Deep in the Moroccan mountains a large brick building sat in the basin of a valley. It was night, and a dull light crept out from the windowless holes in the walls. I was in a car headed down a dirt track toward the building with a man calling himself "Patron"—Spanish for boss. It had taken us five hours to get there, driving up through the mountains via cliff edge roads that dotted with gendarme checkpoints. Every time we were stopped the police would open the door and shake Patron's hand—with big grins on their faces.

"I'm paying these guys off all the way from here to the coast," laughed Patron.

The journey into the valley made me feel sick. The tarmac roads had ended a good five miles back and the driver had pulled several pointless 180 turns without warning, "to throw off any tracking signals." But eventually we pulled up outside the brick building and got out. The driver beeped the horn and a man in overalls emerged and embraced Patron. They spoke for several minutes in French before leading me through the metal door at the front.

Inside the modest brick building there were bags of cannabis the size of hay bales. They were stacked up to the ceiling. "I think that's about two tons of weed," said Patron.

A large quantity of the weed belonged to him. It was his product. It wouldn't be sold on the street, though; these drugs would be wrapped up in small packages and delivered by the postman. Patron, as he says himself, is "not a gangster." He's a large-scale deep web drug dealer. He sells opium and premium quality hash on the internet, and claims to be making "around £100,000 [$123,000] a month" in Bitcoin in the process. His drugs are distributed all over the world after he pushes them into a postbox. I'd met a deep web drugs boss who explained the business once before, but with Patron I'd see it firsthand.