Canadians among top buyers, sellers on illegal drug website Silk Road

It's the predictable — and unsavoury — evolution of online shopping.

Drug users can now score their fixes of choice from the comfort of their living rooms thanks to an anonymous website, Silk Road, that operates "like a black market version of eBay," the Canadian Press reports.

"It's Amazon — if Amazon sold mind-altering chemicals," Gawker's Adrian Chen wrote last year.

Canadians are among Silk Road's top sellers and buyers, with Canada ranking as the fifth most frequent shipping origin and destination.

[ Related: B.C. man facing extradition in PlayStation ecstasy bust ]

Silk Road's "fairly good business model" has helped it grow quickly, bringing in $1.9 million in total revenues a month, said Nicolas Christin, a cyber security professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Access Christin's report on Silk Road here.

The website uses digital "crypto-currency" called Bitcoin to make trailing the online purchases almost impossible. An anonymity software network called Tor — users can only access Silk Road's impossible-to-remember URL through this software — protects users' identities and the servers' location, making it difficult for law enforcement officials to shut it down or press charges. Sellers send the drugs to buyers in vacuum-sealed bags — dogs can't sniff the drugs through them — through private shipping companies and registered mail.

Kerri Manning, spokesperson for the Ministry of Public Safety says that border enforcement and collaboration with international partners is needed to keep these drugs out of the country:

"We are committed to stemming the illicit flow of drugs into Canada, including through the Internet, and law enforcement agencies are committed to working with partners nationally and internationally to identify these websites," Manning said in an email to the Canadian Press.

A spokesperson for Canada Border Services Agency admits that although they visually scan each package entering the country, only certain parcels are examined thoroughly.

"Certain parcels may be examined further if we have concerns that they may be inadmissible, wrongly labelled or contain contraband," Amitha Carnadin said in an e-mail.

Marijuana is the current top-selling drug on Silk Road, but harder drugs like ecstasy, tar heroin and other hard drugs — "any drug imaginable," reports Wired — are also readily available.

Note: even black-market drug markets have limits. Silk Road's terms of service ban "anything who's purpose is to harm or defraud, such as stolen credit cards, assassinations, and weapons of mass destruction," Gawker reports.

While Silk Road seems like the perfect drug-deal environment, one member of the Bitcoin core development team warns that the Bitcoin transactions aren't quite as anonymous as Silk Road users are counting on them being.

He told Gawker that all transactions are recorded in a public log. While identities aren't revealed, law enforcement could use network analysis techniques to break down the transaction flow, tracking down individual users.

"Attempting major illicit transactions with Bitcoin, given existing statistical analysis techniques deployed in the field by law enforcement, is pretty damned dumb," Jeff Garzik wrote in an email.

[ Related: Get a Master's in marijuana growing through Greenline Academy ]

In a follow-up post to the original Gawker story, Chen writes that authorities may be closing in on the online drug market, with some of its top sellers suddenly disappearing from the site and users expressing caution and paranoia in Silk Road's forums.

The same technology that's currently protecting drug deals will hopefully be the end of them, too.

(CP photos)