVivo.

Results

For some, Silk Road facilitated initiation into drug use or a return to drug use after cessation. Typically, participants reported experiencing a glut of drug consumption in their first months using Silk Road, described by one participant as akin to ‘kids in a candy store’. There was evidence that very high availability reduced the need for drug hoarding which helped some respondents to moderate use and feel more in control of purchases made online. Cryptomarket access also appeared to affect solitary and social drug users differently. Most participants described using other cryptomarkets after the closure of Silk Road, albeit with less confidence.

Conclusion

In the context of high levels of drug access, supply and diversity occurring within a community regulated environment online, the impacts of cryptomarkets upon drug use trajectories are complex, often posing new challenges for self-control, yet not always leading to harmful outcomes. A major policy challenge is how to provide support for harm reduction in these highly volatile settings.

Introduction

Cryptomarkets are digital platforms that use anonymising software (e.g. Tor) and cryptocurrencies (e.g. Bitcoin) to facilitate peer-to-peer (P2P) trade of goods and services. Their emergence has facilitated access to a wide range of psychoactive substances, according to marketplace analyses (Aldridge and Décary-Hétu, 2014, Christin, 2013, Martin, 2014) using digital trace methodology (Décary-Hétu & Aldridge, 2015) and surveys of users (Barratt, Ferris, & Winstock, 2014). As they have increased in popularity and visibility, it has become more important to understand how drug-using and drug-buying practices may have evolved in response to cryptomarkets. Without knowing more about how people who buy drugs from cryptomarkets are affected, we cannot fully assess the potential harms and/or benefits of cryptomarkets. The interviewee quotation forming the title of this paper—“What if you live on top of a bakery and you like cakes?”—leads us to question how the specific nature of drug access associated with the emergence of cryptomarkets may prompt different kinds of relationships towards drugs that are now more easily available.

According to Martin, cryptomarkets are “online forum(s) where goods and services are exchanged between parties who use digital encryption to conceal their identities”, distinguishable from drug vendors operating in the ‘clear’ or ‘surface’ web through their use of: the Tor network (see below), third party hosting, vendor and buyer rating systems, decentralised exchange networks, and cryptocurrencies (Martin, 2014, p. 2–3). They are hosted in the dark net or dark web, a part of the internet that is not indexed by conventional search engines and is only accessed by specialised browsers. In contrast, the clear or surface web may be defined as all content accessible via search engines using a normal browser. Cryptomarkets and other sites in the dark net must be accessed using Tor or similar browsers. This anonymization software makes it very difficult to track the identities and locations of network users (Dingledine, Mathewson, & Syverson, 2004). Silk Road, the original cryptomarket that ran from 2011 to 2013, not only operated as a place to trade drugs, but through its associated discussion forums, an active online community formed where the often stigmatised topic of drug use was openly discussed and the values of cyber-libertarianism were espoused (Maddox, Barratt, Allen, & Lenton, 2016).

A review of the literature surrounding the effect of changes in drug availability upon the trajectories of drug use and harm is valuable for assessing the cryptomarket phenomenon from a public health perspective. The influence of availability of substances upon population prevalence of use and harm has been a topic of much scholarship, particularly among epidemiologists studying alcohol (Liang and Chikritzhs, 2011, Livingston, 2014, Stockwell and Gruenewald, 2004) and increasingly the supply of cannabis through medical cannabis dispensaries (Freisthler & Gruenewald, 2014). Understanding the consequences of sudden reductions in drug availability, for example, after law enforcement efforts result in market disruption or displacement, is the goal of the ‘hot-spot’ literature (Kerr, Small, & Wood, 2005). Furthermore, analysts concerned with modelling changes to drug policies, for example, the evaluation of cannabis policy reforms involving moving to a decriminalised or regulated supply model, have discussed theories of availability and its relationship to prevalence (Shanahan & Ritter, 2014).

While area-level analyses demonstrate that increased density of outlets (physical availability) predicts increased substance use and related harms (e.g., alcohol-related assaults, Livingston, 2008) after statistically controlling for a variety of confounding factors, it is not clear what the mechanisms of action actually are (Gruenewald, 2008, Livingston, 2013). The relationship between availability and subsequent substance related harm is complex and multifaceted. Another important consideration is that associations between variables at the area level do not necessarily predict associations at the individual level (the ecological fallacy). Indeed, this methodological problem has led some to argue that “[p]urely aggregate-level studies examining total outlet density only should be abandoned” (Gmel, Holmes, & Studer, 2015, early view). While we are also interested in the implications of cryptomarkets at the population level, this paper is primarily concerned with describing and understanding the diversity of drug trajectories of individuals exposed to situations of sudden high availability of a wider variety of better-quality illicit drugs. Such individual diversity may be cancelled out in area-level studies.

Abbey, Scott, and Smith (1993) found that levels of social and subjective availability of alcohol (measured at the individual level) predicted alcohol consumption whereas physical availability (measured at the local level) did not. They explain the concept of subjective availability using this example:

[A]n urban resident may live very close to an alcohol outlet, but be afraid to walk through her neighborhood alone. In this case, alcohol is physically but not subjectively available. In contrast, a rural resident may live a long distance from an alcohol outlet, but the distance he has to travel to obtain alcohol may be no greater than the distance he has to travel to obtain groceries and gasoline. In this case, alcohol is subjectively but not physically available” (p. 490).

It was also noted by Babor and colleagues, in their recognition of the importance of availability for understanding patterns of drug use, that it refers “not only to the supply of drugs (physical availability), but also to their cost (economic availability), their attractiveness (psychological availability), and their social acceptance within the user's primary reference groups (social availability)” (Babor et al., 2010, p. 18).

Applying these types of availability to cryptomarkets, we may posit that those who have the necessary technical skills and cultural understandings to operate successfully in the dark net setting—that is, they have set up a system that is easy for them and that they trust—will experience higher levels of subjective availability, compared with cryptomarket users who are unfamiliar with the environment. Although it may appear that both technically familiar and unfamiliar populations with the same access to information technology and connectivity have the same potential to access cryptomarkets, their perceptions of ease of availability may differ. Furthermore, for those who live in areas where drugs are relatively more expensive to access in person, use of cryptomarkets may increase economic as well as physical availability, even more so if the cryptomarket user buys in bulk and sells enough to cover their own usage costs. Social availability is also important, because for those people who live within social and cultural milieux where drug use is not generally acceptable, access to and connection with the online communities associated with cryptomarkets may increase the social availability and acceptance of their use within that setting.

In this paper we are interested in understanding how the emergence of the first cryptomarket, Silk Road, affected the drug use and harm trajectories of its users. Using qualitative methods, we describe these trajectories before, during and after its emergence.