Drug Trends has identified, crawled (or ‘scraped’), extracted, categorised and analysed drug listings on cryptomarkets on a regular basis since 1 February 2014. This bulletin series reports on trends in the availability and types of drugs sold on the internet via cryptomarkets over a 12-month period (a new bulletin is released typically every four months). The current bulletin focuses on analysis of drug listings on cryptomarkets from 1 October 2021 to 30 September 2022.
An accompanying public online interactive data visualisation is available, allowing viewers to interact with data collected over the total monitoring period.
Key findings
From 1 October 2021 to 30 September 2022, 27 cryptomarkets were monitored, of which 11 closed before the end of the reporting period. We began monitoring 10 new cryptomarkets during this period.
The 11 cryptomarkets that closed before 30 September 2022 are in grey color font.
- The five markets reaching more than 10,000 listings in a snapshot during this period were DarkFox, Dark0de, White House, Torrez and AlphaBay, of which only DarkFox and AlphaBay remained open as of end of September.
- In the final month of monitoring, DarkFox, AlphaBay, ASAP, Bohemia and Incognito were the largest cryptomarkets.
- The number of drug listings increased by 2.8% per month from October 2021 (average of 46,766 listings per snapshot) to September 2022 (average of 61,459 listings).
- Cannabis comprised the greatest percentage of drugs listings from October 2021 to September 2022 (30%), followed by cocaine (7.6%), benzodiazepines (7.5%), MDMA (7.5%), meth/amphetamine (illicit) (6.1%), opioids (excluding heroin) (6.1%) and PIEDs/weight loss drugs (6.1%).
- The market share of opioids (excluding heroin) showed the highest rate of increase from 5.0% in October 2021 to 6.5% in September 2022. The greatest rate of decrease in market share was observed for LSD from 3.6% in October 2021 to 3.1% in September 2022.