Drug Trends has identified, crawled (or ‘scraped’), extracted, categorised and analysed drug listings on cryptomarkets on a regular basis since 1st 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 (a new bulletin is typically released every 4 months). The current bulletin focuses on analysis of drug listings on cryptomarkets from October 2022 to September 2023.
An accompanying public online interactive data visualisation is available, allowing viewers to interact with data collected over the total monitoring period.
Key Findings
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From 1st October 2022 to 30th September 2023, 18 cryptomarkets were monitored, of which 11 remained active at the end of the reporting period.
- The four markets reaching more than 10,000 listings in a snapshot during this period were DarkFox, Bohemia, AlphaBay and ASAP.
- In the final month of monitoring, Bohemia, Tor2Door, Incognito and Nemesis were the largest cryptomarkets.
- There was an average of 38,698 drug listings per snapshot in September 2023, with an estimated decrease in listings of -7.9% per month as compared to October 2022 (n=77,090).
- Cannabis comprised the greatest percentage of drug listings from October 2022 to September 2023 (31%), followed by MDMA (7.7%), benzodiazepines (7.5%), cocaine (7.4%), opioids (excluding heroin) (6.0%), and meth/amphetamine (illicit) (5.7%).
- The market share of ketamine showed the highest rate of increase from 3.8% in October 2022 to 5.0% in September 2023. Significant decrease in market share was observed for cannabis, PIEDs/weight loss drugs and NPS in the 12-month period.