Estimated Size of Drug Markets on the Dark Web

"An Internet survey conducted simultaneously in 10 European Union countries in the period 2017–2018 among some 20,000 Internet-using drug consumers,15 using various recruitment strategies,16 found that 8 per cent of survey respondents had bought drugs on the dark web.17 This was a far smaller proportion than those who had bought drugs from a drug dealer (59 per cent), but a significantly larger proportion than those who had bought drugs from an online shop (3 per cent) or a specialized NPS shop (1 per cent).18 

"Another online survey, based on a convenience sample of more than 100,000 participants in 35 countries worldwide, suggested that the proportion of Internet-using drug consumers who had purchased drugs on the dark web in the previous 12 months had more than doubled between 2014 and 2022, from 4.7 to 10.8 per cent.19 Although plausible, these findings should be interpreted with caution, because they are not based on representative global samples but on convenience samples that are characterized by an overrepresentation of Internet users in Europe, the Americas and Oceania. 

"Estimating the size of drug markets on the dark web is challenging. An analysis of major darknet markets using web-crawling techniques has shown that they are highly volatile and have a propensity to disappear at short notice as a result of both law enforcement successes in dismantling such markets and exit scams.20 

"Another approach has been to systematically investigate the existing blockchains of various cryptocurrencies for suspicious addresses involved in illegal transactions, and the resulting money flows between such addresses (cryptocurrency wallets). The analysis of various blockchains of cryptocurrencies suggests that darknet markets (mostly selling drugs) continued growing up until 2021, when their combined revenue reached a record high of an estimated $2.7 billion (equivalent to an estimated 1.5 per cent of retail drug sales in North America and Europe),21 before declining by half, to around $1.3 billion in 2022, mostly as a result of the dismantling of the darknet platform Hydra Market in April 2022.22 Nonetheless, darknet markets continue to show resilience and started to recover in the second half of 2022."