The creativity and resilience of drug markets makes drug policy developments immensely challenging. One of the most interesting innovations in recent years are crypto markets, a kind of eBay for drugs, that provides participants with anonymity, uses crypto currencies for payment, and aggregates and displays customer feedback ratings and comments.” The question many are asking now is whether crypto markets permit drug transactions without violence, or at least with less violence. Drug trafficking, after all, is responsible for a wide variety of human rights violations, from farmers being driven from their land, or air sprayed with toxic agrochemicals that contaminate riverbeds and licit crops, to minors being exploited for labour to citizens being executed. Can a shift towards deep web trading mitigate any of these problems?
Research from academics in Australia and the UK, based on data from the Global Drug Survey, concludes that buying and selling drugs online is in fact significantly safer than doing so in offline markets, with fewer threats, intimidation, and violence. The research, while promising, is biased in the same way that crypto markets are: it is skewed toward a predominantly male, young, and educated sub-sector of the drug market located in the global North.
Protecting the health and safety of drug consumers is certainly important; however, the veritable absence of crypto markets in the global South means that those most affected by drug violence are still vulnerable. To argue that crypto-markets make drug trafficking safer is to distract from a much larger problem in the global drug trade, and in fact could further downplay drug-related human rights violations.
