Darknet drug sellers are experiencing a boom, thanks to the scorching price-gouging practiced by pharmaceutical companies in the USA and the efficiency of their marketplaces. The cornerstone of that efficiency is the trust systems used to help drug buyers locate reliable sellers.
The researchers found that the usual path into drug purchasing is to use the trust-mechanism to locate a reliable seller, and thereafter to stick with that seller; they suggest that chaffing the reviews with fake negative reviews about bad experiences would deter first-time buyers from establishing that relationship.
I suspect that darknet buying is a little like the P2P wars. Back in December 2007, NBC yanked its TV shows from Itunes in a contractual dispute. Researchers found that the elimination of a legit market for NBC’s content drove tons of new users into P2P downloading – and that even after NBC restored its content, those users continued to download from torrent sites, because they’d invested the time to figure out how to use them, and had discovered how much other great stuff there was to be had in the land of torrents.
Drug prohibition and pharma price-gouging makes an investment in figuring out darknet and bitcoin into a sound one, worth the while of many people. My guess is that people might come for the cancer meds they can’t afford, and come back for just about everything, opting entirely out of the legit marketplace for medicine, and also gaining access to a useful and efficient market for recreational drugs in the bargain.
