Russia’s Darknet Drug Empire: The Future of Online Trafficking
Behind closed doors in Russia, the drug world is going through some dramatic changes.
With a soft clunk, the magnet attaches the bag of Russia’s favorite drugs, mephedrone (4-MMC) and alpha-pvp (flakka), underneath the mailbox. The stashman unlocks his phone, takes a picture of the drop, and uploads the coordinates for the buyer. He exits the apartment complex and heads towards his next location — a hollow behind a brick where he will hide a bag of coke.
"Move confidently. Calmly. Look normal, not like a punk or hobo, but also, don't wear a suit. Don't look around like an idiot."
He repeats instructions to himself from The Kladmen's Bible, an ebook that instructs couriers how to make a living stashing drugs others bought online in clever spots to be picked up.
That is, unless police or thieves get to it first. Missing packages come with serious consequences for a kladman.
"I've been writing about the drug world for 25 years, and what I was seeing in Russia was a genuinely new phenomenon," says Max Daly, former Global Drugs Desk Editor at Vice. "It was a system that seemed to totally dominate all ends of the drug trade, from production and distribution to marketing, recruitment, enforcement and sales."
To shed light on the changes, Daly and blockchain analyst and veteran researcher of Russian darknet markets Patrick Shortis co-authored Breaking Klad — a 40+ page report for Global Initiative. With the help of Russian journalist Andrey Kaganskih and Russian-British journalist Niko Vorobjo, the report details how thousands of such couriers are now operating in Russia, where buying drugs in person is becoming a thing of the past.
"Not only the mixture of very high-end darknet websites using crypto with a video game style, dead-drop system of getting drugs, but also what seemed like an almost complete takeover of a market in the world's largest country" — drew Daly in, but to get published — "It took a lot of research, interviewing and persuading people that the things we were reporting were actually real.”
Inside Russia’s Underground Drug Economy
Breaking Klad documents how Russia's strict anti-drug laws, combined with unreliable and monitored postal services, made mailing drugs inefficient and risky.
"In the UK and America, it's very easy to get hold of drugs at the moment; there is less jeopardy involved in buying drugs in public than in places like Russia, Georgia, or South Korea — so there is less need of such an anonymous system" — explains Daly.
Russia is not a place you want to be caught using drugs. Laws are strict — potentially sending offenders to jail for five to ten years. And these days, the fastest way out of Russian prison is heading straight to the front with Ukraine (where the report details soldiers can now have drugs delivered).
For a growing number of struggling young people in Russia, the money outweighs the risks, especially if they have a drug habit. Becoming a kladman (Кладмена), which translates to 'stashmen,' it's possible to make over $500 US per week — which is more than double the average weekly salary in Russia ($222).
The Kladmen’s Code: How Russia’s Dead Drop System Works
The 'deadrop' system borrows techniques famously used by spies. Caches of drugs are hidden under park benches, rocks, holes in walls, buried under dirt or snow, and magnetized to lamposts, drainpipes, and post boxes. The stashes, or 'klads' in Russian, are most often bags of synthetic drugs manufactured in Russia from precursor chemicals sourced from China or India.
Domestically manufactured synthetics are cheaper than trafficked cocaine or heroin and are spiking in popularity in Russia. Suppliers are meeting demand by producing Udemy-like online courses that teach the surprisingly accessible manufacture of synthetic drugs.
These chemists provide fuel for a sprawling network of online merchants, warehouses, couriers, and even enforcers who use violence to keep everyone in line.
The supply chain goes something like this:
Chemists — Manufacture or synthesize the drugs supplied to the market.
Shop Operators (Операторы) — Manage online sales and logistics, sourcing products from chemists.
Carriers (Перевозчик) — Transport drugs from shop operators to wholesalers.
Wholesalers (Склад) — Store and distribute drugs to multiple kladmen (local couriers).
Kladmen – Handle the final step, delivering drugs to customers via hidden drops or dead drops.
As workers move up the supply chain from kladman to shop owner, both risk and reward increase.
The phenomenon has created a subculture of bloggers, YouTubers, and Telegram influencers who have turned dealing drugs into a lifestyle — creating content about their jobs online.
The platforms encourage the behavior by paying for advertisements on Telegram channels and even YouTube. One influencer was paid to get tattoos of a marketplace’s logo.
The entire network operates through crypto payments facilitated by marketplace hosting shops. These shops, backed by marketing teams with budgets for high-profile stunts and sleek promo videos, attract customers. Some of the biggest names include Mega, Kraken, Blackspurt, and OMG! OMG!
How the Internet Changed Drug Dealing Forever
In 2011, American Ross Ulbricht created The Silk Road, the first online drug bazaar. Ulbricht discovered he could use anonymity tools like Tor Browser to sell shrooms online for Bitcoin through his online avatar Dread Pirate Roberts.
"Initially, darknet drug markets such as the Silk Road were seen as a sort of utopian dream where sellers cared for users, and harm reduction was a big priority, compared to depictions of the selfish money-grabbing street dealer" — says Daly. That image didn't last, though.
The Silk Road grew into an empire churning through tens of millions of dollars. It became an international marketplace that included hacking services, foraged documents, and weapons — until it was brought down by the FBI in a dramatic sting operation at a San Francisco public library.
Ulbricht got a life sentence for a long list of crimes, and prosecutors alleged Ulbricht attempted to hire hitmen. In 2025, Donald Trump gave Ulbricht a full pardon.
The fall of the Silk Road did little to curb online drug sales, though. The cat was out of the bag — online shopping was the future, and drugs were no exception. Other markets quickly adopted the system Ulbricht pioneered, starting a seemingly endless cycle of authorities busting sites, only to have more take their place.
As new sites opened, the market grew. When the Silk Road was shut down in 2013, estimates put its annual revenue as $90-105 million.
Ten years later, in 2023, TRM labs (where Breaking Klad co-author Shortis works) calculated the combined income of all Russian drug markets at $1.5 billion US dollars, with the top 5 Russian online drug markets controlling 93% of incoming revenue.
"When people in the West think of Russia, they think of everything being old fashioned and broken" — says Daly — "but their drug trade shows how ahead of the West Russia is on online tech."
Competing platforms use cyber-attacks to bring down each other's websites, while hackers attempt to reveal the identity of competitors. But despite the doxxing efforts, authorities have been unable to find who is behind the platforms.
Doxxing, Hacking & Raids: How Darknet Markets Fight Back
"Russian (and Ukrainian) hackers, crypto, and online tech experts have always been ahead of the curve in this realm, and so it takes a huge effort from police to take down these kinds of shops and platforms" — says Daly.
"The biggest platform selling drugs, Hydra, lasted for around 7 years. The Russians could not or did not want to, for whatever reason, take it down. In the end, it was taken down due to a huge effort by the German and US authorities."
The 2022 operation involved sophisticated tracking of cryptocurrency transactions, exploiting poor operational security, and good old-fashioned detective work. Andy Greenberg’s Tracers in the Dark, details how researchers tracked cryptocurrencies through illicit markets, even after privacy-focused tools (like Bitcoin mixers) were used.
"Law enforcement has had to start from scratch in hunting them down. Because Russia is frozen out of international policing intelligence, it is hard for these borderless drug businesses to be identified and caught" — says Daly.
"Most of the experts we spoke to think the main people and infrastructure behind the current big Russian darknet platforms are located outside of Russia and that they are being run by a new breed of Russian organized criminal, not the old Vory type with tattoos and guns, but millennials with Euro university degrees and well off families, with little ties to the old criminal gangs."
Meanwhile, in Russia, individual kladmen, wholesalers, and chemists are the low-hanging fruit police go after. But attempts at dismantling massive clandestine marketing campaigns or arresting any big fish have been futile so far.
"There was a story recently that the head of Hydra was jailed in Russia, but this has been met with a lot of confusion, with some people saying he was not the head of Hydra, but the head of a shop on Hydra. So even in the courts, it's hard to nail who is doing what behind the online smokescreen" — says Daly.
Meet the Sportsmen: The Brutal Enforcers of Russia’s Drug Trade
Like the early Silk Road, platforms do put on some airs about caring for customers by providing harm-reduction resources.
"While the Russian platforms and shops do have a system of quality assurance and standards, and a system where buyers can complain and be refunded, it's hard to evaluate how genuine and comprehensive this really is, although it's obviously better than nothing, the buyer does have a say here" — reports Daly.
Drops don't always go smoothly, and a good reputation is essential to the success of shop owners. Nobody wants nasty online reviews about late products or drugs not showing up at all.
"Seagulls" is the term for people who go around looking for likely stash spots and stealing drugs. Sometimes, kladmen run off with stashes or mess up too many drops.
Enter Sportsmen — the enforcers that keep the machine moving.
"The dark side of this is that behind the hype, these shops routinely hire thugs to carry out severe punishment beatings (which are then uploaded to social media as warnings) on people who steal drugs or are just incompetent or falsely accused" — says Daly.
"Many of these are young people, including young women, who are abused and have had fingers chopped off and bones broken. Because, like in the normal drug world, reputation is everything, and the big businesses cannot be seen to be taken advantage of."
This is all while the druglords at the top of the chain preach a libertarian, self-development type of rhetoric in YouTube videos, styling working for their platforms as a way out of the considerable adversity certain Russians face.
What Russia’s Drug Trade Tells Us About the Future
For Daly, the dead drop system could be “a peek into the future of the drug world, dominated by tech and DIY synthetic drug labs."
And indeed, such effective methods are spreading.
"The system is being used in places where the Russian diaspora are living, for example in Bali. People are selling via dead drops in France, Greece, and the UK, where one site is teaching people how to become kladmen and drug cooks" — says Daly. "So it's a very young version of the Russian system, but people are taking parts of it."
Much of Europe and North America already have online platforms for substances and reliable postal systems to deliver them. While authorities might not approve, current platforms don’t (at least openly) use enforcers and violence to make sure drugs are delivered.
"The advantages of the Russian model — strong brand marketing and customer service, speed, anonymity, localized production — could well be adopted in response to slight shifts in the Western model…"
Should existing North American or European grey market sites shut down completely, it seems clear what model the entrepreneurial underworld will choose next.
Further Reading
Breaking Klad (Report by Max Daly & Patrick Shortis)
Russia’s Dark Web Markets Prove the Drug War Can’t Be Won (Salon)
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