One academic study of the goods for sale on the original Silk Road estimated that about one-fifth of all its listings were aimed at dealers, and that these “business-to-business” transactions accounted for between 31 percent and 45 percent of the site’s trades by value.3 If that is the case, even drug users who buy their supplies “offline,” from a dealer or friend, may well be buying a product that was traded online at an earlier stage in the supply chain.
