The Hive is pretty much the oldest drug related forum that still has members in the scene today. They were mostly for chemistry but I have heard they had an underground market area for chemistry related things. The core group of people on the Hive talked via instant messages prior to its formation in 1997. RCML was also a very old drug market, it was a mailing list though. I don't know when it was operational but it must have been one of the first research chemical market communities on the internet. As far as the modern forums (post webtryp) go I think SL gets the award for being one of the pioneer, although not the first if you count non-polydrug markets (ie: weed only markets, opiate only markets). And of course 'the holy forum' was the dominant forum for all leet people (and one of the first widely international forums post web tryp, and one of the first forums that had lots of illegals on it, and pretty much the first forum that had bulk illegals). I could write a short history of the scene up but many people would probably not be very happy with that. I personally don't see anything wrong with talking about forums that are long dead, but some people think the 'never talk about fight club' rule should apply until their death, rather than the death of fight club (or many years after). There are histories of the scene floating around / that were floating around on various private forums. These days there have been entire splits of 'forum lines' though used to be the same core group of people behind everything but these days many different groups operate groups of forums. Decentralization FTW. SR is hands down the most popular mainstream internet drug market to ever be. It also uses some of the best security honestly, although there is room for improvement for sure . It was also the first community to embrace bitcoin and one of the first to operate openly (OVDB launching almost simultaneously and BM coming shortly after). It was also the first rug market to get major media attention, and the second drug market to be structured similar to E-bay or Amazon (the others were more like OVDB with a forum and private message system versus a market interface). TFM was the first market to have a market interface built into their community afaik, but I am pretty sure the SR interface pwnt theirs. The first drug market that was a hidden service was called The DrugsTor and was a private forum community that only lasted for a few months before the bulk of its memberbase it went back to the clearnet under a different name. It had leaked its IP address via improper configuration anyway .