A study by Ashly Fuller, a doctorate candidate at University College London last year indicates that as many as 13 per cent of social media posts may advertise illegal drugs – underlining the scale of the issue that Meta, X, TikTok and Snapchat have on their hands. Drug sale advertisements could even be increasing in prevalence, according to a forthcoming study by Fuller which was shared with Wired.

Fuller surveyed 1,100 13- to 18-year-olds and found that 60 per cent of young people have seen drug-related content on social media (mostly for cannabis and psychedelics, which have been legalized or decriminalized in a few parts of the world). “They’re common enough that young people stumble upon them on TikTok and Instagram.”

Data released by social media companies shows that millions of pieces of drug-related content are already taken down every year. Facebook and Instagram took action against 9.3 million pieces of drug-related content last year, while Snapchat says it did so in 241,227 cases in the second half of 2023.

But these companies’ actions are sometimes indiscriminate. The accounts of organisations promoting drug harm reduction and social media personalities who post content about drugs and psychedelics, but who do not sell them, are being caught in the crossfire of efforts to get a grip on the issue.

In response, social media companies’ algorithms to detect drug-selling behaviour are getting smarter and are aggregating images and emojis, Fuller says. “There is an understanding that seeing these ads on social media is correlated to a decreased risk perception and young people are led to think the drugs are safer.” Of the teenagers she sampled, 10 per cent reported purchasing drugs via social media. “Those exposed to drug ads were 17 times more likely to purchase drugs on social media compared to those who had not seen such ads,” she adds.

But according to Meta, no more than 1 in 2,000 views on Facebook is of content that violates its restricted goods policy. Between July and September 2024, Meta says that 96 per cent of drug sales content that violated its terms was removed before a user reported it. TikTok, meanwhile, removed 99.5 per cent of content violating its policy on alcohol, tobacco and drugs before it was reported, according to its Community Guidelines Enforcement Report for the second quarter of 2024.

Meta, SnapChat and TikTok declined to offer an on-the-record statement. X did not respond to requests for comment. A Telegram spokesperson said: “Telegram actively combats misuse of the platform, including for the sale of illicit substances. Moderators, empowered with custom AI and machine learning tools, remove millions of pieces of harmful content each day to keep the platform safe.”

The world’s first internet-facilitated sale, in the early 1970s and on the internet precursor Arpanet, was for an undetermined amount of cannabis. The agreement was between students. Today, strangers may contact you on social media offering drugs to buy. For as many people who believe this is something of a utopian development, you can be sure many more view it as dystopian – especially if the dealers are in fact scammers or selling dodgy goods.

“We were wondering if you will be interested in having a trip with our products,” one Instagram account messaged me recently. On X, meanwhile, posts related to psychedelics are regularly infiltrated by bots directing traffic to dealers. “Virtually all psychedelic post[s] are followed by bots selling microdoses,” leading psychedelics researcher Matthew Johnson posted on X in December. “All my blocking & spam reporting seems futile.” An account recently replied to one of my posts, linking to the profile of their apparent boss: “He’s got all Psyche meds & acids.”

Some dealers lurking on social media are even more shady. The drug information organisation Pill Report has told of people wiring cash to dealers and getting duped, with nothing sent to them. When one such person interviewed by Wired sent money for cannabis through a cash transfer app but received nothing in the mail, he reported the account. “It became a threatening match and they sent photos of thugs with guns saying they were going to come for me,” he says.

In a Vice documentary on drug sales on social media, it took the host just five minutes to connect with a dealer in London. “Anyone can sell nowadays,” another dealer told the journalist. “You see little kids, 12-year-olds and everything, setting up accounts. It’s easy, isn’t it? You can sit at home, make an account, and make money. Who doesn’t want to do that?” As part of a separate research project, a 15-year-old was able to locate an account selling Xanax tablets in mere seconds on Instagram.

Telegram’s drug markets remain somewhat complicated to access for the average person, but are still far easier to access than those on the dark net. “The problem with dark-net markets is that you need to install Tor, get a PGP, and have cryptocurrencies,” says Francois Lamy, an associate professor at Mahidol University in Thailand who researches the sociology of drug use. “It’s a little bit more difficult to navigate. With Telegram, you type a few keywords, and there you go. You can find everything.”

When Telegram founder Pavel Durov was arrested outside of Paris in August, prosecutors cited the scale of drug trafficking on the platform as part of the justification. The next month, a new Telegram user policy was introduced to “discourage criminals” and hand over the data of users who are accused of illegal behaviour on the platform by authorities with search warrants.

“While 99.999 percent of Telegram users have nothing to do with crime, the 0.001 per cent involved in illicit activities create a bad image for the entire platform, putting the interests of our almost billion users at risk,” Durov said in a statement at the time.

But experts warn that any increased enforcement on Telegram will simply cause dealers to go elsewhere, disrupting a market that has largely established itself as a safer source of drugs. “If one supply avenue is closed by enforcement, another is soon found to replace it,” says Steve Rolles, senior policy analyst at the Transform Drug Policy Foundation, a UK-based NGO. “Enforcement has, somewhat ironically, actually accelerated these innovations – driving the evolution of ever more sophisticated sales models. The only way such markets can be defeated in the longer term is to replace them through legal regulation.”

• A Tell / Wired report