“We were wondering if you would be interested in taking a trip with our products,” an Instagram account recently messaged me. Meanwhile, on X, psychedelic-related posts are regularly infiltrated by bots that direct traffic to dealers. “Virtually every publication on psychedelics is followed by robots selling microdoses,” said prominent psychedelic researcher Matthew Johnson. published in X in December. “All my blocking and spam reports seem useless.” An account recently responded to one of my posts, linking to their apparent boss’s profile: “She has all of Psyche’s medications and acids.”
Some traffickers lurking on social media are even shadier. The drug information organization Pill Report has said of people sending cash to distributors and being scammed without anything being sent to them. When one of those people WIRED interviewed sent money for cannabis through a cash transfer app but didn’t receive anything in the mail, she reported the account. “It became a threatening party and they sent me photos of thugs with guns saying they were going to come for me,” he says.
in a VICE documentary about selling drugs on social media, it took the presenter just 5 minutes to connect with a dealer in London. “Nowadays anyone can sell,” another merchant told the journalist. “You see little kids, 12 years old and all, opening accounts. It’s easy, right? You can sit at home, create an account and earn money. Who doesn’t want to do that? As part of an independent research project, a 15-year-old boy I was able to locate an account selling. Xanax tablets in seconds on Instagram.
Telegram drug markets are still somewhat complicated for the average person to access, but they are still much easier to access than those on the dark web. “The problem with darknet markets is that you need to install Tor, get a PGP and have cryptocurrency,” says Francois Lamy, an associate professor at Mahidol University in Thailand who researches the sociology of drug use. “It’s a little more difficult to navigate. With Telegram, you type a few keywords and that’s it. 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 presented to “deter criminals” and hand over the data of users who are accused of illegal behavior on the platform by authorities with search warrants. “While 99.999% of Telegram users have nothing to do with crime, the 0.001% involved in illicit activities creates a bad image for the entire platform, putting the interests of our almost one billion users at risk,” Durov said in a statement at the time. .
But experts warn that any greater control on Telegram will simply cause traffickers to go elsewhere, disrupting a market that has largely established itself as a safer source of drugs. “If law enforcement closes one supply route, another will soon be found to replace it,” says Steve Rolles, senior policy analyst at the Transform Drug Policy Foundation, a UK-based NGO. “Ironically, law enforcement has accelerated these innovations, driving the evolution of increasingly sophisticated sales models. The only way to defeat these markets in the long term is to replace them through legal regulation.”