Hybrid Governance in Online Drug Distribution

A growing share of illicit drug dealing occurs on online platforms. Technological innovations, such as encryption and anonymous payments, have enabled new and more complex ways of organizing transactions. This conceptual essay advances the study of online drug dealing by describing how governance mechanisms from markets, networks, and hierarchies are combined to reduce transactional uncertainty. Based on published research, I argue that cryptomarkets and social media drug distribution prioritize prices, trust, and rules differently, and that this can be understood as hybrid governance. In cryptomarkets, networked reputation scores are important, but their reliability is interdependent of administrators’ sanctioning capacity. Similarly, the open advertisement of prices and products relies on the ability to expose fraudulent vendors. On social media, buyers prioritize easy access and fast delivery and characteristics of market governance, while hierarchical rules are absent, and networked reputations play only a small role. Existing typologies of drug dealing organization do not capture these combinations of governance mechanisms. Hybrid governance and the interdependence of several governance mechanisms better capture the empirical reality of new and emerging modes in online drug distribution.