t was almost as simple as ordering pizza. Within half an hour of our tentative, nervous conversation — "I was wondering if I could purchase some Ecstasy?" — we receive a text message from the number we dialled. It gives the details of a State Bank of India account belonging to one Batul Juma Mlapakolo, a Tanzanian name.

Aton Pharma is probably not a real company. Its address, as listed on Indiamart.com — India's largest online business-to-business marketplace, where you can buy anything from furniture to industrial chemicals and, as it turns out, illegal psychotropic drugs — is Building No. 10, Tower C, DLF Cyber City, Gurgaon. (No such company has offices at this address.) The person we talked to seems to be based in Hyderabad: the SBI account is in its Defence Colony branch in Secunderabad, and the "this phone is unreachable" message when we call his number is in Telugu.

We found Aton Pharma while sequentially calling numbers unearthed by our searches for various drugs — cocaine, heroin, LSD, Ecstasy/MDMA, crystal meth, methylone, DMT, among others — on Indiamart. There were plenty of options for every drug, each accompanied either by a short excerpt from the Wikipedia page for said drug, or a brief sales pitch assuring prospective clients of their quality and discretion.

Mumbai-based "Watson Pharmacy", for instance, promised "genuine discreet supply" of cocaine "with good moderate and competitive prices". Their delivery, the ad went on, was "100% guaranteed safe and discreet from any custom interference", and they "ship worldwide to any location using mail logistic courier's [sic]". The company also sold oxycodone, Aderall, ketamine injections and MDMA. The fake address used was that of Bombay House. (Other fake addresses used by advertisers include that of the German Embassy, the Canadian and Australian High Commissions and the UN High Commission for Refugees.) Unfortunately for potential "bulk and small quantity buyers being long or short term orders and being for purposes of personal usage or resellers", the phone number, when we tried it, turned out to be a wrong number. Image 2nd

The same was true for most of the phone numbers listed. The majority of people we called seemed to have been allotted the number recently, suggesting that the numbers had been recycled; it makes sense, after all, for drug dealers to frequently change their publicly displayed phone numbers. All it takes is another free ad; indeed, over the month or so we regularly visited the site, many new entries surfaced. More than one respondent complained of people calling them over the past few days, asking for drugs.

The first response we got was from Indiamart itself. Ten minutes after we placed a sales inquiry for "pure cocaine needed for personal use", a helpful customer care executive called us for our PIN code, in order to connect us with dealers in our locality. We asked him whether selling drugs over the internet was legal. He suggested we ask the dealers that.

The next day, we got an email from one Jennifer Bleq ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ). Thanking us for our interest towards their "top quality and highly graded Cocaine" that is "99.98% pure", Ms Bleq provided us a short rate list: $200 for 10 grams, $550 for 100, $850 for 500 and $1,800 for a full kilo. She promised "fast, safe, confidential and prompt" delivery — the package would be "highly discrete [sic]" and "vacuum sealed with candle wax for security reasons". Image 3rd

The payment, she told us once we expressed further interest, would need to be addressed to Che Fru Bless, of 43 Rue Bebey Eyidi in Douala, Cameroon. (The city, Cameroon's economic capital, is fast emerging as a hub for the global drug trade. In August 2011, 141.5 kg of cocaine was seized from inside bottles of vegetable oil in a cargo ship docked in its port.)

Indiamart, it turned out, wasn't the only such platform. Its major competitors seem to be in on the action too. Sulekha.com's B2B marketplace, b2b.sulekha.com, has search results for most illegal drugs, as doesExportersIndia.com and, to a lesser extent, TradeIndia.com. While the websites might argue that anyone can post an advertisement, Indiamart and ExportersIndia's customer care executives were very prompt in contacting us, as if ours were a routine sales enquiry. Indiamart sent us emails with the subject "Looking for cocaine, Indiamart can help", requesting further details about our requirements, while ExportersIndia even mailed us a list of five dealers, two based in the US, three in Cameroon. (We have copies of all these emails with us.)

We also received an email from John M, a coke dealer based (he said) in Thailand. He asked us to Skype him, but instead of a video chat, we talked over text messages. We asked him for some crack cocaine; he offered a bulk price of $4,000 per kilo, or $50 per gram for smaller orders. (The minimum he was willing to ship was 15 g.) He provided us details for an account in a Bank for Agriculture and Agricultural Co-operatives branch in the town of Bua Yai in Thailand's Nakhon Ratchasima province.

Drug Laws in India

None of these deals, however, were quite as lucrative as Aton Pharma's offer. Rs 40,000 for a thousand pills, each of which has a street price of Rs 800 – 1,500, offers a return on investment of around 2,500% to the enterprising retailer. And it is dealers, not users, that these advertisements are targeted towards, in keeping with the business-to-business ethos of the host websites. LSD, for instance, is sold by the gram, enough to keep a single user in a state of permanent psychedelic bliss for over a decade. Image 4th

We decided to take up Aton's offer and put up the cash, to see if the drugs would arrive. Two days after we made the payment and emailed them proof, the dealer called back, asking for a further Rs 18,500 as "delivery charges", a necessary payment before the package would be shipped. For the aforementioned enterprising retailer, the new per pill cost of Rs 58.50 would reduce the profit margin to a slightly less astronomical 1,700%. But we're neither drug dealers nor particularly enterprising, and the arithmetic cut little ice with our bosses, leaving us in the decidedly uncomfortable position of having to ask a drug dealer for a refund. He was disappointed we didn't want to go through, urged us to change our minds, then very politely promised to pay us back. At the time this went to press, a week later, the refund hadn't yet materialised.

Our little misadventure notwithstanding, it is clear that the Internet, with the anonimity it provides, has made it possible for the international drug trade to leave the corners and inhabit cyberspace. The websites we found, after all, offer none of the privacy that Silk Road, the marketplace for drugs that's part of the Deep Web, where it is almost impossible to track your IP address and payments can be made through anonymous Bitcoin exchanges, does. The difficulty in tracking such dealers, and the ease with which new marketplaces can be set up, make these a nightmare for law enforcement. Silk Road was closed on 2 October last year, and its founder arrested by the FBI. Silk Road 2.0 was up and running on 6 November. Image 5th

Seizure reports of the Narcotics Control Bureau suggest that India's position in the map of the globalised drug trade is both that of supplier and market, with a rise in recent years, in particular, of labs in the country producing methamphetamine and pseudoephedrine — a key ingredient in making crystal meth, as any Breaking Bad fan can tell you — for export purposes. Reports by the NCB and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime suggest that the consumption of hard drugs is steadily increasing in a country that has traditionally preferred marijuana. The increased use of pharmaceutical drugs for recreational purposes also causes headaches over jurisdiction, with many prescription drugs being abused falling under the Drugs and Cosmetics Act rather than the stricter Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act.

"I cannot see any way that states can stop this happening," says journalist Damian Thompson, whose latest book, The Fix, deals with addiction in the 21st century world. "There is always a way to transport a product from manufacturer to consumer and, as economies of scale take effect, it will only become cheaper to order drugs."

The aspirational nature of our society has extended to the middle classes trying to emulate even the partying ways of the rich, and today's youth has more disposable income and access to — and knowledge of — illegal drugs than any other in this country's history. An online market also reduces the interaction with the dealer, and makes the drugs much safer to acquire. The result is the perfect storm of an unprecedented number of people engaging in self-destructive behaviour, monitoring which has acquired difficulties of unprecedented proportions.