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 period (a new bulletin is released typically every 4 months). The current bulletin focuses on analysis of drug listings on cryptomarkets from February 2022 to January 2023.

An accompanying public online interactive data visualisation is available, allowing viewers to interact with data collected over the total monitoring period.

Dr Nicola Man,
Research Fellow,
T +61 (02) 8936 1217,
E n.man@unsw.edu.au

Key Findings

• From 1st February 2022 to 31st January 2023, 21 cryptomarkets were monitored, of which five closed before the end of the reporting period. We began monitoring five new cryptomarkets during this period.

The five cryptomarkets that closed before 31st January 2023 are in grey color font.

• The three markets reaching more than 10,000 listings in a snapshot during this period were DarkFox, Dark0de and AlphaBay, of which Dark0de closed before January 2023 due to an exit scam.
• In the final month of reporting, DarkFox, ASAP, Bohemia and Incognito were the largest cryptomarkets.

Only the 14 largest markets by maximum number of listings in a snapshot in the 12-month period are shown in the plot.

• The number of drug listings decreased from February 2022 to January 2023 but the change was not statistically significant (p=0.887). The decrease (in spite of a general increase in individual market sizes) is largely due to the difficulty in accessing markets with persistent DDoS attacks in December 2022 and January 2023.
• Cannabis comprised the greatest percentage of drug listings from February 2022 to January 2023 (30%), followed by benzodiazepines (7.7%), cocaine (7.5%), MDMA (7.4%), opioids (excluding heroin) (6.4%), meth/amphetamine (illicit) (5.8%) and PIEDs/weight loss drugs (5.8%).

• The market share of other medicines showed the highest rate of increase from 2.9% in February 2022 to 3.5% in January 2023. The greatest rate of decrease in market share was observed for meth/amphetamine (illicit) from 6.6% in February 2022 to 5.2% in January 2023.