An estimated 18 percent of drug users bought from Silk Road, says study

Ars Technica » Scientific Method 2013-12-27

About 18 percent of drug users used product purchased from Silk Road before it was shut down, according to a study set to be published in the journal Addiction and highlighted by DailyDot. The overwhelming majority of users in the US, UK, and Australia went on Silk Road to buy MDMA, more so than marijuana.

Silk Road was a broad-based black market for selling drugs and fake documents that ran for three years and was accessible via the Tor network until the FBI seized the domain and shut down the site in October. The founder, known as Dread Pirate Roberts, was arrested and charged with, among other things, attempting to contract a murderer to kill a former Silk Road employee.

The survey used to complete the study was taken in late 2012  and was conducted online, which may have skewed its results in favor of knowledge and use of the online service—per the abstract, the 9,470 respondents between all three countries skew overwhelmingly male, between 76 and 80 percent of the total.

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