Background: Amid the opioid overdose crisis, communities have formed around darknet markets to reduce the risks of darknet drug trade, including the harms of substance use. However, the nature and quality of harm reduction efforts by darknet market operators, drug vendors and substance users have not yet been examined.
Objectives: The aim of this research was to gain a deeper understanding and to evaluate this community-based peer-to-peer harm reduction activity.
Methods: A mixed-methods study was conducted to first explore the harm reduction topic of a darknet forum through qualitative content analysis, and then to further evaluate the results through focus group interviews involving harm reduction practitioners from Budapest, Hungary and Vancouver, Canada.
Results: The results showed that peer harm reduction among darknet operators, drug vendors and substance users is supported by both experts and professional organisations present in the darknet forum. The main theme of the darknet forum was drug testing, the availability of which depends on national legislation and the resources of local harm reduction organisations.
Implications: These findings highlight transnational variations in the role of global darknet markets in harm reduction and call on decision and policy makers to increase the cross-border availability of harm reduction programmes, the resources of harm reduction organisations and re-evaluate local drug policies.
Richard Frank is a Professor in the School of Criminology at Simon Fraser University (SFU), Canada and Director of the International CyberCrime Research Centre (ICCRC). Richard completed a PhD in Computing Science (2010) and another PhD in Criminology (2013) at SFU. His main research interest is Cybercrime. Specifically, he's interested in researching hackers and security issues, the dark web, online terrorism and warfare, eLaundering and cryptocurrencies, and online child exploitation. He is the creator of The Dark Crawler, a tool for collecting and analyzing data from the open Internet, dark web, and online discussion forums. Through this tool the ICCRC has collected ~150 million posts from various right-wing, left-wing, gender-based and religiously-motivated extremist communities, leading to a number of projects and publications.
Dr. Frank has publications in top-level data mining outlets, such as in Knowledge Discovery in Databases, and security conferences such as Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI). His research can also be found in Criminology and Criminal Justice, Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, and the Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice, to name a few.