Synthetic opioids previously linked to deaths in Britain ‘made available for sale on social media’

Research shows deadly synthetic opioids linked to more than two deaths a week in Britain are being offered for sale in thousands of social media posts.

Suppliers boasted to undercover BBC reporters posing as dealers about how easy it was to use social media to promote nitasenes, an illegal class of drugs many times more powerful than heroin.

The investigation found almost 3,000 posts on the music sharing site SoundCloud that contained audio clips advertising the drugs, with supplier contact details displayed in the song titles.

Advertisements for the drugs were also found in 700 posts on X, including some that had been on the site for 18 months.

In the program New Drug Threat, which will be broadcast on BBC One on Monday, a supplier can be heard: “(SoundCloud) is a music platform, but we can make an advertisement on it.” Another vendor claimed that X was “good to use” to promote the drugs because its ads were less likely to be blocked on the platform.

The reporters contacted 35 vendors, including 14 who had advertised on SoundCloud and six who had advertised on X. Of the 35 contacts, 30 were willing to post to Britain, but the reporters did not actually purchase the drugs.

Figures released to the Guardian by the National Crime Agency show that 65 people have died this year as a result of taking nitasenes in the past six months – more than two per week.

Users often unknowingly take the substances with them after they have been hidden in other illegal substances by dealers. One of Britain’s first victims was 21-year-old musician Dylan Rocha from Southampton, who died in July 2021 after unknowingly taking heroin containing nitazenes.

Rocha’s mother, Claire, described the study’s findings as shocking. She asked, “How could that happen? How many people have died because of the advertising there?”

Prof Vicki Nash, the director of the Oxford Internet Institute, told the programme: “Finding advertisements on this scale, hundreds, thousands of advertisements, is horrifying and could pose a very significant risk to human life.”

Mike Trace, a former government drug czar, said: “In terms of drug-related deaths, the arrival of nitazenes is probably the biggest new challenge, the new fear, that we have.

“We are currently experiencing an ‘overdose crisis’, with almost 5,000 drug-related deaths every year in England and Wales. If nitazenes enter this market on a large scale, that death rate could increase and double or triple.”

After SoundCloud was notified of the ads, it removed nearly 3,000 posts. It said it and other social media platforms were being “targeted by bad actors” and vowed to do “all” it could to “tackle this global epidemic.”

X also deleted hundreds of messages after being contacted by reporters, but did not respond to requests for comment.