Facts.u

The 2013 Global Drugs Survey reported that drug dealing on the internet was on the rise. This may have been shocking news to a lot of people, but the truth is that marijuana was the very first thing ever to have been sold and bought on the internet. The first bag of this "herb" was sold online over 40 years ago!

In the early 1970s, Stanford students at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory engaged in a drug deal with their counterparts at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, using Arpanet accounts. They used the network to arrange the purchase of undetermined amounts of marijuana.

All types of drugs—legal and illegal—have since been sold on the internet. In 2012, researchers found 73 new types of drugs being sold by about 700 websites in Europe. In the 60s, 70s and 80s the drug menu mainly consisted of marijuana, LSD, cocaine, heroin, and amphetamines. Today the list is mind-blowing and many of those are even legal.

Unfortunately, many of the new drugs sold on the internet today are untested, rare compounds of unknown purity that are sold by unscrupulous drug dealers. These people have no concern for the well-being of their customers. As these compounds were never designed to be drugs, they can lead to sickness, high blood-pressure, and kidney failure.

Drug sales on the internet are accelerating and millions of drug deals are taking place each year. It seems the drug trade has reached an all time "high."

According to Facebook, the word “earthquake” appeared in the status updates of 3 million users within four minutes of the quake. Twitter said users were sending up to 5,500 messages (tweets) per second, which tops the peak rate immediately following the death of Osama bin Laden and was “on par with” the rate after the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami.

Due to the significantly slower propagation of seismic waves compared to the near-speed-of-light transmission of internet traffic, some Twitter users read about the earthquake seconds before feeling the tremors. For example, Twitter users in such cities as New York City and Boston reported reading tweets about the quake from users in Washington, D.C., or Richmond, Virginia, 15 to 30 seconds before feeling the quake itself.