THE DEALER IN YOUR TEEN’S POCKET
Social-media apps aren’t just for selfies any more…
You can do everything online these days. Shop, read, play games, pay bills, book holidays, socialise. Deal drugs…
That’s right – those brightly coloured social-media apps filling our kids’ smartphones aren’t just being used to post selfies and tell their mates what they had for dinner.
They’re being used to sell marijuana, cocaine, MDMA, heroin.
Explosive new BBC documentary Stacey Dooley Investigates: Kids Selling Drugs Online, has exposed how these social-media apps have been hijacked by a dark underbelly of drug gangs.
And they’re using the kids themselves as dealers – teenagers as young as 15 dealing class-a drugs on the most public forums.
Home Office national statistics show that one in five 16-to-24-year-olds took illegal drugs last year.
Simple and speedy
According to the Office For National Statistics, there’s been a 30 per cent rise in drug abuse and misuse in the UK over the last five years.
Yet high-street sales have rapidly decreased.
Could this be down to the accessibility of apps and social media?
The BBC documentary proves illegal drugs are being sold over photo-sharing apps, social-media websites and dating apps.
So how does it work?
It’s actually terrifyingly simple – and speedy.
A dealer creates a public profile on one or several social media sites, usually under a pseudonym. They then use a secret code of emojis to advertise the drugs that they have on offer.
For example, a maple leaf is the universal emoji for drugs. A syringe emoji means heroin.
A snorty face or a diamond emoji indicate cocaine. A pill or a money face mean MDMA.
Some dealers, as exposed in Stacey Dooley Investigates, are alarmingly brazen about their illegal activities. One teen even openly smoked marijuana in his online videos, flashing bottles of pills he had for sale.
Quick search
With a quick hashtag search, a buyer can find someone selling what they want, from weed, mushrooms, MDMA and amphetamines, to cocaine and heroin.
Then the buyer either sends a direct message, or uses contact details provided in the dealer’s profile biography. Deals can then be set up in private. Gone are the days when drug deals took place in dark alleys, or corners of seedy nightclubs. They’re done by youths at bus stops and at school gates. During the documentary, members of a Glasgow-based
Stacey Dooley Investigates: Kids Selling Drugs Online is on BBC iplayer now.
drugs gang admitted about 75 per cent of its drugs were now sold online.
So how has this problem got so out of control?
Tech-savvy
As social media boomed, police worldwide focused on the underground drugs deals being carried out in the Internet’s hidden criminal world, the Dark Web.
Sites like Silk Road – an online drugs black market – were shut down, its kingpins jailed.
But criminal gangs were beginning to target something much simpler to peddle class-a substances.
Harmlesslooking, brightly coloured apps on smartphones that reach most teenagers and young people in an instant.
So now kids, who are generally far more techsavvy than their parents, don’t have to ask around to find a dealer, or meet unsavoury characters in back streets.
They can find drugs in just a matter of minutes, at the touch of a few buttons. One teenage dealer admitted earning a staggering £300 a day through his socialmedia drug deals.
App and social-media bosses say they ban any user carrying out illegal activity.
And many sites have already blocked several drug-specific hashtags.
But, of course, things move amazingly quickly online.
New profiles are created on different apps in seconds, new slang words pop up, different emojis are used.
Now parents are calling on social-media bosses and the police to do more to clamp down on illegal drug dealers operating on apps.
Before every kid has a drug dealer in their pocket.
Drugs can be bought with a click