How Drugs Went Viral

Thanks to social media, you can now get anything from Xanax to heroin quicker than a Domino’s delivery. Cosmopolitan investigates how a new generation got hooked on class-As.

- Daniella Scott & Georgia Chambers

Within the past hour I have reorganised my inbox, made a dinner reservation for my boss, written a feature on health shots and scored five bars of Xanax, some MDMA, ketamine and Ritalin… all without leaving my desk. Scoring that lot was the easy bit. The feature took about three hours to polish off. But getting hold of the drugs? Oh… about 10 minutes. Back in the not-so-good old days, if you wanted some recreational “helpers”, you needed three things: contacts, time and the sort of constitution that could handle meeting a man called “Wurzel” behind Halfords on a lonesome industrial estate at half past midnight. That meant drugs were often the preserve of the connected and the truly dedicated. But things have changed. Social media hasn’t just affected the way we communicate, date and eat, but how we get high, too. Because there is a new way to score. It’s fiendishly quick, largely anonymous and may be about to cause a drugs epidemic, the likes of which we’ve never seen before.

Dealers like Oliver* are leading the charge. His phone – which lies face-down on his long dining table – rattles every few seconds. Each time this happens, his eyes break contact with mine and dart to it: another customer. Business is booming for Oliver. Earlier, in his bedroom, he’d pulled open his desk drawer to reveal a sea of pink and purple pills. “I can shift this lot in about two weeks,” he tells me, smiling. For this haul, he’d spent just £180 Bitcoin (a digital currency not linked to your personal banking system) on the dark web (a part of the internet only accessible with certain software where users are anonymous and untraceable) – and will make £1,000 shifting them on. In a fortnight, he’ll repeat the cycle.