Changes in Online Psychoactive Substance Trade via Telegram during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

<b><i>Background:</i></b> In this article, we present an evaluation of online psychoactive substance trade via Telegram, a free encrypted social media messenger service. The evaluation took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, which allowed us to monitor the effects of the spring 2020 lockdown in the Netherlands on substance trade via Telegram. <b><i>Objective:</i></b> The objective of this study was to evaluate whether changes in psychoactive substance trade on Telegram markets in the Netherlands can be observed during the COVID-19 pandemic. <b><i>Results:</i></b> Between December 2, 2019, and June 29, 2020, a total of 70,226 posts appeared in two analyzed Telegram groups. A total of 5,643 posts were psychoactive substance related. Based on the analyzed posts, Telegram is mostly a ‘“sellers” market as only a minority of the posts (6.3%) could be identified as a request for a substance. The proportion of posts related to specific substances varied between the periods before, during, and after the lockdown. The proportion of posts on the stimulants ecstasy, cocaine, and amphetamine was lower during the lockdown than before and after. For psychedelics – ketamine, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), and 2,5-dimethoxy-4-bromophenethylamine (2C-B) – and other substances, there was a relative increase in the number of posts during the lockdown, which was maintained after the lockdown. <b><i>Conclusions:</i></b> Telegram analysis shows that in the Netherlands, online psychoactive substance trade may have been affected during the COVID-19 pandemic. The direction of this effect was different for different classes of substances.

The Use of Discord Servers to Buy and Sell Drugs

“…Discord drug servers bear similarities to Facebook drug selling groups (Demant et al, 2019), or group chats on messaging platforms such as Telegram (Blankers et al, 2021), which enable similarly competitive selling environments and are typically also “managed” by a group “administrator” who grants access to new members, and where membership of many different selling groups is also commonplace (Demant et al, 2019). Bakken and Demant have termed groups such as these “public digital markets” by virtue of their typically high levels of openness and ease of access (Bakken & Demant, 2019).…”

“…Studies to date have focused on the use of popular, mainstream social media platforms such as Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Whatsapp, and encrypted chat apps like Wickr and Telegram (Bakken, 2020; Blankers et al, 2021; Demant et al, 2020; Demant et al, 2019; Moyle et al, 2019). Understanding of how lesser-known social media platforms may facilitate the buying and selling of illegal drugs remains limited.…”

Exploring Televend, an innovative combination of cryptomarket and messaging app technologies for trading prohibited drugs

“…Concurrently, other important changes in the digital media and communications landscape were occurring. Messaging apps, in particular those that offered encrypted messaging services and real-time mobile group messaging (Baulch et al, 2020;Ling, 2017;Nobari et al, 2021), as well as social media services that facilitated interaction and the sharing of user-generated content (McCay-Peet and Quan-Haase, 2016), afforded new possibilities for drug trading (Blankers et al, 2021;Childs et al, 2021;Demant et al, 2019;Li et al, 2019;McCulloch and Furlong, 2019;Moyle et al, 2019;Oksanen et al, 2021;Shah et al, 2021;van der Sanden et al, 2021), alongside the dramatic rise in social media use (Auxier and Anderson, 2021).…”

“…App-mediated drug trading may include joining broadcast-type groups or following public profiles of drug sellers, then using one-toone messaging to broker a deal, followed by an in-person exchange or postal delivery (Li et al, 2019;McCulloch and Furlong, 2019;Moyle et al, 2019). Public data from app-mediated drug selling groups have been assessed across multiple platforms (e.g., Telegram (Blankers et al, 2021) and Instagram (Li et al, 2019;Shah et al, 2021)), with these studies confirming seller advertisement posts predominate with buyers directed to encrypted chat apps for purchase.…”

Editorial

“…Since the COVID-19 pandemic and the disruptions it presented for the work of drug policy research and activism, we observed national lockdowns impacting patterns of drug use, and then how quickly they returned to "normal" when public health measures were eased (EMCDDA, 2021;Chang et al, 2020). Some drug market monitoring studies provided evidence of disruption to drug cryptomarkets (Bergeron et al, 2020) and changes in illicit drug offerings on social media (Blankers et al, 2021), but we also learntyet againthat drug supply networks remained resilient during the pandemic (EMCDDA, 2021;Scherbaum et al, 2021). Challenged by social distancing measures and resource constraints, harm reduction and professional drug services responded by implementing innovative modes of service delivery, including telemedicine, home-delivery and contactless opioid substitution treatment (EMCDDA, 2020;Tyndall, 2020).…”