Situating high-level darknet drug vending: an emancipation from open and closed market drug dealing?

While existing research has readily applied perspectives garnered from open and closed market dealing to conceptualise darknet drug vending, this has been done without clear empirical consideration of the applicability of traditional market dealing to darknet drug vending. This research addresses this gap by considering these three forms of drug dealing in light of key typological features: motivation, environment, methods, business model, and offender profile. These features are then applied to 80 arrest cases of high-level darknet vendors to determine their applicability in understanding vendor behaviour. The results show that high-level darknet drug vendors reflect the characteristics of their highly anonymised, libertarian market, distinguishing them from traditional drug sellers.