Changes in Online Psychoactive Substance Trade via Telegram during the COVID-19 Pandemic.
European addiction research – January 01, 2021
Source: PubMed
Summary
During the COVID-19 lockdown, online drug markets on Telegram saw a notable shift. Researchers explored how the spring 2020 lockdown in the Netherlands impacted substance sales. Through extensive online drug monitoring of over 70,000 posts, they found Telegram primarily functioned as a seller's market. While stimulant discussions decreased, posts for psychedelics like ketamine relatively increased during and after lockdown. This reveals the COVID-19 pandemic significantly altered online substance trade, with varying impacts across drug categories.
Abstract
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. 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. 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. 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.