A cursory visit to Instagram reveals a glut of accounts extolling the consumption and touting the availability of all manner of pills, including Xanax, Percocet, and Ox圜ontin - and often listing a Snapchat handle for arranging deals. Social-media companies have rules forbidding drug sales on their platforms, of course. Snapchat said it is ramping up efforts to address the fentanyl epidemic on multiple fronts, and Instagram said it will enforce policies banning drug sales.īut for many affected families, the social apps make it too easy for teens to buy fentanyl and don't help enough after tragedy strikes. And a review by Insider found that Instagram repeatedly failed to take down accounts touting illegal pills for sale after users had flagged them - an oversight that the Facebook-owned company blamed on a bug. Insider found two dozen fentanyl deaths in which the dealer used Snapchat to sell drugs, according to court records, news reports, and parents' accounts from 20. "It's not just her kid," says Bridgette Norring, the Minnesota mom who lost her son Devin last year and who believes there are "thousands of families like ours." But an Insider investigation has discovered that the story is all too familiar. Laura Berman, a famous sex therapist, told the world in February that her son had died of fentanyl poisoning after connecting with a dealer on Snapchat, many Americans were stunned by the tragedy. The first time they use it, they could die." "That's the danger of the Snapchat drug-delivery thing. "These 14- and 15-year-old kids are clueless about what they're doing," Lisa Smittcamp, the district attorney in Fresno, California, told Insider.
SNAPCHAT TO ROOT OUT DRUG DEALERS CRACK
Why, the families want to know, can't law enforcement and social media crack down on blatant public fentanyl sales before more young people die? The answer, experts say, is a devastating combination of counterfeit pills and consumer technology that has "sped up the danger" of young people's drug use - and which has left companies, law enforcement and health experts scrambling to catch up. "I would say 80% of the people I know who have lost children to fentanyl poisoning say their child bought the drugs on Snapchat," said Jaime Puerta, whose 16-year-old son, Daniel, died in April 2020 of fentanyl poisoning. The transactions are sometimes being arranged via social media to home-bound young people. In Los Angeles and small-town Minnesota, in famous families and blue-collar ones, a drug 50 to 100 times stronger than morphine is killing people at a historic rate during the COVID-19 pandemic. But, unlike the repercussions of posting an ill-advised video or regrettable comment on Snapchat, the consequences for teens buying pills through social media can be irreversible.
The tragedy is part of a painful pattern that has repeated itself over the past year, spread by the immediacy and friction-free ease that teenagers expect in an age of on-demand apps. But the pill that the dealer delivered was packed with fentanyl, an opiate so powerful that Norring died shortly after taking it. The 19-year-old in Hastings, Minnesota, connected with a drug dealer on the social-media app last year and arranged to buy a prescription pain pill. One of the last acts in Devin Norring's short life took place on Snapchat.
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