Darknet Drug Markets Put Customers in Charge

Last year, approximately 20 percent of United Kingdom drug users scored online. The majority of them went to "darknet" markets.

In 1972, before e-commerce, eBay or Amazon, students from Stanford University in California and MIT in Massachusetts conducted the first-ever transaction. Using the "Arpa-net" account at their artificial intelligence lab, the Stanford students sold their counterparts a small amount of marijuana. This could perhaps be considered the birth of the "darknet."

You can't access darknet markets using a normal browser. They are an encrypted part of the Internet where URLs are a string of meaningless numbers and letters that end in ".onion" and are accessed using a special browser.

The encryption system makes it very difficult for the police to know where these sites, and the people who use them, are located.

The most infamous darknet market is called The Silk Road. In 2013, following a lengthy investigation, The Silk Road was shut down. Yet, as soon as it was knocked offline, numerous other sites took its place. Today, there are around 30 sites and most of them are doing well.

The interesting thing about these sites is not how many there are, but how they are changing the drug industry. They work exceptionally well. There are almost 900 vendors to choose from, selling heroin, opium, cocaine, acid and prescription drugs.

When you buy drugs from street dealers, your choice is usually limited by area and your contacts. Although around one-third of vendors are based in the U.S., ten percent are in the U.K. and most promise to ship to every country in the world.

Although all the vendors use pseudonyms, they are interested in building a reputation.

Every site has review options, usually a score out of five, plus lots of written feedback and chat. Most of the customer reviews on the sites score 5/5.

Because the dealers live on the fringes, these sites are remarkably innovative. The currency of choice here is Bitcoin, which offers its users a high degree of anonymity.

Because of the innovation and competition, power is shifting away from dealers to the consumers.

One of the last posts on the original Silk Road discussion forum before the FBI shut it down last year: "My apologies to all of you experiencing slow Customer Support response times ... We are implementing changes to ensure that messages cannot be missed in future, and, again, I apologize for any inconvenience that any delays in responding to your tickets may have caused."

Economics tell us competition is good for consumers for pricing and quality. For drugs, this is especially important to eliminate the risks associated with buying drugs on the street.

Customer service is the secret.

Disclaimer: In some countries it may be illegal to access these sites and purchase drugs. The FBI and other law enforcement agencies are currently investigating such illegal activity.