A pretty cool academic paper on the prevalence and social function/utility of freebies on darknet markets.
Do drug dealers entice nonusers with free samples? Police, the popular press, and social media users say so, but crime researchers have found little support for this theory and argue instead that sample distribution is an unsound strategy for illegal market business. But what about in digital drug markets, where operational logics are based on sophisticated anonymization technology and reputation systems? The author collected data from a large e-commerce website for drugs over 305 days in 2014 and 2015 and documents that (a) drug dealers give away samples of all major substance categories and (b) sample distribution increases vendor sales for prescription drugs and opioid-based painkillers. To explore possible explanations of these findings, the author collected data from the market's online forum and analyzed 175 discussions (2,218 posts) about samples. Among the findings is that samples are preferably given to reputable review writers, or "drug critics."
You can find it here: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0022042617746975
They tried to argue online freebies were to try to get people hooked? I thought it was always very clear that was an in person phenomenon, doesn't really work that way online lol. In order for a person to receive the freebie they'd have to ask for it and thus kinda be looking for it/already in the market anyways