Suit claims app features like disappearing messages and geolocating users make kids easy targets for dealers
Their kids died after buying drugs on Snapchat. Now the parents are suing::Suit claims app features like disappearing messages and geolocating users make kids easy targets for dealers
Desiring drugs isn't what killed her any more than snapchat did. She wanted drugs that were comparatively safe, and instead she got poison.
Why was somebody selling poison? Because buying drugs is illegal, and so consumer protection rules don't apply.
The war on drugs makes drugs more dangerous. Let her go to the drug store and buy some regular-ass methylphenidate over the counter if she wants a stimulant. The pharmacist ain't going to screw up and give her fent.
I think it's a bit easy to blame the environment when almost every kid is going to test that kind of thing at some point in their teens. Watching your children AND regulating snapchat surely can coexist
The night he died, Alexander had told his parents that he had been taking Oxycontin he got online, and that he wanted help. Neville and her husband immediately called a rehab facility and made plans to take him there the following day, but didn’t think to take the pills away.
Lmao, what? They might as well sue phone manufacturers for giving kids access to internet and app stores where they can install apps that enables drug dealers to reach kids or whatever
Even after she created her own account and found her son’s dealer posting images with hundreds of pills, Mendoza’s reports to the help center went unanswered, and it took eight months for them to flag his account. “It was really disheartening,” she said.
And
Other problematic features include notifying individuals when another person screenshots their post, the ability to geolocate fellow users and algorithms that suggest new connections based on demographics.
Perhaps SnapChat files a counter suit on the parents for buying their kid a smartphone, paying for service, and not putting parental controls on the device to keep them from using apps that they don’t want their kid accessing
I think I saw somebody selling drugs in a park next to a playground. We should forbid parks with playgrounds because they make it easy to sell drugs to kids.
Yeah, nobody gets mad at the playground's security guard who sleeps on the job and refuses to tell the drug dealers to leave. 100% of blame rightfully goes to the parents!
I am conflicted on this one. On one hand, yeah they’re just a platform, and realistically these kids would just go to another messaging service instead, but it also feels like they’re asleep at the wheel when it comes to investigating user reports of abuse.
It’s sort of an all social media thing, because I’ve reported posts selling drugs on FB marketplace too and they ignored them after review.
They quote one of the families in the article reporting a drug dealers account and Snapchat taking no action for months. I’d be willing to bet moderation is an afterthought and likely understaffed for the sheer volume of content on the app.
Usually the people selling these to individuals don't know what it actually contains. They just buy it from higher up in the chain assuming it is what they say it is.
The people who do make these pills will add fentanyl for multiple reasons but none of those reasons are to kill the user. It's because fentanyl is cheap to make and a lot more powerful. You can smuggle a much smaller physical amount of fentanyl than something like heroin. Because of that, they'll smuggle less of another drug and make up for the difference by adding fentanyl. The intention is never to add too much of it but they make careless mistakes and end up with some pills containing a lethal amount.
I actually was in a University project once about designing centrifuges in a way to properly mix two powders for pharmaceutical purposes. This is absolutely non-trivial and apparently this used to be done by ear by experts in the field.
My work was about creating a computer simulation to test new designs.
I can totally see this going wrong in a secret back alley lab.
I get how this happens on fake painkillers, heroin, and maybe even fake xanax. But there’s no logical explanation I can come up with to explain why it’s in cocaine, MDMA, fake adderall, and meth short of trying to kill someone.
Most drugs produce a sense of euphoria so Fentanyl just gets sold as whatever and because it's illegal it's impossible to understand the potency of what you're buying.
Besides the issues caused by dealers adding adulterants, drug lab products have varying purity levels and a tiny mistake can create something totally different to what you intended with no way to test it.
From Wikipedia: "In 1976, a 23-year-old graduate student in chemistry named Barry Kidston was searching for a way to make a legal recreational drug... Kidston successfully synthesized and used desmethylprodine for several months, after which he suddenly came down with the symptoms of Parkinson's disease and was hospitalized. Physicians were perplexed, since Parkinson's disease would be a great rarity in someone so young, but L-dopa, the standard drug for Parkinson's, relieved his symptoms. L-dopa is a precursor for dopamine, the neurotransmitter whose lack produces Parkinson's symptoms. It was later found that his development of Parkinson's was due to a common impurity in the synthesis of MPPP called MPTP (1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine), a neurotoxin that specifically targets dopamine producing neurons."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desmethylprodine
They found screenshots of what looked like a menu of narcotics, and conversations with a drug dealer showing Brooke had purchased what she believed to be Roxicet, a prescription medication containing acetaminophen and oxycodone typically prescribed for pain relief.
The suit claims Snapchat’s features facilitate practices like drug sales by connecting dealers to young customers while promising safety from legal repercussions through anonymity.
Other problematic features include notifying individuals when another person screenshots their post, the ability to geolocate fellow users and algorithms that suggest new connections based on demographics.
Perla Mendoza, a parent in the suit, found that Snap did little to prevent illegal drug sales in the weeks and months after the death of her son, Daniel (Elijah) Figueroa, who bought fentanyl-laced pills from a dealer on Snapchat.
Ternan, who did not join the suit, goes on to explain that losing his son – an energetic and fun-loving young man who was weeks away from graduating from UC Santa Cruz – has forced himself to come to terms with the factors that came together to cause Charlie’s death.
While Mendoza works to spread awareness of the risks of fentanyl to Spanish-speaking families, Neville travels to schools to share Alexander’s story and hosts monthly online meetings that empower young people to do peer-to-peer youth outreach.
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