Snapchat’s opioid SHAME: crime watchdog slams the ‘platform of choice for fentanyl drug dealers’

A crime watchdog has urged the Justice Department to crack down on the social media platform Snapchat, calling it the “platform of choice for fentanyl drug dealers” seeking young clients.

The National Crime Prevention Council (NCPC) said it’s time to investigate the platform, where fake pills laced with the powerful synthetic opioid are selling for $25 each and are causing a wave of overdose deaths. .

NCPC Says Snapchatwhich is popular with users ages 15 to 25, uses encrypted technology and its trademark disappearing messages, which help drug dealers evade arrest and prosecution.

“Drug dealers are using American innovation to sell deadly products,” Paul DelPonte, NCPC’s executive director, wrote in a letter to US Attorney General Merrick Garland.

‘In roughly the same amount of time late to read this lettersomeone will die from fentanyl poisoning because they bought a fake pill on a social media platform like Snapchat.

Overdose deaths reached a record high last year, averaging one death every five minutes. Among teens ages 10 to 19, deaths increased 109 percent between 2019 and 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A whopping 84 percent of them involved fentanyl.

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) says it is investigating fentanyl trafficking on social networking sites and warns that young shoppers use emoji code languages ​​to avoid suspicion from their parents.

Merchants use many social media and money exchange platforms, sometimes in the same transactions, but Snapchat’s encryption and automatically deleted messages make it difficult for merchants to catch, DelPonte said.

The Justice Department had no comment on the letter.

Snapchat’s parent company Snap says it took steps to improve security on the platform and saw user reports of drug sales drop from more than 23 percent last year to 3.3 percent last year. last month.

He is also backing a new bill to strengthen reporting of drug activity by social media companies.

Jennifer Stout, Snap’s vice president of global public policy, said the company uses technology to identify and take down traffickers and support law enforcement investigations.

“We will continue to do everything we can to address this national crisis,” he told the AP.

Still, Snapchat is the most common platform grieving families mention when reaching out to their group for help, DelPonte said.

Those parents included Amy Neville, whose son Alex was 14 when he bought a pill he thought was Oxycontin through the platform in June 2020. The boy had just told his parents about his drug experimentation and they were about to put him in treatment. .

One day, she cut her hair, went to lunch with her dad, and went out with friends. After returning to the family’s home in Orange County, California, she went to her room and at some point took the pill that killed her.

‘The next morning I found him in his bed. The rest is crazy,’ said Amy Neville.

‘After he passed, we said, ‘How did this happen?’ We thought we were ready.

His family knew little about fentanyl, which federal authorities say can be deadly in amounts smaller than the tip of a pencil.

Neville has received a tragic upbringing in the years since his son’s death, and he’s also heard from more families whose children overdosed after buying pills via Snapchat.

Neville, who calls Snap’s recent changes “a little Band-Aid on an open wound,” is also part of a California lawsuit against the company.

The lawsuit names several teens and young adults from across the country who have died from accidental overdoses.

It was brought to you by the Social Media Victims Law Center, which now represents 28 families whose children bought counterfeit pills through Snapchat.

The founding lawyer, Matthew Bergman, said the platform is the only one where the children of its clients have received fake or lethal pills.

The DEA calls fentanyl “the deadliest drug threat facing this country.”

DEA Administrator Anne Milgram called social media apps the “perfect tool for drug delivery” in a speech that also named platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.

Ed Ternan became an activist after his son died at age 22 from taking a single fentanyl-laced pill he thought was Percocet.

He said he’s seen more action on Snapchat than other platforms since they became aware of the issue in early 2021.

But he would rather have the government work with the companies to prosecute dealers than launch a corporate investigation.

“If the carrot is working, at some point the stick is working,” said Ternan, who sits on Snap’s safety board.

‘I want to prevent future deaths. And we do it with educational awareness and joining forces with social media companies.’

While the latest overdose death data has some encouraging signs, the number of fentanyl pills seized in the US has more than doubled this year, the DEA said this week.

The drug is largely produced in illicit laboratories in Mexico, with chemical precursors purchased from China, authorities said.

For drug dealers, social media today occupies a similar place to phones and pagers in years past, said Jim Carroll, a former director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy who also serves as an unpaid member of the safety board that advises Snap.

There is no data on exactly how much fentanyl is trafficked through social networking sites, he said, but Snapchat’s immense popularity among young people could also help explain why traffickers use the site and there are more deaths related to the platform, said.

“You can’t go after the phone company just because it’s the method of communication,” he said. Still, “all these social media companies need to do more.”