期刊名称:International Journal of Population Data Science
电子版ISSN:2399-4908
出版年度:2019
卷号:4
期号:3
页码:1-1
DOI:10.23889/ijpds.v4i3.1182
出版社:Swansea University
其他摘要:Since the development of cryptomarkets, researchers have been interested in the effects of these platforms on the 'cyber geography' of the drugs market. To understand these effects researchers have often focused on national or continent-level drugs flows inferred from data scraped from cryptomarket vendor listings. In this paper we demonstrate the value of administrative data as a complementary data source to understand the intra-national aspect of the supply of drugs through cryptomarkets. We use data from a UK law-enforcement agency to analyse the geographical distribution of drugs packages that were identified being delivered into Scotland in the post. We linked these data to information on neighbourhood deprivation to understand the characteristics of places to which packages were addressed and found that packages were, on average, more likely to be delivered both to deprived, urban areas and remote island localities. We contend that these results provide evidence that cryptomarkets have affected drug markets in remote island communities in the same way as legal e-commerce sites affected the markets for consumer goods. This further suggests that the spatial transformation of local drug dealing patterns by global cryptomarkets is in fact experienced differently in different places and geographies.