Tainted pills bought on social media killing youths
Shortly after Kade Webb, 20, collapsed and died in a bathroom at a Safeway Market in Roseville in December, the police opened his phone and went straight to his social media apps. There, they found exactly what they feared.
Webb, a laid-back snowboarder and skateboarder who, with the imminent birth of his first child, had become despondent over his pandemic-dimmed finances, bought Percocet, a prescription opioid, through a dealer on Snapchat. It turned out to be spiked with a lethal amount of fentanyl.
Webb's death was one of nearly 108,000 drug fatalities in the United States last year — a record, according to preliminary numbers released this month by the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention. Law enforcement authorities say an alarming portion of them unfolded the same way as his: from counterfeit pills tainted with fentanyl that teenagers and young adults bought over social media.
“Social media is almost exclusively the way they get the pills,” said Morgan Gire, district attorney for Placer County, where 40 people died from fentanyl poisoning last year. He has filed murder charges against a 20-year-old man accused of being Webb's dealer, who pleaded not guilty. “About 90% of the pills that you're buying from a dealer on social media now are fentanyl,” Gire said.
The phenomenon has led to disturbing new statistics:
• Overdoses are now the leading cause of preventable death among people ages 18 to 45, ahead of suicide, traffic accidents and gun violence, according to federal data.
• Although experimental drug use by teenagers in the United States has been dropping since 2010, their deaths from fentanyl have skyrocketed, to 884 in 2021 from 253 in 2019, according to a recent study in the journal JAMA.
• Rates of illicit prescription pill use are now highest among people ages 18 to 25, according to federal data.
Much as drug dealers in the 1980s and `90s seized on pagers and burner phones to conduct business covertly, today's suppliers have embraced modern iterations: social media and messaging apps with privacy features such as encrypted or disappearing messages. Dealers and young buyers usually spot each other on social media and then often proceed by directly messaging each other.
The platforms have made for a swift, easy conduit during the coronavirus pandemic, when demand for illicit prescription drugs has jumped, both from anxious, bored customers and from those already struggling with addiction who were cut off from in-person group support.
Supplies of tainted pills, crudely pressed by Mexican cartels with chemicals from China and India, have escalated commensurately. Fentanyl, faster and cheaper to produce than heroin and 50 times as potent, made for a highly addictive filler. Last year, the federal Drug Enforcement Administration seized 20.4 million counterfeit pills, which experts estimate represent a small fraction of those produced. Its scientists say that about 4 out of 10 pills contain lethal doses of fentanyl.
The result is that new waves of customers are swiftly becoming addicted, said Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “When you are putting fentanyl in pills that are sold as benzodiazepines or for pain, you are reaching a new group of customers that you wouldn't have if you were just selling fentanyl powder.”
In a two-month span in the fall, the DEA identified 76 cases that involved drug traffickers who advertised with emoji and code words on e-commerce platforms and social media apps. The agency has included a feature in its One Pill Can Kill public awareness campaign: a poster called “Emoji Drug Code: Decoded,” with images of drug symbols.
“There are drug sellers on every major social media platform — that includes Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, TikTok and emerging platforms like Discord and Telegram,” said Tim Mackey, a professor at the University of California San Diego who runs a federally funded startup that developed artificial intelligence software to detect illicit online drug sales. “It's an entire ecosystem problem: As long as your child is on one of those platforms, they're going to have the potential to be exposed to drug sellers.”
In January, parents of children as young as 13 who had died from pills protested in front of the headquarters of Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, in Santa Monica, with signs accusing the company of being an accomplice to murder. One speaker was Laura Berman, a relationship therapist and television host. In February 2021, her 16-yearold son, Sam, bought what he thought was a Xanax through a Snapchat connection, ingested it and died at home of fentanyl poisoning.
Facing a barrage of criticism from law enforcement and grieving parents, social media platforms have been stepping up policing on their sites, shutting down dealers' accounts and redirecting drug seekers to addiction services.
On Monday, the Ad Council announced a wide-ranging campaign to roll out this summer, funded by three tech companies — Snap, Meta and Google — to alert teenagers and young adults about the dangers of fentanyl. Social media platforms like Twitter, TikTok, Twitch and Reddit are expected to provide landing zones for the warnings.
Snap and Meta, the parent of Instagram and Facebook, report they are increasingly interrupting drug exchanges. Snap said it took action on 144,000 drug-related accounts in the United States from July to December last year. That figure does not include the 88% of drug-related content that was preemptively detected by artificial intelligence software, which monitors terms that could signify drug deals.
Now when Snapchat users search for “fenta,” “xanax” or other drug language, the results are blocked. They are redirected to an in-app video channel with content from nonprofit groups and the CDC that addresses “fentapills” — the dangers of purported OxyContin, Percocet, Xanax and Adderall.
According to Facebook's latest community standards report, it took action on 4 million drug-related exchanges worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2021. Instagram took action on 1.2 million, figures which represent alerts from both users and preemptive detection technology.
On Instagram, one recent search for Percocet did set off an automatic warning and an offer of help. But it also yielded numerous results, including an account that posted photos of the pills and contact information, with phone numbers on the encrypted messaging apps Wickr and WhatsApp.
During the pandemic, drug use has surged as mental health among young adults and teenagers has deteriorated, studies show. Young people tend to eschew heroin, not only because of its addictive properties but also because of a skittishness about syringes, say experts in adolescent behavior. Pills, with the false imprimatur of medical authority, appear safer. Moreover, to their generation, prescription medications — for anxiety, depression and focus — have become normalized.
“By the time the kid goes to college, his friends all have prescription bottles in their backpacks; they're used to sharing pills,” Ed Ternan said. “The drug traffickers know that.” In May, 2020, his 22-year-old son, Charlie Ternan, three weeks away from college graduation, bought what he thought was a Percocet for back pain from a dealer he connected with on Snapchat. Thirty minutes after ingestion, Charlie Ternan, 6-foot-2 and 235 pounds, was dead from fentanyl poisoning.
To fine-tune prevention messaging, Snap commissioned Morning Consult, a digital market research firm, to conduct a survey of drug knowledge. The results, from a random sample of 1,449 Snapchat users ages 13 to 24, underscore their vulnerability to misusing prescription drugs. They expressed feeling overwhelmed, anxious and depressed but also fearful of the stigma surrounding mental health challenges. “Coping with stress” was the top reason to turn to illicit pills, they said.
But only half the respondents overall, and 27% of the teenagers, knew that fentanyl could be in counterfeit pills. When asked to rate the danger posed by certain drugs, nearly twothirds were likely to rank heroin and then cocaine as “extremely dangerous,” but scarcely one-third put fentanyl in that category. Overall, 23% did not even know enough about fentanyl to rank its danger level, including 35% of adolescents.