“Pressed OXY M30 Pills, Great Press, Potent, Fast Shipping!!!”: Availability of Counterfeit and Pharmaceutical Oxycodone Pills on One Major Cryptomarket
Issued Date
2023-01-01
Resource Type
ISSN
02791072
eISSN
21599777
Scopus ID
2-s2.0-85147755348
Pubmed ID
36756844
Journal Title
Journal of Psychoactive Drugs
Rights Holder(s)
SCOPUS
Bibliographic Citation
Journal of Psychoactive Drugs (2023)
Suggested Citation
Lamy F.R., Daniulaityte R., Dudley S. “Pressed OXY M30 Pills, Great Press, Potent, Fast Shipping!!!”: Availability of Counterfeit and Pharmaceutical Oxycodone Pills on One Major Cryptomarket. Journal of Psychoactive Drugs (2023). doi:10.1080/02791072.2023.2176954 Retrieved from: https://repository.li.mahidol.ac.th/handle/20.500.14594/82581
Title
“Pressed OXY M30 Pills, Great Press, Potent, Fast Shipping!!!”: Availability of Counterfeit and Pharmaceutical Oxycodone Pills on One Major Cryptomarket
Author(s)
Author's Affiliation
Other Contributor(s)
Abstract
From 2018 to 2021, seizures of counterfeit oxycodone pills containing non-pharmaceutical fentanyl or other novel synthetic opioids increased significantly contributing to continuing increases in overdose mortality in Northern America. Evidence suggests that counterfeit pills are distributed through cryptomarkets. This article presents data regarding the availability and characteristics of oxycodone pills advertised on one major cryptomarket between January and March 2022. Collected data were processed using a dedicated Named Entity Recognition algorithm to identify oxycodone listings and categorized them as either counterfeit or pharmaceutical. Frequency of listings, average number of pills advertised, average prices per milligram, number of sales, and geographic indicators of shipment origin and destination were analyzed. In total, 2,665 listings were identified as oxycodone. 48.2% (1,285/2,665) of these listings were categorized as counterfeit oxycodone, advertising a total of 652,699 pills (93,242.7 pills per datapoint) offered at a lower price than pharmaceutical pills. Our data indicate the presence of a large volume of counterfeit oxycodone pills both in retail- and wholesale-level amounts mostly targeting US and Canadian customers. These exploratory findings call for more research to develop epidemiological surveillance systems to track counterfeit pill and other drug availability on the Dark web environment.