I want to engage with a type of argument that is self-undermining. The months after Al-Qaeda’s attacks on New York and Washington in 2001 birthed an immoral decision. The USA at the highest level began publicly legitimising torture as a means to an end in the War on Terror. As opposed to having the decency to pretend not to. Opponents would often use a two step argument. First they would lay out why torture was repugnant. It harms the tortured, stains the torturer, and degrades the society that permits it. Second, they would add as a final flourish ‘torture doesn’t even work!’. Torture produces bad, unreliable intel. That’s lucky, I thought. What if it did work? Any argument where morality is reliant on pragmatism is going to risk the equation changing against it. Where do you stand then?

The same argument tends to bubble up over AI. In my work outlandish claims are often made about police AI by those developing the systems. These are private solutions offered by companies promising to use data integration to be able to predict where crime will happen so that police resources can be distributed accordingly. In response critics rehearse the damage to democracy when decisions are taken beyond any possible oversight, the danger to human autonomy, and then we say, ‘And it doesn’t even work’! Critics are usually right. These systems over promise and deliver little more than a beat cop’s common sense (crime happens where lots of young males hang out, where there are targets, and little oversight). We also point to the biases being worked in here so that systems without any explicit racial categorisation element will still faithfully reproduce racial biases in their effects.

If someone then designed a workable pre-crime system, one that did not simply replicate existing biases in the datasets, then what? These arguments do not go away, and we should continue to critique the effect as well as the principle, but the problem is that the pragmatic argument is a dodge. It is a way of avoiding the claim morality places on us, that we have to take decisions against our own interests and convenience. That there are paths we should not follow. A workable pre-crime system is something that should never be developed because it removes any notion of culpability and effectively end runs due process. Systems cease to have any hope of having democratic oversight, and they shift power from communities to states and remote techbrotopia corporations.

On the other hand that argument might be too purist. It is through their practical effects that we approach technologies and policies, and therefore leading with the in-context pragmatism is not a bad move to make. Further, we should not assume pragmatism is downstream of morality. Mostly we reason in the other direction. We say ‘how does this affect me … how does it affect my context … and maybe after a bit, how does it affect the world I will come to live in’. The two are more closely bound in than presented as we see in eg the ‘effects’ of bitcoin. Therefore the role of sociology is to interject at that point, where human visions of a moral life intersect with human realities about how once can live well.

One of the annoying things academic competition does is push us to develop elaborate ways of not quite saying what is staring us in the face. There is a tendency to produce theoretical solutions to problems that only exist because there is something we want to avoid saying, in this case, that some entities are objectively real, graspable and obdurate. Assemblage theory is one of these. We known that social constructionism is not satisfactory, because material reality makes a mockery of it. So we have to come up with a way of accepting the predominant fact of material reality without saying so, by arguing that things are actants in networks.

To roll back a bit. Social constructionism is seen as old hat and research concluding that ‘phenomena x is a social construct’ is not going to be seen as very interesting. Like, duh! You have to say it is rhizomatic or somesuch. Social constructionism itself has been flattened into something bland and common sensical. To say something is socially constructed means making a set of claims which are not the same. There is a spectrum of social construction from at the one end identifying constructs that are active, and somewhat conspiratorial , to the other those that are practiced and are about the way of life we have in common.

On the active end the best example is the invention of tradition (Hobsbawm and Ranger 20212). The upshot of those studies was that states create public rituals to bind the communities they claim to represent. Perfect examples are those ‘ancient’ traditions securing the British monarchy, which turn out to be modern inventions which were deliberately put in place to support the legitimacy of the house of Hanover and by extension the new British state. Race science is another good one. All the stuff that goes on in the House of Commons did not emerge from a mystical past but were created for a purpose, usually to say: we are here, we mean to stay, and we are so powerful we can call someone Black Rod and you have to pretend that is not  an extremely funny job title. In them have a direct connection to power’s shifting claims upon our minds.

At the other end we have ground level constructs which are diffused throughout society, are are about how we live and what we value.  They draw on some of these more active constructs but are combined and reworked with others. They are less intentional. The reason that social constructionism is unsatisfactory here is that we have to understand not just that they exist, but what they are doing. For example, we can hypothesis that the heterosexual family that came into being in the form it did to service the demands of the capitalist labour market. In the early capitalist period, the family would be a group hire – factories employed whole families as labour groups. Later comes a stronger domestic/public division in some places, for some of the labour aristocracy and the middle class. Different family forms for different times, and more variation in practice than you would think from looking at common cultural representations. But the next step is to ask why a family exists at all as a social form, one that is recognisable between these very different periods. If your immediate answer is ‘it’s the best way to bring up children’, then that is a perfectly plausible but not a social constructionist explanation.

We have to pay attention to that last/first step because answers to other questions matter or make more sense in the light of it. Factory owners might have got more productivity from their employees if they just stuck them all in big dormitories. Some tried. They found that things generally did not work as they hoped. Intensive, industrial work is only bearable if people have a life away from it. Families exist because society cannot work without them. Society cannot work without them because there is no other reliable way to secure reproduction, and the human organism collapses or endures great damage without intensive personal contact. The human organism needs intensive personal contact because we need to cooperate in any resource constrained environment. We need to cooperate because we need to reproduce. Therefore the constructs we identify – the particular arrangements of people, things and habits – only make sense as answers to that deeper question, of how to live fruitfully.

Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. The invention of tradition. Cambridge University Press, 2012.

…really just one social fact

Crime is behaviour that is intentional, measurable and directly harmful. The only reason to care about crime is that it gets in the way of the good life. Ignore anything about obeying the law for its own sake because otherwise our moral sphere will crumble. Unless the person proposing that position really does never get drunk in a pub. Also when considering this contextual dimension, please ignore any pleas in mitigation that reduce the moral agency of the person doing the deed. Helps nobody.

A lot of people get punished for behaviour that is not crime in that sense, like girls and women seeking abortion, or in the UK folk posting rap lyrics containing the n-word on social media or in Scotland, football fans singing football songs perceived as likely to rile the opposition (I thought that was what football chants were for).  And a lot of people never get punished for behaviour that is within that definition, such as invading and mangling sovereign nations, toxifying drinking water and encouraging others to do harm. All the legal ins and outs – the learned exhuming of precedent, the self satisfied blather about a rules based international order or European solidarity – merely describes temporary states of convenience that match what some people and states want. The Republican Party in the USA did not want to overturn Roe because it disagrees with the Warren Court’s interpretation of the 14th or because it has a weird need to control ‘pregnant people’. It wants women to be prevented from having abortions.

So the context of crime is targeted harm. There are many factors involved which I say can be boiled down to a small set of five underlying, partly hierarchal realities – its social facts.  Here they are. Top one comes first and last:

1. Some people are literally psychopathic and are able to act accordingly. They will never stop and they need either watching or consequences. There are not many but the harm they cause is vastly disproportionate to their numbers.
2. Some people are poorly socialised/well socialised into a harmful moral universe. You can design out some of this crime with changes to incentives.
3. Some people live in a context where it is impossible to avoid morally gray behaviour. You can design out some of this crime by shifting the opportunity structure and giving people better options.
4. Some people get excitement from transgression. You can ensure crime is mostly dull and unrewarding through target hardening.
5. People gather in ways that increase opportunities for crime. This can be resolved by increasing guardianship.
6. There is an oversupply of young males. Give them something to do or get them paired off or in a monastery. That fact should give you a clue to the characteristics of the ‘people’ mentioned in the first five factors.

Crime is mostly a male problem. At heart every aspect of criminology boils down to this seldom spoken biological fact. It holds true across culture and history. Grappling with this we often frame it in terms of masculinity as a construct, which is relevant but also avoids the issue of why we have to start there in the first place.

Men might be more risk taking, might be socialised into a harmful masculine role, might be more inclined to use violence to secure status-dominance, but they are these things as men. Culture mediates biology. The problem then becomes what we mean by biology. There are plenty of biological factors at play which can be isolated: resting heart rate, testosterone levels and the rest, but they are not causes, and do not explain what biology is and why it would be linked to crime, a fundamentally social act.

Perhaps it is simply that the relative capacity to do harm gives a proportion of men the power to do that. However that does not quite do it. Men certainly have the physical and psychological capacity to harm women, boys and girls, more than the reverse, but we also have the capacity to harm each other, which is well used. Men do not act as a class interest in that sense (Filser at al 2020). In some cases I suspect the harm men cause to women is an offshoot of inter-male competition. That does not bring us closer to a mechanism or a sense of why it matters in the way it does. We must look at why men have this capacity at all.

Edlund, Lena & Li, Hongbin & Yi, Junjian & Zhang, Junsen, 2007. “Sex Ratios and Crime: Evidence from China’s One-Child Policy,” IZA Discussion Papers 3214, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).

Never ask me ‘do you think this is fence electrified? Are these berries poisonous? Is this knife super-sharp?’ Or somesuch. I know only one path to knowledge and am the sort of person who likes to find out what something is by jabbing it with my finger/licking or eating it or otherwise interacting in the way most likely to lead to immediate and non reversible consequences. An empiricist. We need to be governed by the research ethics process because we are very murky people indeed.

Research ethics is frequently presented as evolving due to a sequence of errors, cruelties and catastrophic misjudgements. Social researchers look with wistful envy … er, abject horror, back to a time when you could lock a bunch of students up, tell some of them they were ‘warders’ and some ‘prisoners’ and see if the former decided to beat the daylights out of the latter. Ethics is frequently and effectively taught as of a series of pitfalls to avoid which are wholly tied to questions of empirical research because that is where the pain is.

However, there is another kind of scholar. These people, wordcels and shape rotators both, stare unblinking at the sun of pure thought. They can work effects out from first principles. They use the British Library. They are theorists, and research ethics does not touch them. We seldom ask if you need ethical approval for a non-empirical study. Indeed how very dare you, sir, for proposing that question. Only vulgar empiricists who would gull their subjects into pretend electric shock experiments given half a chance need the stern oversight of the ethics board. Theory takes place in the realm of pure ideas, each one as unsullied as a summer’s day of childhood memory. The thought experiment is their realm. These are imaginative stories which you will often see philosophers, scientists and theorists deploy to work out some problem or illustrate an argument. They are often mocked as the ‘we have chosen to assume that each horse is a perfect circle’ response to some real world problem. Thought experiments get a bad name but they have their uses.

Types of thought experiment, of varying usefulness:

1. Let’s see if we can break our theory, or someone else’s. Maxwell’s Demon and that quantum-cat box thing that does not mean what everyone thinks.
2. Explain how we got here. The tragedy of the commons, most origin stories in mainstream economics – it’s worse than the MCU for multiple competing origin stories.
3. This is how humans work, other things being equal. Malthusian resource dilemma (we are pretty much screwed). Habermas’ social configurations and communicative rationality (no we are not). People who don’t play enough Civilization.

The ones about resource competition are often rhetorically persuasive but ineffective because they are about how we think things work rather than how they really work. The tragedy of the commons is the claim that if you have any communal property, it becomes over fished, over grazed, or over used to depletion because everyone has an incentive to maximise what they take from it. Hence, private property and land enclosure to the rescue. A scan of the historical record shows it does not work like that at all.  Enclosure of common land was a state-driven process enacted in order to serve the interests of landowners. It was not some naturally occurring event. Overexploitation was regulated because other people would notice if it was happening. The malthusian population growth crisis never happened. Communicative rationality turns out to be a cover for serving our interests while feeling smug about it.  Useless thought experiments have become real world common sense and they have damaging real world consequences.

On the other hand, some of these thought experiments show the power of thinking where some observations might take you. Free thought is dangerous to power, which is why in the current environment several governments are trying so hard to regulate it and punish people for erring, usually in the name of something nice. Perhaps thought experiments should also be governed. Theorists could be required to submit an ethical review before starting any thinking. The danger is that ideas could easily leak from the University’s containment field into real life where they can cause untold harm. The University could become liable if any of this thinking has damaging effects, such as causing people to act in unpredictable ways, question their social roles or despair at the futility of existence. A simple form would suffice. We could ask: will you be thinking about vulnerable groups and sensitive topics? E.g. University vice chancellors and principals and government policies. What steps have you taken to ensure they are not harmed by your thinking? That should tie up the pesky cogitators and leave the field open to us morlocks.

This post is inspired by an invitation from Andreas Hackl to a workshop organised by himself and Margie Cheesman on The risks of working online: refugees in the internet economy, supported by the UNHCR.

The digital society has various used for refugees beyond the usual. Digital traces might be used to support an asylum claim. Money transfers, distance communications and work opportunities become especially salient, and especially vulnerable. Trust technology could be used to distribute aid and track support needs. A number of risks are apparent. Hostile state and non-state actors can use the surveillance opportunities to target the person seeking asylum and their friends, family and loved ones. Digital verification can close the useful ambiguous spaces and conditions that refugees sometimes have to make use of. The UK Home Office’s hostile environment policy is an example here. The move away from cash payments increases some opportunities but also increases surveillance and tracing threats. Refugees often have to choose between adherence to the law and survival. They may be particularly vulnerable to cyberthreats and cybercrime.

There are many contexts in which refugees might face threats and barriers to digital inclusion. Work with Alex Wafer of Wits University in South Africa has looked at how migrants use digital labour in informal economies. Many are forced to use unreliable and insecure methods of payment and have to use platforms like Uber as jury-rigged trust technologies. This is in the context of significant unemployment and political racism directed at them.

So let’s sort out some principles and see how we can think about how to create resilience:

Continuity and capacity: there are many domains where continuity is disrupted and where digital means can help support it. I work in education so my mind immediately went to how refugees can be integrated into education and credentialing systems. There are loads of places where that might break down and impose extra costs. How can language qualifications be recognised? How do credentials maintain validity for employment or study? Are there challenges posed by different academic cultures? Various capacities are limited by the digital divide – different kinds of literacy might come into play alongside access.

Connectivity and convergence: the mobile internet is a vital resource, and existing and new infrastructures can be investigated for the support they provide, from Starlink to cafe wifi. Various risks arise from this such as the need to share insecure connections or devices. Some risks are baked into the design. For example, iOS devices do not normally allow multiple user accounts making privacy harder to maintain. These simple features or lack of them have iterative effects in terms of risk. We should also not lose sight of the way in which existing risks or disadvantages are made sharper or mitigated, for example, gender and ethnic vulnerabilities play out in very different ways in precarious situations. Refugees are a financial resource subject to a process of data extractive capitalism, technological/system experimentation and convergence (Madianou, 2019). That has effects on their autonomy and agency in the face of powerful humanitarian bodies and state agencies.

A counterpoint is that several of these principles might be inherently risky, or at least in tension, in the lives of refugees, especially that of continuity. Strategic opacity might be a useful goal, and this is where the possibilities of hidden hosting and communications, and decentralised payments could come into play. Generally for each technical solution proposed however there is also the corresponding problem of how to maintain it within a viable community. Nothing is automatic, and crypto et al does not work without a significant investment of time and labour. Therefore we might want to look first not directly at how refugees’ trajectories might be supported, but at how supportive networks can be brought into being and maintained using some of these security and trust technologies. The real questions then are the big ones of what principles inform our software and hardware design, how design can be community led and ethically protective.

Questions remain about the affordances of particular combinations of technology and the way in particular technological solutions are likely to evolve (Cheesman, 2022b). Something we should consider in future is the effect of the fracturing internet and the emergency of distinct and sometimes hostile digital infrastructures. An ethnography of infrastructure approach could work here (Leigh Starr, 1999). Refugees must move across and within these infrastructures, interleave different platforms, and balance the need for opacity with the need to maintain a digital identity and keep contact with home and receiving communities. Cheesman (2022a)  frames these challenges and tensions in dimensions of subjectivities, timescapes and materialities. We should always be aware of the uses of tech for social closure and exclusion, and the political risk facing refugees from new xenophobic movements as we see in South Africa and elsewhere at the moment.

This is the draft of a paper I am presenting at the International Forum on Drug Policy, hosted by the International Center for Drug Policy Studies at Shanghai University. The theme of the forum is  ‘The Fentanyl and Other Synthetic Opioids Crises: New Challenges and New Responses’.

Introduction: the present and future of illicit opioids in digital markets

Drug supply and drug culture has evolved rapidly. 10–15 years ago most people buying illicit drugs would do it from a known contact, arranged by telephone, and paid by handing over cash in person. Now a deal typically is arranged by social media, sometimes through the open web or darknet, dropped by delivery and paid for electronically, including by cryptocurrency. It need not involve any interaction at all, and the buying and selling parties can be unknown to each other. The drugs being bought would often be the big 6, heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, LSD, amphetamines and cannabis. Now the classic illegal drugs mix with opioids, pharmaceuticals, enhancement and lifestyle drugs, and a vast array of novel psychoactive drugs which come in many different forms for consumption (Lim et al., 2020). The emergence of digital drug selling also changes the fundamental nature of the market. In the face to face drug selling work there two markets – one public, open and risky, the other private, closed and somewhat more predictable. Digital methods allow markets to be in theory both private and open (Bakken et al., 2018).

Therefore the emergence of digital drug selling platforms and methods alters the logic and underlying rationalities of drug markets. The paper takes that as its theme, and hypothesises that these developments shape both what is sold and alter the cultural framing of drugs as meaningful commodities. To do that it examines the emergence of synthetic opioids in darknet drug markets and the ways in which they reshape supply chain relationships and drug users’ subjectivity. It uses the case of opioid buyers in darknet cryptomarket to examine the relationship between market processes and drug culture.

Taking a material culture perspective the paper discusses what aspects of opioids are sought after and how the drugs themselves are calibrated to reflect market conditions and users’ experiences and expectations. It discusses users’ presentation as hyper-modern, risk reflexive consumers. Increasingly we are seeing self-efficacy being used as the measure of a substance’s potency, a new development which points towards a novel understanding of the relationship between self and intoxication. Features of the digital marketplace design plug into this subjectivity, promoting a rational consumer ethic through its feedback features. The paper examines how fentanyl emerges as a product within the digital supply chain and how users treat it as both a threat and sometimes useful part of their psychoactive repertoire. It ends with some critical thoughts on how the ‘rational market’ design makes some features of the commodity chain transparent while obscuring others, and some suggestions about the future direction of the digital drug markets. This has implications for policing, public health and harm reduction.

What are cryptomarkets

Illicit drug supply has become more globally integrated and technology driven in multiple ways. One of the most striking is the development of digitally located specialised drug markets, or cryptomarkets (Martin, 2014). Cryptomarkets are anonymous platforms that allow buyers and sellers to exchange goods using decentralised payment systems. The first viable cryptomarket was the Silk Road, launched in 2011. Silk Road introduced two qualities that were previously mutually exclusive in drug markets: it was open – in the sense that anyone could enter, given a basic level of technical knowledge, and it was private, in the sense that people could participate without detection (Aldridge and Décary-Hétu, 2016). It was the prototype for new paradigm of illicit drug exchange that was then copied and reproduced elsewhere (Aldridge and Décary-Hétu, 2014; Bakken, 2020; Demant et al., 2019). Silk Road was eventually closed down by law enforcement. That operation did not reduce interest in the cryptomarkets. It was the start of a continuing process of innovation and disruption as market administrators tried to stay ahead of their rivals and law enforcement (Afilipoaie and Shortis, 2018). Various social, legal and economic disruptions tended to show the resilience the overall market ecosystem even as they exposed technical or organisational failings in some of them (Décary-Hétu and Giommoni, 2017). Over time however the market has been reconfigured away from large, centralised cryptomarkets to smaller ‘shopfronts’ (Martin et al., 2019). Though sometimes depersonalised they are evolving and also provide the basis of dealer to buyer direct dealing (Childs, Coomber, Bull, et al., 2020).

Cryptomarkets are a small but influential proportion of the overall drug trade. Respondents to the Global Drug Survey obtaining at least some of their drugs from darknet sites in the previous 12 months rose from 4.7% in 2014 to 15% in 2020 (Winstock, 2021). The demographic balance tends towards the ‘psychonaut’ user profile (Cunliffe et al., 2019). Alongside that there are many self-identified dependent and addicted users who find the predictability, professionalism and stability of supply a significant benefit (Bancroft, 2019).

Cryptomarkets are hosted on the Tor darknet. A darknet is any system that isolates and obfuscates internet traffic through a combination of hardware and software. Facebook has some features of a darknet. It does separate itself from the web and obfuscates users from each other depending on a combination of user-controlled and system controlled settings. Ultimately users are entirely exposed to the system so there is no hope of privacy.  ‘The’ darknet is the Tor darknet which is a different proposition. Along with other darknets like i2p and Freenet, it creates an anonymising layer over internet traffic using a combination of encryption and signal routing. Users operate with a degree of anonymity that is not possible with normal internet and web use, which has been compared to living in the Big Brother house in terms of privacy. Tor and the other darknets are part of a class of privacy promoting systems and products that include remailers, cryptocurrencies and VPNs. They differ in the degree of control and knowledge users have over the systems. Tor offers another ability which is that of private or hidden hosting. Services can be offered from anonymous servers. That ability opens up a whole host of uses, from criminal markets to encrypted chat and private discussion. It offers new qualities for commodity exchange and social interaction which is of interest to sociologists, criminologists, economists and privacy focused activists.

Cryptomarkets are a valuable data source for researchers. Researchers have developed digital trace methods to follow changes in supply and understanding price/buying dynamics (Décary-Hétu and Aldridge, 2013). These innovations allow for early confirmation of market changes such as the emergence of fentanyl and other novel synthetic opioids (Bunting et al., 2021; Lamy et al., 2020, 2021) and new drug delivery systems such as e-cigarettes and vaping (Lim et al., 2020). These changes can indicate wider developments in the illicit drug market overall.

Cryptomarkets are often presented as a fully formed, self contained system. However they are best understood as one particularly well integrated part of a larger, flexible digital market ecosystem. That system is composed of social media apps, encrypted messaging systems, decentralised discussion servers and other communication forms (Moyle et al., 2019; Saidashev and Meylakhs, 2021). Drug sellers and buyers move around within this landscape depending on the changing supply availability and their specific requirements.

Illicit digital hybridity, market habitus and the global supply chain

Drug selling takes place in the penumbra of digital life and the digital economy. There is also a growing acknowledgment of the disruptive potential of technologies – notably the digital – to transform illicit drug markets and future use patterns (Barratt et al., 2022). That has implications for what is sold, how, where and by whom. For a long time, researchers, policymakers and law enforcement have referred to ‘the drug market’ as a generic term for aggregated global drug production, trafficking and distribution systems. This approach is useful as it allows us to understand how disparate individuals and places are connected without an organised or cartel arrangement at work. It cannot be left at that though as markets create and normalise effects that are specific to them. They change the ‘market habitus’, the dispositions dealers and buyers have towards the drug exchange process, their expectations of value and quality, and their fears of exploitation and predation (Aldridge, 1998).

In a straightforward sense we should not be surprised at the infiltration of technology and drug markets. All markets involve technologies, and in another sense, are technologies. An accounting spreadsheet is a technology. Even if these technologies are not tangible, they exist and have effects: adding and subtracting mentally is a technology, amortising debt is a technology. Technologies channel, reproduce and extend human capacities. In another sense, markets conduct specific technological functions, epistemological and ontological. Illicit markets are somewhat distinct in that they are the products of other platforms (Breger Bush, 2020).

Digital drug markets are techno-social hybrids. They are novel combinations of existing technologies that create a new interactional dynamic and which expands the reach and availability of illicit drugs. They are force multipliers in the illicit drug field. Any finished – though seldom ‘complete’ – technological interface or device is a combination of other systems, however the uniqueness of drug market hybrids is their frequent non-intentional evolution. Over time, the purpose built darknet cryptomarkets have adapted into new forms combining on and offline activity, often in response to changed consumer demand, market reorganisation and competition or law enforcement successes (Childs, Coomber, Bull, et al., 2020). They might retain the same interface and technological infrastructure while being fundamentally different sites of social encounter and organisation. Illicit digital hybridity then is a process that reaches across ontological boundaries, between on and offline, face to face and remote, virtual and material.

Markets are very effective hybridising systems that connect, automate, flatten and rationalise; and also reorganise, reshape their participants’ habitus, create hierarchies, and reputations (Appel, 2016; Beckert, 2017). Classical economics seeks to treat the market as an abstract, unifying, disembedding whole, while sociology looks at how it is encountered as a material, cultural entity. Both perspectives capture a reality of how markets operate and the impact they have. In this paper I take material culture perspective which examines how technologies are taken up and used in different market cultures. I treat digital drug markets as places with their own localised cultures which promote varying market habituses.

There are also different markets overlaying each other which drug users and sellers encounter in different senses. There is the abstract market as a set of operating concepts, promoting types of rationality and self-directed action (Childs, Coomber and Bull, 2020; Hall et al., 2013). There is the material market as the connected set of different exchanges which may not be directly in touch with each other. Finally there is the material implementation of specific market contexts, whether a street market, or a darknet cryptomarket. Mirroring developments in capitalist societies, I recently observed the emergence of what might be called conscious markets, where drug sellers and buyers have a distinct understanding of themselves as operating within and according to market principles. In these spaces they see themselves as and expected to behave as service providers and consumers. That has implications for drug normalisation, access, pricing, quality, product diversity and availability (Barratt, Coney, Aldridge, Larisssa J. Maier, et al., 2017; Barratt et al., 2014).

Drug markets then work as both sorting and identification systems and as epistemological devices. They define what drug quality means, assign value to labour and risk (Bancroft, 2019). They assemble knowledge from different sources and also destroy or fragment some kinds of knowledge. From example, those that conduct drug testing and in so doing make only those qualities of the drug ‘speakable’. They define some use types and users as rational consumption, and others as deviant ‘rubbish’ consumers (Bancroft et al., 2020).

Market participation is also about positioning. For example, many sellers use strategic pricing, as became clear during the COVID pandemic (European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, 2020). Some kept prices stable in order to maintain their client base or market position. Price therefore is entity which does not necessarily signify the harmony of supply and demand, but also includes other needs like the status and trajectory of the buyer and seller. Pricing can be used methodologically as both a signal telling on the general health of the drug market, and a positioning move made by drug sellers.

As well as normalising a market habitus, digital drug selling shapes how drugs are normalised. The growing availability of a range of drugs through online sources at the same source promotes a psychoactive repertoire (Barratt, Coney, Aldridge, Larissa J Maier, et al., 2017; Measham and Moore, 2009). That is where users incorporate a range of substances for specific context based effects. These elements come together in relation to opioid and fentanyl distribution and consumption.

This paper makes several critical propositions:

1. The integration of the digital economy with the illicit drug market has led to more rapid innovation in drug types
2. That process has shifted power in the supply chain, with dealers having more opportunity to introduce new substances which may be more powerful and more harmful, such as fentanyl and its derivatives, and benzodiazepines
3. We can measure the consequences in terms of incidences of overdose and drug related death
4. The consequence is that current harm reduction advice and practice may need to acknowledge and work with that, in particular recognising greater uncertainty in terms of dose and response
5. Furthermore, buying and consumption can be more individualised and informed by medical cultures rather than subcultural drug use cultures

Literature review: Opioids and fentanyl as an NPS category

The EMCCDA and others (Duke, 2019; European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, 2019) have highlighted the rise of novel psychoactive substances (NPS) and one dimension of this upsurge in new drugs, previously little known drugs, and drugs previously largely restricted to medicinal use, is the rise of artificial opioids, fentanyl and its derivatives and benzodiazepines (‘benzos’). These drugs are frequently highly potent, and though sometimes are claimed and marketed as mimicking the effects of established drugs are often not analogous to them. Many are initially unknown in drug using cultures and must be adapted to shared cultural norms and understandings. That process puts them on a trajectory which can begin with initial interest and novelty, and later recognising the drug’s harms and side effects, redefining it as a dangerous drug of abuse (Bilgrei, 2016).

NPSs are defined as a public health threat in various ways, as a regulatory problem (Duke, 2019), and a contaminant in existing drug use cultures (Measham, 2020).  We should not automatically accept that it does it exist as a coherent category (Potter and Chatwin, 2017) and in fact consist of several distinct types which combine into different effects. There are performance and image enhancing drugs, recreational NPSs, and opioids and their derivatives. I separate these out as ‘power categories’ because they involve different demographics of users, different forms and pharmacokinetics of the drugs, and different modes of distribution and consumption contexts. Opioids and fentanyl are similarly new and not new. What is novel is the way they exist as a new power category, which locks down the multivarious ways opium functions into a narrow set of effects (Breger Bush, 2020). Ultimately the impact of opioids and fentanyl is to separate this new category from its supposed origin, the opium poppy. Though opioids mimic some of the analgesic qualities of opium, and operate on the same brain receptors, they have become a distinct ontological category marked by concerns about potency and addiction. Historically we can see the category come into being with the emergence of pain medicine during the 1970s. This was a concerted shift in the focus of medicine and of medical science which came to treat pain as an object which could be worked on and managed as part of medical practice (Bonica, 1991). New journals were founded, new directions for medical science and education were proposed, and new ideas of what pain was were proposed. A whole system of pain management emerged as medical practice and system of governance (Sherman, 2017).

Part of that history was the rise of pharmacological solutions, promoted fiercely by drug companies like Purdue (Quinones, 2016). Oxycontin came to be a default solution to pain – both physical and psychic – and the trigger for a new wave of addiction and drug related death that swept through North America (Hansen and Skinner, 2012). The drug came to be a part of white working class life and trauma, and once again changed its status as a political object. It was bound up with a number of existential threats – economic, social, and racial – which fundamentally altered the meaning and trajectory of white working class life in North America. As with other drug related panics this new regime misses out or diminishes the experiences of users who do not fit this discourse, who belong to other ethnic groups and/or are suburban or urban based (King, 2014).

In a literal sense they are a power category, as in, one which is especially potent in the mind and body of the user, and one which emphasises potency in discourse and use (Kennedy and Coelho, 2020). Potency has a double meaning: both positively powerful and because of that risky and dangerous. The ability of a drug to inscribe its history on the users’ body is a signal of its long term potency (Dennis, 2019). I argue that as opioids have come into the illicit drug market they have brought this meaning with them, and have shifted focus from users’ intoxicant experience with the drug to an emphasis on the drug as powerful and challenging. The drugs’ potency introduces new challenges: it becomes unstable, and is hard to titrate into a predictable dose (Broadhurst et al., 2020). The language around it reflects that: it is estimated to be orders of magnitude stronger that heroin or morphine, and has a high fatality risk.

Method

The aim of this study was to conduct a visual ethnographic cultural analysis of how fentanyl and opioids are represented in digital drug markets. Research for this paper used searches on current darknet drug markets using the Ahmia tool https://ahmia.fi/ maintained by Juha Nurmi. Ahmia indexes cryptomarkets and provides a common interface for searching them. Common search terms were used covering opioids and known derivatives. Listings were downloaded and analysed according to thematic codes covering their visual and textual content.

Findings

The predominant opioids for sale on the darknet are oxycodone (aka OxyContin), heroin, hydrocodone, methadone, morphine and opium. Fentanyl is sometimes sold in the ‘other’ category and sometimes bracketed out into its own. Fentanyl is sold on the darknet in a range of forms: as pills, patches and powder. A typical listing is illustrated below, from Venus Marketplace.

Fentanyl was framed in different ways throughout the markets. It was presented as a contaminant in some listings for heroin. One said ‘Our heroin is uncut and comes directly to you. There is no fentanyl, or any other active cut’ (from Black Market). Another was at pains to say their ketamine was ‘TESTED AND FENTANYL-FREE. WE ENCOURAGE ALL OUR BUYERS TO TEST THEIR PRODUCT FOR THEIR OWN SAFETY’ (Helsinki Market, Ketamine).  They also offered fentanyl testing strips free with a purchase.

Fentanyl in these listings is presented as a potential contaminant, a risky and unwanted substance. In some opioid listings it was presented as a dark other, a hyper dangerous drug which the opioid being sold was a softer, gentler version of. An oxycodone listing said of the product for sale:

These Oxycodone are a well known type of pill and are considered as the most wanted oxycodone pill on the market. They are made with an opiate which is alternative to fentanyl as fentanyl is considered dangerous and can be harmful for the user. (The Hidden Market, 10x m30 oxycodone mallinckrodt pharmaceuticals)

Fentanyl sellers presented an alternative narrative, one that focused on fentanyl as a powerful drug. A counter narrative presentation by sellers was one centered around pain treatment and that presented fentanyl as superior to other opioids

Fentanyl is an extremely potent synthetic opioid prescribed for the treatment of acute and chronic pain, usually in patients already tolerant to high doses of less powerful opioids such as morphine or oxycodone. Fentanyl is approximately 100 times more potent than morphine and 20 – 50 times more potent than heroin. (Deepshop, listing ‘Buy Fentanyl Powder Online)

Top of Form

Fentanyl listings validated the product through reference to its physical form. Sales offering it in powder form noted the relative rarity of this type and referred to it as ‘laboratory type’. Derivates such as acetyl fentanyl were often listed as ‘Research Chemicals’ when sold. As part of this pharmaceutical representation side effects were listed, which was unusual in comparison to more established drugs such as cocaine.

As a μ-opioid receptor agonist, acetyl fentanyl may serve as a direct substitute for heroin or other opioids. Side effects of fentanyl analogues are similar to those of fentanyl itself, which include pruritus, nausea and potentially severe respiratory depression. (CJ Market, Buy Fentanyl Powder Online Buy Acetyl Fentanyl Powder Online. Cheap and Trusted Supplier with Top Stealth USA, UK Canada, Australia and worldwide)

Sellers offering fentanyl itself were also not entirely positive about the drug. They often acknowledged the risk of overdose and death, describing it as a powerful painkiller with restricted use.

Opioids were presented in terms of their material characteristics. Most were sold in pill form and the sellers were at pains to say that the pills would behave as expected. They tried to demonstrate that they were professionally produced and would not break apart while being used. Sellers were aware that their customers would often want to transform their product into a more consumable form, one pill sellers saying that their customers liked to snort or inject the product. Customers’ responses focused on the potency and compared the product to others:

Pills are very weak, no tolerance barely felt a huge amount off of 1x pill. Similar to roughly 20mg of Morphine or so? This was taken orally how I would expect to take Oxycodone. Needed to take 3 for any decent effect, only problem with this, the high only lasts about 2 hours and then your tolerance is too high to take more so it becomes a waste. (feedback on The Hidden Market)

Opioids such as OxyContin were sold according to some of their pharmacological characteristics such as extended release versions. Overall then we can see how an illicit drug is both a pharmaceutical existing within a medical culture, and an illicit drug existing within a drug use subculture.

Discussion

It was apparent throughout the study how much substances were represented in terms of purity and potency. Potency could appear as something desired, and risky at the same time. In other research I have noted how potency becomes a distinct aspect of the opioid experience (Bancroft, 2020). It is striking how in these listings the drugs are recognised as dangerous for this reason. Potency has a complex position in the accounts of drug users. An unexpectedly potent effect can be reassuring, or thrilling. It tells them they are still able to feel pleasure, to experience risk and that their drug use is not wholly defined by addiction.

Sellers focused a great deal on the drugs’ distinct material characteristics, and these clearly separated them out from other drugs for sale such as cocaine, ecstasy and cannabis. Listings for those drugs focused on the drug effect, on the intoxicant effect it would have on the user. Opioid listings focused more on what the drug was. In a sense the drug became its own powerful ‘actor’ over which the seller presented themselves as having limited control.

The markets and the vendors presented tools to make the drug buying and consumption process transparent. More complex markets display ratings to support a rational approach to drug consumption. Testing was promoted to create an objective sense of what the drug was as a substance, and to show that what was being sold was uncontaminated. The ability of users to manage their use effectively was both supported and limited by this. The relative transparency about the products’ pharmaceutical qualities exposed the limits of users’ and vendors’ abilities to manage and limit pharmaceutical risks. To some extent this could be a fiction. Adulteration could be introduced further up the supply chain so it became impossible to avoid consuming unwanted adulterants. Although the markets were designed to get around supply chain risks they often highlighted and reproduced them. Problems arose when the supply chain was seen to introduce invasive substances (Mars et al., 2019) which fentanyl was often presented as.

Pain was unexpectedly central to the narrative. The power fentanyl had over pain was reiterated as evidence of the drug’s serious purpose and its strength. Much of this rhetoric was recycled from statements by pharmaceutical companies themselves. Many darknet market listings focused on pain medications, and this was a growing theme with several markets dedicated largely to pain relief.

Some of the shift in the drug market towards benzos, opioids and fentanyl is driven by changing demographics, by the emergency of integrated supply chain operations, and the political economy of the illicit drug market. Drug businesses operating in this way integrate different principles from those of sellers of established drugs. They demonstrate aptitudes in chemical-industrial processes, rather than for example, subcultural cultural nous, or involvement in drug subcultures. A contrast is sellers of psychedelics on the darknet, who show themselves as embedded in the principles of psychedelic culture, including a measure of altruism and a concern for harm reduction. Harms can be driven by supply chain needs such as fentanyl displacing heroin/opioids (Lamy et al., 2020). This has implications for policing, public health and harm reduction. Sellers of opioids and fentanyl recognise the drug as inherently dangerous, and therefore resistant to the common harm reduction advice to ‘start low and go slow’.

The generalisation of markets as a mode for illicit distribution and organisation has had wide ranging effects on how drug users obtain and consume drugs. As has happened more broadly in capitalist societies we have seen an expansion in the conscious use of market forms for identity formation, self-creation and expression. Market principles value certain qualities in both products and users: professionalism, the capacity to make objective judgements, to act as self directed, accountable agents, and invite drug users to express themselves as instrumental, reflexively hedonistic consumers. That extends even to drug cultures which are not seen to priories instrumental hedonism, such as those surround opioids. One worrisome effect of this is atomisation: consumption takes place outwith any kind of supportive network.

A further effect of markets is commodification and commoditisation. Drug markets are not immune from that, and one factor in the rise of opioids and benzos is that they are immediately commoditisable.  The implications of commodification extend beyond what is sold to the nature of drug businesses themselves. Early trends we can observe are the replacement of the core/distributor model of drug business operation with integrated lab to user operations.

Conclusion

In capitalist societies markets are often presented as naturally occurring creations, places where people with something to sell and buy, and meet others with a need to fulfil meet in mutual exchange. Digital drug markets can promote and embed norms of destigmatisation and harm reduction but there are risks in where foregrounding of a market focused engagement with drug distribution can lead us. It may concentrate market power, promote bulk purchase, create supply chain risks and ultimately increase seller power. The rise of opioids can be seen as part of that process.

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