Becky Haslam is a 28-year-old, professional worker living in London who for years has suffered from bouts of insomnia. She has started buying prescription drugs from the internet after doctors have refused to give them to her. "I tried to go the legal route and visited my doctor's on several occasions but they were always unwilling to supply me with a prescription, so I turned to the internet. It was so easy. Within minutes I had ordered a three month supply of sleeping tablets which arrived two days later. I know it may not be the most sensible thing to do and I don't know what I'm taking, but at least I'm finally getting some sleep," she told me.

With more people abusing prescription drugs than cocaine and heroin combined, the excess of online "pill mills," providing steroids, pain relievers, uppers and downers to anyone with a credit card is gravely intensifying the problem. Unfortunately it is young people who are resorting to the internet to acquire both illegal and prescription drugs. Because the younger generations have grown up using the internet, they are more vulnerable to the "sharks" and do not take as guarded and precautionary steps as older people might.

By typing "buy cannabis online," Google came up trumps and rewarded my urgently incisive searching, with plenty of results dedicated to my pursuit – 6,820,000 to be exact. Despite this comprehensive plethora of sites devoted to cannabis, I, like most Google users, clicked on the site which ranked highest, where I could buy Marijuana, hashish and even "Ganja kits" simply, discreetly and quickly.

Whilst China's commitment to maintaining censorship is criticized for its apparent efforts to steer online activity in the direction preferred by the government, perhaps if other countries followed China's example of implementing more stringent censorship rules, then buying illegal narcotics online would not be as easy as a few strokes of the keyboard and a couple of clicks of the mouse, and the problem would not be so rampant.

With governments continuing to withstand "lax" attitudes regarding internet censorship, a tolerance is forming within the realms of drug dealing online, and moving the industry from the sordid and sinister world of the streets, onto the arguably even more secretively sinister networks of the World Wide Web.