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 2023 to January 2024.

An accompanying public online interactive data visualisation allows viewers to interact with data collected over the entire monitoring period.

Key findings

From 1^st February 2023 to 31^st January 2024, 16 cryptomarkets were monitored, of which 11 remained active at the end of the reporting period.
The three markets reaching more than 10,000 listings in a snapshot during this period were Bohemia, ASAP and Incognito.
In the final month of monitoring, Incognito, Bohemia, Nemesis and Archetyp were the largest cryptomarkets.
There was an average of 42,008 drug listings per snapshot in January 2024, with an estimated decrease in listings of -1.9% per month as compared to February 2023 (n=49,571), although new markets identified subsequently may offset this decline.
Cannabis comprised the greatest percentage of drug listings from February 2023 to January 2024 (29%), followed by MDMA (8.0%), benzodiazepines (7.6%), cocaine (7.3%), opioids (excluding heroin) (6.2%), and meth/amphetamine (illicit) (5.8%).
The market share of opioids (excluding heroin) showed the highest rate of increase from 5.2% in February 2023 to 6.8% in January 2024. Cannabis was the only drug class with a significant rate of decrease in market share, from 32% in February 2023 to 28% in January 2024.