"It's no longer this scary concept of this hooded person on the street." "The dynamic between the buyer and the dealer has changed," a 17-year-old told SkyNews.
(The commonest drug dealing platforms were Snapchat and Instagram, and the commonest drugs advertised were, in order: weed, coke, ecstasy, xanax, whippets and lean.) Social media drug dealing is so common, so normal, that only half of the kids Volteface talked to were worried that it was somehow "bad." To them, it's just another post. And he said he was part of a collective delivering worldwide. But placing that order was only a little harder than getting GrubHub burgers. Within a half hour, he said he'd deliver a gram of 2c-i - a drug said to be wonderful but which I've never seen in real life - to my house that afternoon, for $100 - a decent price. His bio listed my city, Denver, and his name on Wickr, a private messaging app. On my Twitter feed, for example, there was a guy whose name was something like PlugForYou, with emojis of mushrooms and pills. The algorithms know where you live, and will connect you to plugs nearby. Follow a drug dealer, and the algorithms suggest more drug dealers to follow. The mainstream media is fixated on drug dealing on the Dark Net - a secret-ish back alley of the Internet.īut the Dark Net requires a tricky program called TOR, and cryptocurrency like Bitcoin or Litecoin - a headache.įacebook and Twitter deals are more dangerous than the Dark Net, but so much easier.