Drug dealers have taken to social media

“We were wondering if you would be interested in having a trip with our products,” an Instagram account sent me recently. In X, meanwhile, psychedelic-related posts are regularly infiltrated by bots that direct traffic to sellers. “Virtually all psychedelic posts are followed by bots selling microdoses,” lead psychedelic researcher Matthew Johnson. published on X in December. “All my blocks and spam reports seem in vain.” An account recently responded to one of my posts, linking to the profile of its apparent boss: “It’s all medicine and Psyche acid.”

Some sellers who stay on social media are even more shady. Drug Information Organization Pill Report he said of people who wire money to dealers and get cheated, with nothing sent to them. When one such person interviewed by WIRED sent money for cannabis through a money transfer app but received nothing in the mail, the account said. “It became a threatening match and they sent pictures of thugs with guns saying they were coming for me,” he says.

In a VICE documentary about selling drugs on social media, it took the host just 5 minutes to connect with a dealer in London. “Anyone can sell today,” another vendor told the reporter. “You see kids, 12-year-olds and everything creating accounts. It’s easy, isn’t it? You can sit at home, create an account, and make money. Who doesn’t want to do that?” As part of a separate research project, a 15-year-old was able to find a sales account Xanax pills in seconds on Instagram.

Telegram’s drug markets remain somewhat complicated to access for the average person, but they are still much easier to access than those on the darknet. “The problem with darknet markets is that you need to install Tor, get a PGP, and have cryptocurrencies,” says Francois Lamy, an associate professor at Mahidol University in Thailand who investigates the sociology of the use of drugs. “It’s a little more difficult to navigate. With Telegram, you type a few keywords, and you go. You can find everything.”

When Telegram founder Pavel Durov was arrested outside Paris, France, 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 “deter criminals” and hand over the data of users who are accused of illegal behavior on the platform by the authorities with search warrants. “While 99.999% of Telegram users have nothing to do with crime, the 0.001% involved in illegal activities create a bad image for the entire platform, endangering the interests of our nearly billion users “, Durov said in a statement at the time. .

But experts warn that any increased use of Telegram will only cause dealers to go elsewhere, disrupting a market that has largely established itself as a safer source of drugs. “If one avenue of supply is closed by enforcement, another is quickly found to replace it,” says Steve Rolles, senior policy analyst at the Transform Drug Policy Foundation, a UK-based NGO. “The application has, somewhat ironically, actually accelerated these innovations – they lead the evolution of increasingly sophisticated sales models. The only way such markets can be defeated in the long term is to replace them through regulation legal”.