US government's war against online drug sales not working, research finds

The US government's war against online drug sales isn't working, according to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. Despite law enforcement crackdowns, online drug black markets have matured into a resilient industry that enables more than US$100 million worth of worldwide sales a year, a new paper from researcher Kyle Soska and computer science professor Nicolas Christin reports.

The report is one of the most comprehensive looks yet at the burgeoning online drug market. Researchers collected data on 35 online marketplaces that were active on the "Dark Web" - sites that require the anonymous browsing tool Tor to access and are much harder for law enforcement to track - between 2013 until January of this year.

They wrote a programme to scrape the sites for data, including examining the prices that the drugs - from marijuana to cocaine - were being sold for. They also collected information on how much feedback sellers received from customers on their purchases. The data helped the researchers estimate trends and total sales.

The researchers found that the industry's growth has slowed since the early days of Silk Road - one of the first online drug markets and the target of an aggressive US government investigation that resulted in a life sentence for the man convicted of running the site. But sales continue to grow, and the market has matured beyond being dominated by a single player, they said.

Illegal online drug sales have stabilised at between US$300,000 and US$500,000 a day, the researchers said. Marijuana and Ecstasy were the most popular drugs among black market users, according to the report, accounting for more than half of overall sales.

The report also found that the majority of vendors on the sites appeared to be small-time sellers. About 70 per cent of them never sold more than US$1,000 worth of products, and another 18 per cent sold between US$1,000 and US$10,000. Just 2 per cent managed to sell more than US$100,000 worth of drugs.