Drug dealers have moved to social networks

“We were wondering if you’d be interested in taking a trip with our product,” an Instagram page recently messaged me. Meanwhile, psychedelic-related posts on X are regularly infiltrated by bots that drive traffic to dealers. Almost every psychedelic post(s) is followed by bots selling microdoses,” Matthew Johnson, a leading psychiatry researcher. posted on X in December. “All my bans and spam reports seem futile.” An account recently replied to one of my posts with a link to their apparent boss’s profile. “He’s got all the psychedelic drugs and acid.”

Some of the dealers lurking on social media are even more shady, says the drug information organization Pill Report told people sending cash to dealers and getting scammed When one such person interviewed by WIRED sent money through a cash transfer app but got nothing in the mail, he reported the bill threatening game and they were sending photos of thugs with guns saying they were coming for me,” he says.

On VICE documentary It took only 5 minutes for the presenter to contact a dealer in London about the sale of drugs on social networks. “Everyone can sell today,” another dealer told the reporter. “You see little kids, 12-year-olds and everything. It’s easy, right? You can sit at home and make money. Who doesn’t want to do that?” 15 years within the framework of the project was able to find a sales account Xanax tablets in just seconds on Instagram.

Telegram’s drug markets remain somewhat complicated for ordinary people to access, but are still much easier to access than those on the darknet. “The problem with darknet markets is that you have to install Tor, get PGP, and have cryptocurrencies.” ,” says Francois Lamy, an associate professor at Mahidol University in Thailand. “It’s a little more difficult to navigate through Telegram you type in a few keywords and off you go. You can find anything.”

In August, when Telegram founder Pavel Durov was arrested outside France, prosecutors cited the scale of drug trafficking on the platform as part of the rationale.Next month, Telegram’s new user policy has been submitted to “deter criminals” and hand over the data of users accused by authorities of illegal behavior on the platform with search warrants. “Although 99.999% of Telegram users are not involved in crime, the 0.001% involved in illegal activities create a bad image for the entire platform, putting the interests of our nearly one billion users at risk,” Durov said. in the time statement. .

But experts warn that any increased enforcement of Telegram will simply force dealers to go elsewhere, disrupting a market that has largely become a safer source of drugs itself will replace it,” says Steve Roles, senior policy analyst at the UK-based NGO Transform Drug Policy Foundation. “Implementation, to some extent ironically, has actually accelerated these innovations by driving the evolution of more sophisticated sales models. The only way to defeat such markets in the long run is to replace them with legal regulation.”