HOW DRUGS WENT VIRAL

Thanks to social media, you can now get anything from Xanax to heroin quicker than a Domino’s delivery. Cosmopolitan investigates how a new generation got hooked on class-As

Within the past hour I have reorganised my inbox, made a dinner reservation for my boss, written a feature on health shots and scored five bars of Xanax, some MDMA, ketamine and Ritalin… all without leaving my desk. Scoring that lot was the easy bit. The feature took about three hours to polish off. But getting hold of the drugs? Oh… about 10 minutes. Back in the not-so-good old days, if you wanted some recreational “helpers”, you needed three things: contacts, time and the sort of constitution that could handle meeting a man called “Wurzel” behind Halfords on a lonesome industrial estate at half past midnight. That meant drugs were often the preserve of the connected and the truly dedicated. But things have changed. Social media hasn’t just affected the way we communicate, date and eat, but how we get high, too. Because there is a new way to score. It’s fiendishly quick, largely anonymous and may be about to cause a drugs epidemic, the likes of which we’ve never seen before.

Dealers like Oliver* are leading the charge. His phone – which lies face-down on his long dining table – rattles every few seconds. Each time this happens, his eyes break contact with mine and dart to it: another customer. Business is booming for Oliver. Earlier, in his bedroom, he’d pulled open his desk drawer to reveal a sea of pink and purple pills.“I can shift this lot in about two weeks,” he tells me, smiling. For this haul, he’d spent just £180 Bitcoin (a digital currency not linked to your personal banking system) on the dark web (a part of the internet only accessible with certain software where users are anonymous and untraceable) – and will make £1,000 shifting them on. In a fortnight, he’ll repeat the cycle.

I’ve seen those little pastel pills before… on Oliver’s Snapchat – his virtual shop window, which lights up my screen with a full rainbow of colour. There are little bags of pills the colour of strawberry Angel Delight, rows of tablets shaped like the minions from

Despicable Me and tiny capsules designed to look like the Chupa Chups logo. It feels like a window into Willy Wonka’s factory.

But this isn’t the only place you’ll find easy access to drugs alongside #tbts and selfies: other modern dealers opt for Instagram. Beneath their pictures they use huge lists of searchable hashtags, designed to ensure that if someone is looking for drugs, their account will appear. See a dollar sign? That means what you see in the picture is for sale. See a rocket emoji? This signals high potency. See a snowflake? This is how dealers show they have cocaine they want to shift.

Once a sale has been arranged on apps like Snapchat (where opened messages are deleted after a maximum of 24 hours) or Kik (where chats cannot be traced by others), money is exchanged through an app like Wickr – which has endto-end encryption, meaning that conversations can’t be accessed by a third party. All these apps, and the potential customers on them, have heralded a boom time for drug dealers. They offer a ready-made market place where anonymity is almost always guaranteed (to set up a new Instagram or Snapchat account, all you need is an email address and password), and the reach is far greater than what you’d get through word of mouth. What’s even more appealing is the free marketing: the more drugs you look at on the apps, the more the algorithms put them in front of you – meaning that social media often works in the dealers’ favour more so than it does against them. That’s why modern-day dealers now make 75% of their income on social media.†

Billy’s* profile appeared as soon as I typed #xanax into Instagram, but he’s certainly not the only dealer available to me. A quick search of selective hashtags turns my feed into a sweet shop of drugs, full of images of mason jars jam-packed with pink and baby-blue pills. I pick Billy because his profile offers overnight delivery with promises of “discreet” packaging; all the things you want from a good online seller. Plus, his profile picture is a meme and his bio is littered with emojis – at first glance it’s no different from a million other carefully curated teenage profiles.

I comment on his picture of a bag of foam-banana-coloured Xanax bars (pills are crushed and reformed as

“It feels like I’m in Willy Wonka’s factory”

long bars) asking to buy two. Within minutes, my phone flashes up with a message from him, this time under a different name. He demands we speak on Kik (where there is no requirement that you share any personal details). He even insists I download it just to speak to him. His customer service pitch is better than most: discounts, suggestions and delivery deals come flooding in. Before I know it, I’ve been up-sold and have overnight delivery on five bars of Xanax and a gram of MDMA.

Nick Hickmott, an early intervention lead at addiction charity Addaction, warns that he’s increasingly working with larger numbers of 13- to 17-yearolds: “Some dealers have enough of a conscience to draw the line at really young kids, but for the most part, there are no rules – they’re making hay while the sun shines.” Although statistics show that overall drug use across the UK is down,‡ for 16- to 24-year-olds, class-A drug use has increased by 2.2% in the past five years,** and the number of school-age children who have taken drugs has risen 9% between 2014 and 2016.†† According to local news reports, schools all over the UK are sending home letters to parents warning them of the drugs being sold to their children through the devices in their pockets. This suggests that drug culture, rather than slowing or growing, is simply changing, and adapting for a more specific clientele. We’ve seen this before: during the alcopop boom of the early noughties, numerous drinks companies were accused of using childish, brightly coloured packaging to target young people. With this in mind, I test Billy: “I don’t want my parents to know, so what if it arrives while I’m at school?” I type, gingerly. He responds almost immediately, “You have nothing to worry about”, he tells me.“Everything is discreet and safe, no bullsh*t. They won’t find [out] what’s in it.”

According to Hickmott, one of the central issues with this new method of distribution is not just that it targets young people, but that it specifically pinpoints the most vulnerable young people in society: those whose social lives exist almost exclusively online. “This method often appeals to those who are already ostracised, isolated or don’t have good friendship groups, because it’s faceless and sits with all the other aspects of social media that appeal to them: like hiding behind their phones. For them, speaking to a stranger online is far easier than having to go out to meet someone in the flesh.”

This masked anonymity is certainly part of the appeal for students like Anna.* She knows almost nothing about her dealer in real life, because when she decided, aged 18, in her first year of university, that she wanted to get hold of some weed, she found it on Instagram Stories. Most of her friends do the same.“It’s because of the convenience of it,” she tells me.“It’s so much easier than getting in contact with a load of dealers at random to see what they have: this way, they post on their Stories when they’re active with certain drugs.” She doesn’t have to deal with the cumbersome and complicated process of accessing the dark web, or climb in the back of a stranger’s car, parked behind her local Tesco. She can also get lured in to try other substances – ones she might not have considered before – that are being advertised on her feed: “I buy weed and cocaine from one dealer on Snapchat, as well as edibles and THC oil vapes, and use other dealers for ket and ecstasy… I have to shop around to find what I want.”

You could argue that – apart from the technology – there’s nothing new here. Young people have always experimented with drugs, it’s only the marketing of them that’s different; it’s just part of the societal ebb and flow of things. But what if there’s something more sinister about this approach than we realise? While our parents worried about dealers peddling drugs in the playground, this new, low-lying phenomenon was growing insidiously under the radar, targeting those with brains already wired for addiction. Look closely at the brightly coloured pills strewn about social media and you’ll notice many of them are designed to look like emojis or the logos of popular platforms. Social media has a complicated effect on the brain. As we scroll, our dopamine levels (a neurochemical present in certain parts of the brain) spike, meaning we experience increased goal-oriented behaviour and we start seeking out the reward of a “like” and the instant gratification of a follow. So when dealers come to social media to advertise their wares, they’re pitching to a captive audience. Advertising magazine Adweek found that consumers are six times more likely to purchase a product online if the page includes images from social media, and that’s the crux: there’s an implicit sense of trust and comfort with social media that dealers are using to their advantage. Recent research from Michigan State University found a clear connection between social media and poor decision-making – a link also commonly found with drug addiction. There are numerous psychological similarities between drug use and social media use, so the coupling of the two is doubly problematic. If social media has become the opiate of a generation, then the leap to harder stuff becomes dangerously easy.

Eighteen-year-old Caleb,* who buys Xanax on Snapchat and Instagram, says he would never go back to buying drugs in person.“The first time I did it, I posted ‘Who has Xanax?’ on my Story and that was it, dealers started getting in touch.” For

“This method is appealing because it’s faceless”

Caleb, this method feels like it fosters a community, one which he considers relatively safe: “If people get caught using a certain dealer, they will start posting about it on their Stories, giving details about what happened so that others know not to use them – it’s like everyone’s looking out for each other.”

Using discounts, postage options and preferential algorithms has allowed social-media dealing to mimic a regulated retail market. The resources available to the police and charities such as Addaction are not enough to tackle a problem as large and multifaceted as this, which begs the question: could the platforms be doing more? When we spoke to Snapchat, it insisted that action is being taken to alleviate the problem: “There is no place for selling drugs on Snapchat. We encourage anyone who sees something like this anywhere to always report it.” Instagram states the same. Its spokesperson told us,“Buying or selling illegal or prescription drugs is not allowed on Instagram. We encourage anyone who comes across content like this to report it using our in-app tools. We check these reports 24/7 and as soon as we’re made aware of violating content, we work quickly to remove it.” Kik and Wickr declined to comment. Social media is an inherent part of the digital world we’ve created. One that chimes with our human urge to discover, create and improve. But, unlike real life, it’s a place where nothing is off limits. Our phones and the social profiles they hold have become an extension of the ego, in the psychoanalytical sense of the word: grounded in reality, but with a hearty dose of sometimes unattainable aspiration. For the 37 million of us using them in the UK, they’re also a lifeline: it’s how you organise your work life, social life, how you date, shop and relax. Existing without it is out of the question. So the fact that dealers are starting to take advantage of this phenomenon isn’t surprising. Social media is not the axis of all evil – far from it. But it is up to us, as consumers, to notice who is in control of the relationship. And if it isn’t us, perhaps step back and ask, who is?