Drug traders on a local dark web marketplace.

This article uses the concepts of habitus and way of life to analyze cultural and socioeconomic factors related to the lives of drug users who utilize a Finnish dark web site. It draws on a set of 9300 posts on that site, Sipulitori, to understand the way of life of the site's users. The article analyses usernames and forum posts, qualitatively and quantitatively, to find representations of the users' ways of life, and to understand their relationship to drugs. The article finds several different relationships to drugs, as well as the absence of some recognized drug user types on this particular dark web trading site. Drugs appear to be the defining factor of many users' lives, regardless of how actively they are using and how strongly that aspect dominates said lives. The article concludes with a brief discussions on how its findings can be used as basis for future research on such trading forums.