A recent report in The Guardian, on a ‘huge rise’ in illicit online sales of pharmaceuticals, reminded me of one of the best books I read in 2014: legal scholar Anupam Chander’s The Electronic Silk Road. Chander’s great insight, to my mind at least, is that as internet commerce and digital technologies are remaking the world before our eyes, we need to draw deep from the well of our creativity and imagination to build a new regulatory infrastructure for cybertrade. Trying to bend what he calls ‘Trade 2.0’ into the old legal frameworks is like a rancher trying to stop a car with a lasso.

Chander is mainly concerned with licit online trade but the challenge is arguably even steeper in relation to the growing use of the internet for illicit retail – whether of pharmaceuticals, psychoactive substances, or other counterfeit or prohibited goods. My own main interest is in online drug markets. Here, the sheer velocity of change in the last few years has been breath-taking, as the drug trade has been transforming in ways that even the sharpest-eyed observers can still only dimly discern. The one certainty is that policy-makers have not even started to grasp the nature and enormity of the new challenge, let alone to devise adequate new solutions – the drug-policy lasso remains very much in evidence. As I have argued recently, we need to be prepared to engage with genuinely new ideas if we are to achieve the kind of regulatory paradigm shift that is required. And it will be scholars like Anupam Chander who will be the most helpful guides as we seek to re-make global drug policy for the twenty-first century.