“We were wondering if you would be interested in taking a trip with our products,” an Instagram account messaged me recently. On X, meanwhile, posts related to psychedelics are routinely infiltrated by bots directing traffic to dealers. “Basically all psychedelic post[s] Microdoses are followed by bots selling them,” lead psychedelics researcher Matthew Johnson Posted on X in December. “All my blocking and spam reporting seems to be in vain.” One account recently responded to one of my posts, linking to their apparent boss’s profile: “He’s all psyched and acid.”
Some dealers lurking on social media are even more shady. Drug Information Organization Pill Report has told People hand over cash to dealers and nothing is sent to them. When one such man interviewed by WIRED sent money for cannabis through a cash transfer app but got nothing in the mail, he reported the account. “It became a threat match and they sent photos of thugs with guns saying they would come for me,” he says.
In a sub Documentary On drug sales on social media, it took the host just five minutes to connect with a London dealer. Another dealer told the journalist, “Nowadays anyone can sell. “You see little kids, 12-year-olds and everything, setting up accounts. It’s easy, isn’t it? You can create an account and earn money from home. Who wouldn’t want to do that?” As part of a separate research project, a 15-year-old An account was able to find the sale Xanax pills on Instagram in just seconds.
Telegram’s drug markets remain somewhat complicated for the average person to access, but are still much easier to access than those on the dark net. “The problem with dark-net markets is that you need to install Tor, get a PGP and get cryptocurrency,” says Francois Lamy, an associate professor at Mahidol University in Thailand who researches the sociology of drug use. are “It’s a little more difficult to navigate. With Telegram, you type in some keywords, and there you go. You can find everything.”
When Telegram founder Pavel Durov was arrested outside Paris in August, prosecutors cited the scale of drug trafficking on the platform. Next month, a new Telegram user policy was introduced To “dissuade criminals” and hand over data on users who are accused of illegal behavior on the platform by authorities with search warrants. “While 99.999 percent of Telegram users have nothing to do with crime, the 0.001 percent involved in illegal activities create a bad image for the entire platform, endangering the interests of our nearly billion users,” Durov said. said in a statement at the time. .
But experts warn that any increased enforcement on Telegram will cause dealers to go elsewhere, disrupting a market that has established itself as a safe source of drugs. “If one supply avenue is shut down by enforcement, another is soon found to replace it,” says Steve Rolls, senior policy analyst at the Transform Drug Policy Foundation, a UK-based NGO. “Enforcement, somewhat ironically, has actually accelerated these innovations – driving the development of ever more sophisticated sales models. The only way to defeat such markets in the long run is to replace them through legal regulation. “
