Have any studies/surveys been done into the user makeup of darknet markets?

I'm currently writing an essay on how 'moral panics' are created in our society. I am supposed to look at a specific 'moral panic,' historical or current, concerning drugs (e.g. the temperance movement in the early 1900s, the panic about crack in the 80s, the current "heroin epidemic" in vermont, etc.), and analyze the various sociological factors that contributed to that specific panic or why the panic failed. I've selected to look into the current 'panic' surrounding the rise of darknet drug markets, which seems to be evidenced by the massive amount of media coverage that has been devoted to 'dangerous' anonymous online drug markets in the past few years.

I have been doing a bit of research on the topic and am struggling to find any legitimate sources that have looked at the user makeup of buyers and sellers on darknet markets (i.e. socioeconomic status, race, whether vendors tend to be small-scale and private or connected with some sort of organization, etc.). Does anyone know of any legitimate research in this area that you could point me to?

If anyone is interested in what i'm trying to argue in the paper I'd be happy to go into some more detail, though I'm still only in the beginning stages.

I hope it's ok that I'm posting this here, I figured this subreddit would be my best bet for finding people who know about research that's been done on darknet markets.


Comments


[10 Points] XanaxBaratheon:

Judging from the comments on this sub lately I'd say 50% underage white male


[5 Points] massiveweiner:

https://www.gwern.net/docs/sr/2013-barratt.pdf

http://www.academia.edu/1408484/Silk_Road_eBay_for_Drugs


[3 Points] fmerz:

dont have anything on darknet activity but here is a nice article on the demographics of people who buy bitcoins. (apparently: rich, 20-40, white people)


[3 Points] lolnymous:

Tbh people try to stay as anonymous as possible most of the time, there's a few interviews with vendors floating around though, not sure of anything else.


[3 Points] lamarrotems:

I am in the same exact same boat - eventually hope (within this lifetime or the next) to publish something sociological on DNM's or the DNM community - exploring possible thesis topics now.

This way I can justify all my waste time here as "research".

Pri. Mes. myself here and I will tell you my thoughts thus far. I am sociology grad student. Gonna take a few days to reply though - super busy - and trying not to fail out of school. :)


[3 Points] None:

My advice would be to build from some high profile cases that resulted in deaths--the one in the UK where the guy died from a combo of too much MDMA, K, and Acid I think on Skype with his friend, and the Australian who jumped off a balcony or something while high on nBOME and his dad is quoted in lots of articles saying how awful the DNMs are. He even has some quotes about Ross' sentencing. You can find these stories on Gwern's site, which will be a very good situating resource.

Another recommendation is to look into the FBI's statements after arresting SuperTrips and Ross, any of the SR admins, etc. Look at the language they use about how hardened these criminals are and so on.

Together with these news articles about deaths of teens, you can see how the basis of the panic forms and gets perpetuated.

As for studies:

Here is a link to google scholar results of ("Silk Road" and bitcoin) since 2011.

Take a look at this project on Silk Road that Australia's National Drug Research Institute has been working on. I don't think they've published the article yet, but the academics involved may have previous stuff on SR.

You'll likely be restricted to extrapolating data and information from scholarly commentary on SR. It takes fucking forever to publish things.

Good luck on the paper!


[1 Points] None:

The problem you have is that when you're breaking several laws, you don't really want to go announcing it coupled with the fact that drug use is so stigmatised so people generally give as little away about themselves as possible.

No one's ever going to be queuing up to answer questions on anything that could potentially help identify them so some dude can write a paper. You feel me?

I'm more relaxed than most about what identifying information I post on this sub but it's unlikely you're going to find some nice, tidy accurate stats on DNM users.