An insight into the deep web; why it matters for addiction psychiatry?

ObjectiveNowadays, the web is rapidly spreading, playing a significant role in the marketing or sale or distribution of quasi legal drugs, hence facilitating continuous changes in drug scenarios. The easily renewable and anarchic online drug-market is gradually transforming indeed the drug market itself, from a street to a virtual one, with customers being able to shop with a relative anonymity in a 24-hr marketplace. The hidden deep web is facilitating this phenomenon. The paper aims at providing an overview to mental health's and addiction's professionals on current knowledge about prodrug activities on the deep web.MethodsA nonparticipant netnographic qualitative study of a list of prodrug websites (blogs, fora, and drug marketplaces) located into the surface web was here carried out. A systematic Internet search was conducted on Duckduckgo (R) and Google (R) whilst including the following keywords: drugs or legal highs or Novel Psychoactive Substances or NPS combined with the word deep web.ResultsFour themes (e.g., How to access into the deepweb; Darknet and the online drug trading sites; Grams-search engine for the deep web; and Cryptocurrencies) and 14 categories were here generated and properly discussed.ConclusionsThis paper represents a complete or systematical guideline about the deep web, specifically focusing on practical information on online drug marketplaces, useful for addiction's professionals.