Truthfully, this shouldn’t be much of a shock. It was the 1970s, so if anything was going to be sold on the Internet, it was going to be drugs.
Decades before the days of Ebay, Amazon or the Silk Road, a transaction too place online during the Internet’s infantile stages. In the early ’70s, students at Stanford, who worked in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, purchased some nugs from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s lab. They used the web to quietly purchase the product, marking the first time anyone bought anything off of the Internet.
Where does this crazy story come from you might ask? This is all according to a a book written by John Markoff, a journalist for the NY Times, which was released in 2005. The price and the amount of marijuana is unknown, but chances are it wasn’t a small amount. The leader of the infamous online market, the Silk Road, has been shut down by the law, and buying weed online can’t be as fool proof as it was in the ’70s.
According to the 2013 Global Drug Survey, 22 percent of users had bought a type of drug through the Internet. The number of people that have purchased any type of product from the net, is closer to 100 percent, which makes those kids from Stanford groundbreakers in the world of Internet shopping.
