By: Jonathan P. Caulkins, Philippe C. Schicker, H. Brinton Milward & Peter Reuter

Overdose deaths in North America have soared, primarily because of the spread of illegally manufactured fentanyl. This paper uses detailed qualitative and transaction-level data to analyse an early and prominent dark web fentanyl-selling operation. The data record the date, drug, quantity, and selling price for 5,589 transactions comprising 872,659 items sold for a little over $2.8 million through AlphaBay. Findings include that the organisation sustained an impressive sales growth rate of approximately 15% per week, com-pounded. Increasing order sizes by a factor of ten reduced the price per pill by approximately 25% for Oxycodone and 50% for Xanax. Those steep quantity discounts imply large price markups when selling further down the distribution chain. Such high growth rates and price markups suggest that it might be difficult to constrain supply by shutting down individual organisations, since any remain-ing organisations may be able to quickly grow to fill unmet demand.

Glob. Crime 2023

By Roderic Broadhurst, Jack Foye, Chuxuan Jiang and Matthew Ball

This study provides a snapshot of the availability of weapons across eight omnibus or ‘High Street’ and 12 specialist darknet or illicit cryptomarkets between July and December 2019. Overall, 2,124 weapons were identified, of which 11 percent were found on niche markets. On all markets, weapons for sale included 1,497 handguns, 218 rifles, 41 submachine guns and 34 shotguns. Also available were ammunition (n=79), explosives (n=37) and accessories such as silencers (n=24). Omnibus markets also sold other weapons (n=70) such as tasers, pepper spray and knives, and digital products (n=112), mostly DIY weapon manuals, as well as chemical, biological, nuclear and radiological weapons (n=12). The data allowed for estimates of the cost of weapons and some description of the 215 vendors identified, 18 (8.4%) of whom were active across more than one market.

Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology, 2021. 20p.