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Five or six times a day, a man from Texas injects a dose of carefully measured fentanyl. He does it when he wakes up and before he goes to work, and sometimes on breaks. It makes him drowsy, but he says people can’t usually tell he just used.

He gets his supply the way other people buy books and Bluetooth speakers: He orders it online, then waits for it to come in the U.S. mail. (I was connected to this man through a researcher on the condition of anonymity, out of concern he would be jailed if discovered.)

Researchers say the internet is a surprisingly common method of obtaining fentanyl, an opioid that is now responsible for more overdose deaths than heroin or prescription painkillers. Far from the shady, street-corner deals of popular imagination, more and more drug buys are taking place online, often with the help of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for added anonymity.

Recently, a group of investigators with the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations Googled “buy fentanyl online” on the open internet, then homed in on the six sites that were most responsive to their requests. An investigator on the committee, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the findings, said these represent a tiny fraction of the hundreds of fentanyl-selling sites on the web.

Jon Zibbell, a public-health analyst at RTI International, said that the sale of many different types of fentanyl can increase the risk of overdose. It’s not that the analogues themselves are more dangerous, he said, but that “they affect the body so differently, that it’s hard [for the user] to plan and stay safe.”

The drug user in Texas said he first began using opioids when a doctor prescribed him hydrocodone for a bad cough he had as a teenager. He progressed to prescription painkillers, and then, when they became too expensive, to heroin. The heroin left him broke and with abscesses on his skin.

“It’s stronger than your willpower,” he said of the drug’s pull.

He decided to seek out something that would be both safer and cheaper. For the past three years, he’s been buying fentanyl and its analogues, like carfentanil, online. When he receives it, he measures it out in water, which he says makes for greater accuracy. He says he’s never overdosed. A day’s supply of heroin used to cost him $100. Now, for that amount, he can get enough fentanyl to last more than three weeks.

To buy his fentanyl, the man uses “darknet” sites, which are unlisted on search engines, rely on a special private browser for access, and don’t tie his username to his identity. About 50 such cryptomarkets are currently operating. He says most of the sites on the regular internet, which the Senate report focused on, are scams in which dealers will take money and fail to deliver. (The Senate investigators did not actually make any purchases.) Or, these so-called “clearnet” sites lead to arrests. “The feds are very on top of the clearnet markets,” he said.

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