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Online drug dealing has been studied intensively since the rise of darknet markets, through which both the buying and selling of drugs have been made possible without a direct threat of being caught.  Drug dealing has also featured on the Clearnet, where a number of new psychoactive substances (NPS) and pharmaceutical products have been traded. Simple searches can direct a potential buyer to websites selling ‘spice’, ‘legal highs’ or synthetic cannabis. However, the market for these products in some countries has partly disappeared due to changes in legislation. The rise of darknet markets could be seen as a response to the increasingly stricter regulation of drug markets, as well as some more political and opportunistic reactions to state monopoly and registration. Moreover, to enable them to function effectively, darknet markets build trust systems. Such markets rely on encryption as well as users’ skills in using such modalities. Darknet markets operate side by side with the more public digital routes of the drug trade.

Social media coverage of drug use has been a concern in relation to an increase in young people’s interest in buying illicit substances. Moving from exposure to drug use, recent years have seen media stories identifying drug-dealing activity on social media. Social media drug dealing makes drugs potentially available to large groups of previously unengaged young people. Furthermore, a wide palette of available drugs may tempt users to expand their use from one to more types of drugs, a phenomenon which has been observed on the darknet markets (Barratt et al., 2016). In a previous report for the EMCDDA, Demant and Bakken showed how social media digital drug markets function, and they reported relatively few barriers to finding drug-related content (Demant et al., 2019). In their study, the open social media sites Facebook and Instagram demonstrated a high level of dealing in Denmark, Sweden and Iceland. Within these countries, drug dealing was in part moving away from a relation-based model, where buyer and seller had to establish a one-to-one contact, and over to a more open market, where sellers and buyers could contact each other without sharing their networks. In Australia, a similar development in social media drug markets has taken place. In parallel with the more open type of social media dealing that was identified previously in the Nordic countries, a more traditional phone-based, closed style of partly online dealing was also evident.