First, we designed and implemented an anonymous marketplace data collection and analysis pipeline to gather and identify opioids data in 16 anonymous marketplaces and forums over a period of almost 9 years between 2011 and 2020. Second, we fine-tuned the semantic comparison model proposed by Yuan et al [19] for opioid jargon detection, which can recognize the opioid jargon as innocent-looking terms and the dedicated terms only used in the anonymous marketplaces and forums. In this way, we generated a rich underground marketplace opioid vocabulary of 311 opioid keywords with 13 categories. Third, we conducted a comprehensive, large-scale, longitudinal study to measure and characterize opioid trading in anonymous online marketplaces and forums. In our study, a total of 248,359 listings from 10 anonymous online marketplaces and 1,138,961 traces (ie, threads of posts) from 6 underground forums were collected.
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When the buyer wants to check out and make a purchase using cryptocurrency (eg, Bitcoin), if the trader accepts payment through an anonymous online marketplace as an escrow, the buyer will place the listed amount of cryptocurrency in escrow (step 7). Otherwise, the buyer will pay the trader directly using cryptocurrency or any other payment method accepted by the trader (step 9) [7]. Note that the escrow mechanism is widely deployed in the anonymous online market because it helps to build trust and resolve disputes between sellers and buyers. When the purchase is made, the opioid trader ships the purchased item to the buyer (step 10).
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We then developed a suite of opioid domain–specific text mining techniques (eg, opioid jargon detection and opioid trading information retrieval) to recognize information relevant to opioid trading activities (eg, commodities, price, shipping information, and suppliers). Subsequently, we conducted a comprehensive, large-scale, longitudinal study to demystify opioid trading activities in anonymous markets and forums. Our study identified 41,000 opioid trade–related marketplace listings and forum posts by analyzing more than 1 million listings and posts in multiple anonymous marketplaces and forums, which is the largest underground opioid trading data set ever reported. We found evidence through extensive analyses of the anonymous online market of pervasive supply, which fuels the international opioid epidemic.
- Pharmacy benefits managers (PBMs) are working with employers to cover these medications through prior authorization models.
- It also recently announced plans to build a second multibillion-dollar facility in Wilson.
- HUB offers licenses to its proprietary technology and provides drug development services using its living organoid biobanks.
- The papers have been cited within the report and are also being made available here for those who would like further information on the topic.
- The global market for pancreatic and bile duct cancer therapeutics is experiencing significant growth driven by advancements in targeted therapies, increasing prevalence of these cancers, and expanding research initiatives.
- Learn how we’re keeping our communities safer and improving access to mental health through the transition of nine supervised drug injection sites into HART Hubs.
- To better understand the potential bundling relationship of opioid suppliers across different marketplaces, we calculated the Jaccard similarity coefficient between the suppliers in different marketplaces (Figure 6).
- Sri Lanka’s pancreatic and bile duct cancer drug market is expected to grow steadily, supported by increased healthcare spending and improved diagnostic capabilities.
Gene therapy market outlook projects strong growth through 2031
First, an opioid trader, who intends to list the selling information and find potential customers, will first access the anonymous online marketplaces and forums, using an anonymous browsing tool such as a Tor client or a web-to-Tor proxy (step 1 in Figure 1) [5,6]. Anonymous online marketplaces and forums usually operate as hidden Tor services, which can only be resolved through Tor (an anonymity network). Figures 2 and 3 illustrate examples of opioid listings in The Versus Project and Alphabay. The opioid trader will also use an anonymous online forum (eg, The Hub Forum) to post promotional information to attract potential customers (step 3). We first conducted a whole-site crawl of anonymous online marketplaces and forums to solicit data. Our study used opioid keywords and jargons to recognize listings and forum traces related to underground opioid trading activities.
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The government said it plans to have no gaps in care, meaning the new hubs will be open before supervised consumption sites are ordered to close by March 31, 2025. Nineteen new addiction treatment hubs will be operational in Ontario before 10 supervised consumption sites are forced to close their doors in March, the Ford government is promising. Hopefully, this has helped to illuminate some of the mystery behind hubs and show how they work to ease the specialty process for some patients.
An example of a DrugHub Market product listing
Market players are increasingly focusing on local collaborations and clinical research to enhance treatment options tailored to regional patient needs. The opioid buyer (client) will also access the anonymous online market and create an account in each anonymous marketplace before they can find the listings of opioids (step 4). After perusing the items available on the anonymous online market (step 5), the buyer will add opioids to their shopping cart (step 6).
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Our opioid jargon identification procedure implemented a modified semantic comparison model [19]. This model employed a neural network–based embedding technique to analyze the semantics of words in different corpora. In particular, in the semantic comparison model, the size of the input layer was doubled while not expanding either the hidden or the output layer. Hence, every word has 2 vectors, each describing the word’s relations with other words in one corpus. In the meantime, these 2 vectors are still comparable because they are used together in the neural network to train a single skip-gram model for predicting the surrounding windows of context words.
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Among them, we identified 28,106 opioid product listings and 13,508 opioid-related promotional and review forum traces from 5147 unique opioid suppliers’ IDs and 2778 unique opioid buyers’ IDs. A total of 248,359 listings from 10 anonymous online marketplaces and 1,138,961 traces (ie, threads of posts) from 6 underground forums were collected. Recent years have witnessed the trend of studying opioid use disorders using anonymous marketplaces and forums data [5,8,10] and public social media data (eg, Twitter and Instagram) [11-14].
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HUB Organoid Technology represents a paradigm shift for drug discovery and development, preclinical patient stratification, predictive diagnostics, personalized medicine, clinical trials, regenerative medicine, and companion diagnostics. HUB offers licenses to its proprietary technology and provides drug development services using its living organoid biobanks. Always verify the complete onion URL character by character before entering any credentials. Because specialty medications are complex, third-party payers often require extensive paper work and clinical information for review before approving a drug.
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HUB meticulously crafts its targeted marketing campaigns to highlight specific applications of organoid technology to accelerate and improve drug testing. The company’s proactive approach to using digital platforms for outreach has played a crucial role in demystifying complex scientific processes and showcasing the tangible benefits of organoids in drug discovery and development. “Frost & Sullivan identifies HUB’s epithelial tissue-based technology as groundbreaking and innovative.
Homeless and Addiction Recovery Treatment Hubs (HART Hubs): Reference Document, January 2025
Minister of Health Sylvia Jones has said the government plans to open 19 of the treatment hubs and 375 highly supportive housing units at a planned cost of $378 million. The hubs will not provide a safe supply of illicit drugs, supervised consumption services or needle exchange programs. Note that we should not overestimate the number of suppliers and buyers given the number of IDs found in this research, but we regarded it as the upper-bounded number of the opioid suppliers and buyers.
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To identify forum posts related to opioid commodity promotion and review, our methodology was designed to filter forum posts with opioid keywords and then use a classifier to the posts with the topics of interest. The classifier was built upon transfer learning and a crafted objective function that heavily weighs the penalty of misclassifying a positive instance. HUB Organoids (HUB) is the global leader in the field of adult stem cell-derived organoids.
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- Cherian et al [12] gathered codeine misuse data from Instagram posts to understand how misuse is happening and its misused form.
- Most recently, Swiss pharma behemoth Novartis unveiled plans to build a new radioligand therapy manufacturing facility in Winter Park, Florida, as part of a $23 billion U.S. investment pledge announced in April 2025.
- We aimed to profile the opioid supply chain in anonymous markets and forums via a large-scale, longitudinal measurement study on anonymous market listings and posts.
- Government initiatives aimed at improving cancer screening and treatment infrastructure are pivotal.
- This award recognizes HUB at the forefront of innovation and growth in the field of organoid technology, continuously improving its offerings to meet the dynamic needs of drug developers and providing state-of-the-arts solutions.
Gilbert et al [15] described changes in the conceptualizations, techniques, and structures of opioid supply chains and illustrated the diversity of transactions beyond the traditionally linear conceptualizations of cartel-based distribution models. Dasgupta et al [18] collected opioid listings on Silk Road to analyze the prices of diverted prescription opioids. Duxbury et al [6] evaluated the role of trust in online drug markets by applying exponential random graph modelling to underground marketplace transactions. The results show that vendors’ trustworthiness is a better predictor of vendor selection than product diversity or affordability. Considering social media data (eg, Twitter and Instagram), Nasralah et al [14] proposed a text mining framework to collect opioid data from social media and analyzed the most discussed topics to profile the opioid epidemic and crisis.
- In the above objective function, C+ is always larger than C−, which means that the penalty of misclassifying a positive instance is larger than that of a negative instance.
- The opioid buyer (client) will also access the anonymous online market and create an account in each anonymous marketplace before they can find the listings of opioids (step 4).
- Combining opioid jargon with known opioid product names [25-27], we generated an opioid keyword data set consisting of 311 opioid keywords with 13 categories.
- Alex worked as a retail pharmacist until 2015, at which time he transitioned into a clinical pharmacist role within the specialty pharmacy industry.
- Market players are increasingly focusing on local collaborations and clinical research to enhance treatment options tailored to regional patient needs.
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For that reason, Dr Barratt urged darknet drug users to stay diligent and exercise caution—and, wherever possible, to let someone else know what they’re going to be consuming, as well as when and where. To ensure maximum stability and accessibility, each user is issued a private mirror, which is almost unique and can be accessed in the account settings. You’ll be shown a page with your recovery key and unique “Security Phrase” if everything is done successfully. You will receive your recovery key and security phrase after completing the registration process. These background papers were commissioned by the EMCDDA and Europol to provide background information to inform and contribute to the drafting of the main report. The EMCDDA and Europol are very grateful for the valuable contribution of the author.
We will never announce emergency procedures through forums, Telegram, or other third-party channels. Primary support is provided through the marketplace ticketing system accessible after login. This ensures secure, encrypted communication with verification of staff identity.
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- The Asia-Pacific region is projected to register the fastest growth, propelled by rapid industrialization, expanding manufacturing capacity, urban development, and increasing uptake of cost-effective technologies across China, India, and Southeast Asian economies.
- In early 2025, the company broke ground on a $2 billion manufacturing facility project in Wilson.
- The aforementioned hub services allow the manufacturer to positively affect the patient journey by ensuring efficient distribution of medication and improving patient compliance.
- The decision to operate clearnet mirrors alongside Tor-hidden services compounded the problem.
- The results provide insight into opioid trading in the anonymous markets and forums and may prove an effective mitigation data point for illuminating the opioid supply chain.
Become part of the #1 darknet marketplace trusted by over 500,000 users and 100k+ listings. 🚨 DrugHub is the leading darknet marketplace for verifiedvendors, over 100,000+ listings, over 500,000 active users, and more than 4,000 trusted vendors. Launched in August 2023 bythe legendary team behind White House Market, DrugHub has quickly become the topdarknet market globally.
Mackey et al [13] collected tweets related to the opioid topic to identify illicit online pharmacies and study the illegal sale of opioids in online marketing. Cherian et al [12] gathered codeine misuse data from Instagram posts to understand how misuse is happening and its misused form. However, to the best of our knowledge, no large-scale study, which may cross multiple anonymous marketplaces and is cross-sectional, has been conducted to profile the opioid supply chain and unveil characteristics of opioid suppliers, commodities, and transactions. To the best of our knowledge, a comprehensive overview of the opioid supply chain in the anonymous online marketplaces and forums, as well as a measurement study of trading activities, is still an open research challenge.
The Asia-Pacific region is projected to register the fastest growth, propelled by rapid industrialization, expanding manufacturing capacity, urban development, and increasing uptake of cost-effective technologies across China, India, and Southeast Asian economies. Latin America offers emerging growth potential through infrastructure expansion and rising industrial activity, while the Middle East & Africa benefits from growing investments in energy, construction, and smart infrastructure projects. Collectively, regional diversification, supportive policy frameworks, and expanding end-use applications are generating substantial growth opportunities for the global Pancreatic And Bile Duct Cancer Drug Market. With these complexities, the hub can function as a liaison between the distribution channel partners and the patient. A manufacturer that develops a medication with characteristics such as limited distribution, REMS requirements, or orphan drug patient populations can greatly benefit from the services of a hub.
- In addition, we observed that 10 and 9 suppliers in Apollon and Empire, respectively, migrated from Agora 3 years after it shut down.
- We output the top 100 proper nouns in the underground corpora in our implementation, whose embeddings showed the closest cosine distance to the known opioid keywords.
- The agency, based in The Hague, built intelligence based on evidence from Germany, which it said seized the marketplace’s “criminal infrastructure” in December 2021.
- Learn how we’re keeping our communities safer and improving access to mental health through the transition of nine supervised drug injection sites into HART Hubs.
- To better understand the potential bundling relationship of opioid suppliers across different marketplaces, we calculated the Jaccard similarity coefficient between the suppliers in different marketplaces (Figure 6).
- It also recently announced plans to build a second multibillion-dollar facility in Wilson.
- The move has been touted by Ontario Premier Doug Ford as a swing to focus on tackling addiction itself instead of preventing fatal overdoses through either the supply of safe drugs or spaces where overdoses can be quickly reversed.
- Our research collected product listings and forum posts from 10 anonymous online market places and 6 forums.
The government said each individual HART hub will be in charge of its own waitlist and prioritizing who to serve. Mandatory evaluations of sites selected to receive a chunk of the government funding will be ordered, with the results deciding “future funding” for the locations. The move has been touted by Ontario Premier Doug Ford as a swing to focus on tackling addiction itself instead of preventing fatal overdoses through either the supply of safe drugs or spaces where overdoses can be quickly reversed. If you use drugs to have a good time, CREW’s online tool can help you figure the risk.
The life sciences industry continues to pour manufacturing investments into the state. GSK announced plans in September to build an additional new biologics flex factory at Upper Merion focused on medicines for respiratory disease and cancer, with construction planned to start this year. It’s part of a bigger $1.2 billion investment in advanced manufacturing facilities, AI and advanced digital technologies that will also include new capabilities. Everything’s bigger in Texas, the saying goes, and that’s true of Eli Lilly’s plans to build a new $6.5 billion manufacturing facility in Houston, marking one of the state’s biggest life sciences investments. Lilly expects the project will bring 615 high-wage jobs for engineers, scientists, operations personnel and lab technicians, as well as 4,000 additional jobs during construction. The facility is also significant because it will manufacture Lilly’s highly-anticipated oral GLP-1, which is expected to receive approval in March.
M&A activities help companies expand capabilities, market reach, and competitive positioning. Infrastructure development, manufacturing expansion, and technology adoption offer strong opportunities. Challenges include supply chain disruptions, cost volatility, and regulatory compliance pressures.
Deaths involving fentanyl nearly doubled from the previous year’s rate in 2014, 2015, and 2016 [2]. To reduce opioid-related mortality, there is a pressing need to understand the supply and demand for the product; however, no prior research that provides a greater understanding of the international opioid supply chain has been conducted. The Drug Hub editorial team is made up of people who use(d) drugs, students, researchers, and healthcare professionals who work with marginalized and criminalized communities. In addition to patient services, benefits investigation, and REMS reporting, a hub must understand and consider the manufacturer’s drug distribution strategy. Specialty medications are often expensive products with limited distribution models that service smaller patient populations and have cold chain storage requirements.
The award recognizes the quality of the solution and the customer value enhancements it enables. Regulations influence product standards, sustainability compliance, and market entry strategies. Key trends include automation, digital integration, smart systems, and innovation-led product development. First Logevity Limited provides a service to strictly match groups or individuals seeking investment capital with individuals looking to invest.
The government also unveiled plans to stop other supervised drug injection sites from opening in Ontario, going against its own expert advice but citing rising crime and complaints from neighbours. Nitazenes are a new synthetic opioid drug that has emerged in the UK drug supply. The hub may be there for patient education and support, co-pay assistance, pharmacy triage, or a series of other reasons. Therefore, as a partner to the patient, the hub is tasked to improve patient care and outcomes, which is something every pharmacist can get behind.
“It may be that a person’s entire experience of using drugs has actually started through the darknet, and may indeed be confined to the darknet,” she explained. But another worrying knock-on effect is that people who buy drugs off the darknet, rather than through a contact or a friend, may be using those drugs alone. But another factor that’s worthy of consideration is the way in which drug dealers and darknet vendors are diversifying their offering and creating a more reliable service—even in the face of transnational cybercrime crackdowns and rampant fraudulent activity. In 2017, Dr Barratt sought to find out why it was that Scandinavian countries like Finland consistently reported the world’s highest proportion of drug buyers who were using the dark web to purchase their supply. A local source explained that, due in part to the climate and the prohibitively cold weather, Finnish people are typically “more isolated” than other peoples around the world and “tend to stay home”. It is a priority for CBC to create products that are accessible to all in Canada including people with visual, hearing, motor and cognitive challenges.
A steering committee made up of senior executives from both organizations will oversee the execution of the new development hub. The partnership aims to discover and develop new therapeutics, while also forging collaborations with academic and research institutions in the UAE and internationally, supporting Abu Dhabi’s broader ambitions in the life sciences sector. Like any marketplace, branding is key, even in the shadowy corners of the internet. But this logo, created using Adobe Illustrator version 24.0—a software outdated as of 2019—became the first crack in DrugHub’s armor. Embedded within the logo’s metadata was a treasure trove of information for anyone skilled in Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). The use of outdated software was not just a cosmetic flaw; it signaled a broader negligence in keeping up with technological advancements.
Alex worked as a retail pharmacist until 2015, at which time he transitioned into a clinical pharmacist role within the specialty pharmacy industry. In 2017, he received his Masters of Science in Pharmacy Business Administration degree at the University of Pittsburgh, a 12-month, executive-style graduate education program designed for working professionals striving to be tomorrow’s leaders in the business of medicines. Some hubs also employ nurses or professional personnel to travel to drughub.su homes and teach patients and caregivers how to properly mix, administer, and store their medications. That same report concluded the health ministry did not provide a thorough, evidence-based business case for the hub model and did not provide proper impact analysis or do proper consultations with all affected people. Harm reduction advocates have condemned the move to shutter supervised consumption sites, saying it will put lives at risk and only move drug use into public spaces.
Among them is Amgen, which in April announced a $900 million expansion of its Ohio manufacturing facility as part of a $1.4 billion investment plan it said has created 750 jobs. In addition, J&J kicked off 2026 by announcing plans to build a next-generation cell therapy manufacturing site in Pennsylvania. Novartis broke ground on a 700,000-square-foot flagship manufacturing hub in December.