Dealing with Apps: Managing Access and Risk in Hybrid Drug Markets

This article examines how social media and messaging apps mediate everyday access to illicit psychoactive substances in Poland. While the study broadly engages with digital infrastructures, Telegram emerged as the primary hub where drug-related practices converge. Drawing on interviews with 19 mostly young, socio-economically mainstream drug users, we analyze how participants navigate app affordances, convenience, and risk in a prohibitive and stigmatized environment. Findings show that digital drug markets are embedded within polymedia ecologies: buyers move across Telegram, Messenger, Snapchat, and offline encounters, combining multiple sources and delivery options such as parcel lockers or ride-sharing couriers. These affordances create hyper-accessibility, normalizing on-demand access while offering users a sense of comfort. At the same time, safety is actively constructed through both technical features (disappearing messages, secret chats) and social mechanisms (legit checks, referrals, reviews). Yet participants often overestimated the security provided by platform affordances and privacy features and assumed that individual buyers remained too minor to be targeted by law enforcement. By situating these practices within broader debates on risk in platform societies, we highlight the hybridity of digital and physical exchanges. App-based drug supply exemplifies how everyday technologies reconfigure access, reshape trust, and blur boundaries between legality and deviance.