A Geographic Analysis of Drug Trafficking Patterns on the TOR Network

Abstract

As globalization processes continue to impact patterns in drug‐trafficking operations worldwide, a cyber‐based dimension of the drug trade has recently emerged via the Tor Network. This study employed geovisualization and exploratory spatial data analysis to examine drug distributions of heroin, cocaine, new psychoactive substances, and prescription drugs advertised on Agora, the largest international marketplace on the Tor Network at the time of data collection. Data were collected using webcrawling software and mapped to determine the presence of statistical outliers internationally or hotspots within Europe. Global Moran's I testing revealed that drugs sourced from Europe were randomly distributed. Box maps confirmed the visual analysis that six countries (including Canada and the United States) dominated world listings across the four drug types. Globally, heroin and cocaine markets were found to be almost exclusively retail based, while new psychoactive substances and prescription drugs were sold from countries with established pharmaceutical and chemical industries.

Key words:

• exploratory spatial data analysis
• Tor Network
• drugs

Notes

1. In the weeks prior to this complete crawl, a series of test crawls were performed to ensure the precision and reliability of the webcrawling software. Soska and Christian raised concerns regarding the ability to successfully capture the Agora marketplace using these techniques due to the site's frequent downtime causing webcrawling software to timeout (2015). However, the authors of this study were able to verify that the full crawl used in this research was complete through extensive hand‐checking methods that involved physically counting the number of listings per page, then multiplying this number by the number of pages under each category on Agora's site on the day of the crawl (see Dolliver 2015b for further methods‐based explications).

2. Soska and Christin's aggregated Tor study of sixteen marketplaces did not consider geography as a variable (2015).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Diana S. Dolliver

Dr. Dolliver is an assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487‐0320; [[email protected]].

Steven P. Ericson

Dr. Ericson is an instructor in geography at the same institution [[email protected]].

Katherine L. Love

Ms. Love is a student of law at the University of Richmond, Richmond, Virginia 23173; [[email protected]].