Scripting Online Drug Trafficking as Digital Deviance: Social Media, Logistics, and Crime Prevention in China

Research on online drug markets has focused mainly on Western darknet platforms and cryptomarkets. Less is known about surface-web drug trafficking and its use of ordinary digital and commercial infrastructures. Drawing on crime script analysis, this study examines 74 typical and representative court cases published by Chinese judicial authorities between 2020 and 2025. The analysis identifies two recurring script tracks—platform-mediated trafficking and logistics-facilitated trafficking—and one emerging pattern involving overseas procurement followed by domestic resale. Offenders coordinate communication, payment, and delivery across digital and physical infrastructures, producing hybrid online-offline transaction patterns. The study refines crime script analysis by showing that such scripts involve both sequences of offender actions and coordination of infrastructures supporting criminal transactions. It also identifies situational intervention points across social media, payment services, express delivery networks, smart parcel lockers, and cross-border logistics.