For months, Artyom had watched with concern as the park near his house turned into a popular drop spot for drug dealers. The shrubs provided the perfect cover for hiding narcotics their clients would later dig up.
At night, the young software engineer says, that park “looks like a fairy forest” with “fireflies lurking everywhere” as dealers and buyers navigated the shrubbery by the light of their mobile phones. But the danger of the situation only hit home when Artyom’s dog, Tosha, dug up one of these “deliveries” and accidentally overdosed on psychedelics.
After rushing Tosha to a nearby vet, it dawned on Artyom that he would have to take matters into his own hands. He had already informed the police about the park many times, but they did nothing.
The problem isn’t just in Artyom’s neighborhood. Every day, hundreds scour Moscow’s backstreets, the undersides of its park benches and its flower beds for zakladki—industrial-grade plastic bags filled with drugs. These dead drops are neatly sealed and equipped with small magnets so they can cling to rails, windowsills and drainage pipes.
While the goods are delivered to these unlikely corners of Moscow, the deals themselves now originate in an even more bizarre place. The transactions plaguing Artyom’s neighborhood begin in drug supermarkets hidden online in the deepest reaches of the “dark web.”
Here, hundreds of eager suppliers compete to satisfy their customers’ sophisticated palettes. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are the legal tender here. In exchange, buyers are issued GPS coordinates to the spot where their purchases await in flower beds and drain pipes.
The anonymity these marketplaces provide and the fact that they remove the most troublesome link in any drug deal — the real-life meeting between dealer and buyer — have been a boon for Russia’s illegal drug sellers. As of January 2016, the narcotic industry was turning an annual profit of 1.5 trillion rubles ($25 billion), according to Viktor Ivanov, ex-head of Russia’s drug enforcement agency. One online drug supermarket owner told the news website Lenta.ru that his business’s turnaround in 2016 amounted to 24 billion rubles ($412 million.)
The online marketplace has also proven almost impossible to police. As a result, Artyom now spends his evenings patrolling his northern Moscow neighborhood to counter Russia’s dealers and junkies.
“We used to have a flower bed in our courtyard, and the flowers started disappearing” Artyom recalls. “At first, I thought some old women were taking them for their gardens in the country, but then I saw that it was these junkies digging them up and looking for their drugs.”
The markets
Hidden away from the “clearnet” indexed by Google, accessible only via specialist software, is one of Russia’s biggest online drug supermarkets.
The site’s front page is an epilepsy-inducing checkerboard of flashing, boldfaced banner ads: “Hashish! Highest Quality Cocaine! Every 5th Drop Free!” More than 100 suppliers sell everything from drugs and disposable “burner” phones and SIM cards to ready-to-move drug labs.
The site is part of a highly competitive and customer-oriented industry. Unlike in the pre-internet days, drug users are no longer forced to meet with shady characters prone to supplying low-quality products.
Dealers offer an exhaustive description of their wares, their chemical components and growing methods (for marijuana, mushrooms and other plant-based narcotics). And quality control is almost obsessive. In the de-monopolized, competitive market of the internet, suppliers are no longer motivated by the short-term benefits of diluting their product with cutting agents.
Cheating is actively discouraged by the site. One market’s front page features a warning to suppliers in the form of a Biblical quote from Leviticus: “Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgement, in meteyard, in weight or in measure; Just balances and just weights ye shall have.”
The most popular items are marijuana and amphetamines. Both have one major advantage: They do not need to be imported.