“Drogues Sur Internet: Etat Des Lieuxsur La Situation En Suisse”, 2018-11 (; backlinks; similar):
[Google Translate of French abstract] Where do you find drugs on the Internet, how are they sold, what is the size of the market and what is Switzerland’s place in it? To try to answer these questions, Addiction Switzerland and the School of Criminal Sciences at UNIL have collected and analyzed a set of relevant data on behalf of the Federal Office of Public Health.
The Internet is made up of three basic components: a transmission network (cables or waves), a system for recognizing interconnected devices (the IP protocol) and data transport protocols. Together, they allow the use of applications (web, e-mail, messaging) for communication and information sharing. It is possible to find and buy drugs on many applications including websites, whether concealed or not, but also social networks and messaging applications. You can come across different promotion strategies, different sales spaces but also evaluation of the drugs offered. Other products such as drugs, narcotics, and new psychoactive substances (NPS) are also on sale.
Knowledge about the sale of narcotics on the various applications present on the Internet is still in its infancy, with the exception of crypto-markets which are often specialized in this field. These are sales platforms that allow for some anonymity. The use of specific infrastructures (called darknets), web spaces that are not or not very regulated (dark webs), encrypted communications and cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin allow this anonymity. The dark webs, and the crypto-markets they host, however, are tiny compared to all the spaces on the web.
The sale of narcotic drugs on crypto-markets has been revealed by the Silk Road website. Since then, many similar sites have appeared but with often relatively short lifespans, due to internal fraud or the intervention of the police. The sites are based on management by administrators and on advertisements that describe the product, its price and the conditions of its acquisition. They also rely on the assessment of products and sellers by buyers. They are thus, in their form, similar to many sites known as eBay.
To understand Switzerland’s place in this market, downloads of data from one of the main crypto-narcotics markets (AlphaBay, active from the end of 2014 to July 2017) were carried out. They show that the most cited countries of origin are the Anglo-Saxon countries (United States, Canada, Australia, United Kingdom), the Netherlands and Germany. Switzerland occupies a less important place but, if we consider its size, its role is not negligible in terms of sales. Thus, 57 seller accounts declaring to be located in Switzerland carried out just over ten thousand transactions for a turnover of ~1.3 million francs on AlphaBay. The sale of stimulants concerns 85% of these transactions, especially with small quantities and prices close to those of the physical market. These sales represent in fact only a very small part of the narcotics market in Switzerland, but some sellers make substantial sales of up to almost $36,532.62$30,0002017 a month.
There is little data on people in Switzerland who order drugs online. Analysis of data from the Global Drug Survey suggests that shopping on the web and on dark webs remains limited, but with an increasing trend. Older data shows that cannabis and stimulants are the products most ordered by Swiss buyers. They order from sellers in Switzerland but also abroad, especially in Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Belgium. Overseas orders are generally associated with larger quantities but remain relatively small. On average, apart from cannabis, purchases rarely exceed 5–10 grams on average.
A small survey of cantonal police has shown that surveys of online drug purchases have so far been relatively rare. They often result from information provided by an informant or from the discovery of a computer turned on during a search. The most frequent case concerns parcels intercepted by customs with small quantities ordered on the Internet, most often cannabis, stimulants or hallucinogens.
We will retain from this exploration of the data on the Internet drug markets, that these are found in different spaces of the web, in particular the dark webs, but that they seem so far to constitute only a very small part of the drug market for narcotic drugs, at least in Switzerland. There are, however, some indications that the phenomenon is tending to spread, even if it is happening at a slower pace than one might have thought. Like other innovations, the sale and purchase of psychoactive substances on the Internet probably follows an adoption phase in a small group of individuals before, perhaps, becoming a wider phenomenon.