Drug Dealers Turn to Social Media

“We were wondering if you would like our product tour,” one Instagram account messaged me recently. On X, on the other hand, posts related to psychedelics are often imported by bots that direct traffic to sellers. “Almost all psychedelic posts[s] followed by bots selling microdoses,” leading psychiatry researcher Matthew Johnson wrote in X in December. “All my blocking and spam reporting seems to be in vain.” The account recently responded to one of my posts, linking to the profile of its apparent manager: “He has all the Psyche drugs and acids.”

Some sellers who are hiding on social media have been blown away. The drug information organization Pill Report has told us about people who deposit money to dealers and are cheated, and nothing is sent to them. When one such person interviewed by WIRED sent marijuana money through a money transfer app but received nothing in the mail, he reported the account. “It was a scary game and they sent pictures of thugs with guns saying they would come to me,” he said.

In a VICE documentary on drug sales on social media, it took the host just 5 minutes to connect with a dealer in London. “Anyone can sell these days,” one seller told a reporter. “You see young kids, 12 years old and all, creating accounts. Simple, right? You can stay 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 an account selling Xanax pills in seconds on Instagram.

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

When Telegram founder Pavel Durov was arrested outside Paris, France, in August, prosecutors cited the level of drug trafficking on the platform as part of the reason. The following month, a new Telegram user policy was introduced to “discourage criminals” and provide the data of users suspected of illegal behavior on the platform to authorities with search warrants. “Although 99.999% of Telegram users are involved in crime, the 0.001% involved in illegal activities create a bad image on all platforms, endangering the interests of our nearly billion users,” Durov said in a statement at the time. .

But experts warn that any further enforcement of Telegram will only cause dealers to go elsewhere, disrupting a market that has largely established itself as a safe source of drugs. “If one supply chain is forcibly shut down, another has to be quickly found to replace it,” said Steve Rolles, senior policy analyst at the Transform Drug Policy Foundation, a UK-based NGO. “Enforcement has, in some ways, accelerated these innovations—incentivizing the emergence of sophisticated marketing models. The only way such markets can be defeated in the long term is to change them through legal regulation.”