Editorial
Everything you always wanted to know about drug cryptomarkets* (*but were afraid to ask)

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2016.07.005Get rights and content

Introduction

For some drug policy scholars, including us, the online marketplace Silk Road and its successors are inherently fascinating. When we first discovered Silk Road in 2011, on opposite sides of the globe, we could not believe it was real: people were buying illegal drugs anonymously through a global marketplace that resembled eBay or Amazon. We were instantly hooked. Rather than addressing our fellow cryptomarket-obsessed colleagues who will no doubt already be devouring the 12 articles in the issue, we would like to address the remaining readership of the journal, who may not know much at all about cryptomarkets and may wonder what relevance cryptomarkets have to broader drug policy scholarship.

We believe that there are at least five reasons that the broader drug policy scholarly community should pay attention to drug cryptomarkets. First, cryptomarkets provide us with arguably the first opportunity to analyse the supply side of a drug market in its totality: not using small and often partial samples, but as a near complete population. Second, cryptomarkets are not isolated from broader drug markets: drugs flow into and out of cryptomarkets into broader social and commercial drug supply chains. Third, cryptomarkets provide a new way of monitoring emerging drug trends. Fourth, cryptomarkets offer an illustration of criminal innovation in drug supply as a response to law enforcement efforts. Fifth, cryptomarkets have become a location in which the needs and preferences of drug users are at least partially met: a wide repertoire of available drugs, information and advice, all within a community-based regulatory system that has more or less effectively bypassed state regulation. These marketplaces may therefore provide us with lessons we can usefully apply in a possible post-prohibition world.

In this editorial, we aim to demonstrate why the journal readers should care about cryptomarkets. What are cryptomarkets and how do they work? How do the papers in this special issue contribute to mapping the innovation of cryptomarkets? What are the novel methodological opportunities and ethical issues that arise in conducting these kinds of studies? And what can we say about the future of cryptomarkets?

Section snippets

Definitions and terms

In 2011, the first cryptomarket Silk Road was created by the audacious Dread Pirate Roberts. Its innovation was that it combined technologies used to hide internet user activities (i.e. Tor) and technologies that allowed individuals to make purchases with a digital, non-identity-carrying form of cash (i.e. Bitcoin). The marketplace flourished until seized by the FBI on 2 October, 2013. A little over a year later cryptomarkets were again hit by law enforcement agencies in Europe and the United

Mapping the innovations of cryptomarkets

How do cryptomarkets affect the types of drugs available for purchase and use? In this special issue, Aldridge and Décary-Hétu (2016b) use the number of customer feedback comments and/or ratings on drug listings as a proxy indicator for the number of transactions. This methodology enables them to provide estimated monthly revenue by drug type, finding that at least in the last month of operation of Silk Road 1, the highest revenue was from cannabis sales, followed by ecstasy/MDMA, stimulants,

Methodological innovations

Perhaps the most exciting methodological development for studying drug markets is showcased by the papers in the issue that collect so-called ‘digital traces’ (see Décary-Hétu & Aldridge, 2015) of actual drug selling activities. Three papers (Aldridge and Décary-Hétu, 2016b, Décary-Hétu et al., 2016, van Buskirk, Naicker et al., 2016) using this approach generate large datasets that provide us with unprecedented insight into drug selling activities because the data collected from these sites

Challenges of cryptomarket research

The application of these cutting-edge approaches to the study of the hidden web brings ethical conundrums that, as Martin and Christin (2016) argue, have outpaced scholarly contributions to the literature that contends with them. Researchers using cryptomarket-sourced data still face the conventional ethical challenges that many criminologists and drug researchers do already: protecting those about whom we often hold incriminating information. But fresh ethical challenges are also raised.

Cryptomarket futures

The International Journal of Drug Policy has been at the forefront of publishing new research on drug cryptomarkets, including the first qualitative studies of the use of Silk Road (van Hout and Bingham, 2013a, van Hout and Bingham, 2013b, van Hout and Bingham, 2014), the first study of Silk Road 2 using marketplace crawling and scraping of the ‘digital traces’ left by vendors and customers (Dolliver, 2015), and two editor-invited responses to controversy connected to that work (Aldridge and

Acknowledgements

MB is the recipient of an NHMRC Early Career Researcher Fellowship (APP1070140). The National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre at UNSW Australia and the National Drug Research Institute in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Curtin University are supported by funding from the Australian Government under the Substance Misuse Prevention and Service Improvement Grants Fund. MB is a Visiting Fellow at the Burnet Institute and gratefully acknowledges the contribution to this work of the Victorian

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