An insight into the deep web; why it matters for addiction psychiatry?

Abstract

Objective Nowadays, the web is rapidly spreading, playing a significant role in the marketing or sale or distribution of “quasi” legal drugs, hence facilitating continuous changes in drug scenarios. The easily renewable and anarchic online drug‐market is gradually transforming indeed the drug market itself, from a “street” to a “virtual” one, with customers being able to shop with a relative anonymity in a 24‐hr marketplace. The hidden “deep web” is facilitating this phenomenon. The paper aims at providing an overview to mental health's and addiction's professionals on current knowledge about prodrug activities on the deep web. Methods A nonparticipant netnographic qualitative study of a list of prodrug websites (blogs, fora, and drug marketplaces) located into the surface web was here carried out. A systematic Internet search was conducted on Duckduckgo® and Google® whilst including the following keywords: “drugs” or “legal highs” or “Novel Psychoactive Substances” or “NPS” combined with the word deep web. Results Four themes (e.g., “How to access into the deepweb”; “Darknet and the online drug trading sites”; “Grams‐search engine for the deep web”; and “Cryptocurrencies”) and 14 categories were here generated and properly discussed. Conclusions This paper represents a complete or systematical guideline about the deep web, specifically focusing on practical information on online drug marketplaces, useful for addiction's professionals.

Novel Opioids: Systematic Web Crawling Within the e-Psychonauts’ Scenario

“…To this respect, there is strong focus at present on the study and development of abuse-deterrent opioid formulations (Pergolizzi et al, 2018). Despite the efforts of law enforcement and other agencies (European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction [EMCDDA], 2019; United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime [UNODC], 2019c), an unknown number of substances are continuously manufactured, (illicitly) offered for sale, and inappropriately consumed Orsolini et al, 2017). Some concerns are related as well to the lack of regulation relating to so-called home-brew opiates (Galanie et al, 2015;Oye et al, 2015).…”

Neurochemical and Behavioral Profiling in Male and Female Rats of the Psychedelic Agent 25I-NBOMe

“…The appearance of new psychoactive substances (NPS) is changing the trend in drug use worldwide (Orsolini et al, 2015;Miliano et al, 2016;UNODC, 2016;Corkery et al, 2017;Orsolini et al, 2017), which includes also their safely perceived purchase on the Internet (Miliano et al, 2018). As a matter of fact, in the last decades the classical drugs of abuse are being progressively substituted by their "legal synthetic alternatives" or simply co-abused with these powerful substances.…”

Analyzing the Open/Deep Web to Better Understand the New/Novel Psychoactive Substances (NPS) Scenarios: Suggestions from CASSANDRA and NPS.Finder Research Projects

“…So far, the NPS.Finder has crawled on the open web only. Future studies by our group will be expanding drug searches on less accessible areas of the web, such as the deep web and the most elusive darknet [13]. A qualitative/netnographic approach [11] will be needed as well, to better assess the possible psychonauts' preference between NPS analogues and their motivation for use.…”