The continued global crisis makes it difficult to know how black-market consumer behavior will change in the future.
The coronavirus pandemic caused an uptick in doomsday hoarding behavior, with Americans stocking up on toilet paper, frozen poultry, and hand sanitizer. They also bought a bunch of marijuana.
Previous data showed legal cannabis sales skyrocketed when Americans became serious about the pandemic around mid-March. But now we have a better idea of how COVID-19 affected black market sales.
The European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) studied dark web marijuana sales with findings published in the Journal of Addiction Medicine, as WIRED first reported. The number of dark web cannabis sales increased more than 30% in the first three months of 2020, which coincided with when the pandemic first impacted Europe. EMCDDA analysts aren’t sure why this jump in sales began as early as it did in Europe.
“It’s possible that buyers were trying to stock up for the weeks to come, or there’s just a larger group of cannabis users discovering online as a convenient distribution channel when social contact is limited and they have limited means to reach out to their usual dealer,” EMCDDA’s principal scientific analyst, Teodora Groshkova, told WIRED.
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