Long before you could order groceries, gadgets, or literally anything else with a few clicks, the predecessors of the internet were being used for something far less legal. In the early 1970s, students at Stanford University used ARPANET—the military-funded network that would eventually become the internet—to arrange a marijuana sale with students at MIT.

That's right. E-commerce was basically invented for drug deals.

The Deal That Started It All

The transaction happened sometime between 1971 and 1972. Stanford students used their ARPANET accounts to connect with buyers at MIT, negotiating the sale of an undisclosed amount of cannabis. No money actually changed hands over the network—they weren't that sophisticated yet—but the arrangement and agreement were made entirely online.

This makes marijuana one of the first products ever "sold" via computer network, depending on how strictly you define a sale.

Wait, Was This Actually the First?

Here's where it gets murky. Some historians argue about what counts as the "first" online transaction:

The Stanford-MIT marijuana deal (1971-72) arranged via ARPANET
A 1984 grandmother in the UK ordering groceries through her TV
The 1994 Pizza Hut online order, often cited as the first retail e-commerce
A Sting CD sold on NetMarket in 1994, claimed as the first "secure" online purchase

The marijuana sale predates all of these by decades—but since no digital payment was processed, purists might not count it as true e-commerce.

ARPANET: The Accidental Marketplace

ARPANET was created by the U.S. Department of Defense to allow researchers at different universities to share computing resources. The idea that students would immediately use this revolutionary technology to buy weed probably wasn't in the Pentagon's original vision statement.

But it makes perfect sense. Give young people access to instant, cross-country communication for the first time in human history, and of course someone's going to find a way to monetize it—legally or otherwise.

The Real Legacy

Today, global e-commerce is worth over $5 trillion annually. Amazon alone ships billions of packages per year. And it all started—at least spiritually—with some college kids figuring out how to score drugs without leaving their dorm rooms.

The next time you one-click order something at 2 AM, remember: you're participating in a grand tradition that stretches back to the very dawn of the internet. The products may have changed. The impulse hasn't.

Jeff Bezos should probably send those Stanford students a thank-you note.

Related Tags