The Deep Web
Silk Road Marketplace opened in 2011, the first platform on which illegal drugs could be bought and sold over the Internet. Using technology that was already available — the Tor browser, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Monero, and encryption systems like GPG — it made anonymous, secure drug trading possible.
Nobody would have bet on a platform that brought drug buyers and sellers together Amazon-style, running on reputation and trust. Heroin, MDMA or cannabis could be ordered comfortably from home and arrive in the letterbox a few days later. Around the figure of Dread Pirate Roberts, Silk Road’s enigmatic administrator, a virtual community of more than a hundred thousand people formed worldwide. Arresting him and shutting the site down became an international priority.
In October 2013 the FBI arrested Ross Ulbricht, a 26-year-old accused of being the brain behind Silk Road. In 2015 he was sentenced to two life terms for coding a website on his laptop. The judge justified the severity of the sentence by the need to deter anyone tempted to imitate him.
She was not especially on target.
By then Silk Road’s successors — Silk Road 2.0 and Evolution — were already turning over three times its sales volume.
Alphabay ran between 2014 and 2017, with more than 400,000 registered users moving 600,000–800,000 dollars a day and an estimated volume ten times that of Silk Road.
Every "police success" has been followed by an immediate migration of sellers and buyers to new platforms that are safer, simpler to use and more efficient. By early 2024 there were at least twelve active platforms.
The model Silk Road inaugurated is the first exercise in regulating controlled drugs in a hundred years. Platforms of this kind are not necessarily the only, or the best, possible answer to the War on Drugs. But experience shows there is no going back on technological progress.
Although drug trading over the Internet is a minute fraction of the global trade, the trend is clearly upward. The Internet has the potential to revolutionise drug trafficking — and the drug policies that sustain it — with the same impact it has had on the record industry, film and television, or tourism.
The cryptomarket model also allows innovative, imaginative forms of preventive intervention to be tested. A significant part of my professional career has been spent on this ground.