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
Suing Snapchat won’t fix the environment that led to their daughter desiring drugs, sadly.
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.
Except big pharma will gouge the fuck out of any opportunity market and have people still resort to the street level junk.
Just let people buy the same stuff people take for prescriptions, at the same prices they would pay if they were uninsured.
If you’re uninsured, a month’s supply of cheap ADHD stimulant meds is like $40, and that’s for somebody taking it daily not recreationally. Fancy patented stuff like Vyvanse costs like 10X more but there you’re paying for timed consistent long-term release, which isn’t exactly a huge concern for recreational use.
“I wanna buy some ritalin”
“Do you have a prescription?”
“No.”
“Can I see some ID?”
“Okay.”
“Okay. That’ll be $40. Since you’ve never taken this before we strongly recommend you take your first hit now and sit in that chair for 40 minutes so we can make sure you don’t OD and die. Fill out this consent form, watch this video, and give me another $40 for this one-time onboarding.”
I love this
Legal weed in Canada has determined THAT was a lie.
Weeds legal here too. The fun part is paying upwards of 30% tax on top of overpriced product.
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
when almost every kid is going to test that kind of thing at some point in their teens.
How did you come to this conclusion?
Being around teenagers in the last decade pretty much leads to this conclusion.
The number of people I knew who didn’t do some kind of drugs in high school (grad 2017) was lower than the number that did, and I went to the known “upper middle class white people” school.
This day and age has led to teens increasingly seek escapism and other, less healthy coping mechanisms
I work in K12. The amount of kids who are trying drugs at a younger age is massively higher than when I was in high school 20 years ago.
Yep. It’s crazy and not in a good way. 20 years ago the edgy kids smoked pot and not much worse. Now there’s kids literally doing cocaine in bathrooms of high schools. Pot is not only normalized, it’s almost encouraged among teenagers now.
I’m a pothead to an extreme degree and I keep telling kids to not be like me.
I had kids doing cocaine in our high school bathrooms 25 years ago, which is why anecdotes are unreliable for sense-making.
Exactly, the 1980s existed and some of us were alive then. I was too young to see coke in high school as I started in 1989 but older siblings absolutely did.
Fair, and I’m not saying that it didn’t happen, but I’d bet it was less people than are doing it now. What we can all probably agree on is that high schoolers doing coke is bad and we’d like that number to trend down, not up.
Um, there’s a whole lot to escape from, even if their home life is functional.
We don’t get to totally neglect kids and parenting as a society, except to funnel them towards becoming an interchangeable, disposable laborer / soldier in some machine working towards a billionaire vanity project or into prison where their options are worse, and then not expect them to want to escape.
If a teen is seeking out drug sales on Snapchat, that’s a symptom that something is amiss, whether or not the platform is being misused.
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pretty much every kid in my high school was experimenting with drugs 20 years ago. we all smoked weed at the very least, lots of kids did coke, acid. ecstasy was crazy popular. this was way before fentanyl though.
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.
Clearly Snapchats fault
“My baby keeps playing with the knife, instead of taking away the knife I’ll schedule some behaviour classes”
The parents next day finding the baby stabbed itself:
It’s obviously the knife manufacturer, and whatever retailer that sold the knife’s fault!
It sucks their kids died but it is more their fault than Snapchat.
You can’t blame the postman for delivering weed, it is just another package to them. And by the same token if someone seeks out drugs that’s on them.
Legalise drugs.
How the fuck is legalising drugs going to help from an overdose?
Better drugs, more accountability, better regulations, better education, stronger supports funded by the Revenue from drugs.
How is this news to you?
Motivated reasoning is a heluva drug
How so?
Dude you were replying to seems convinced criminalization is the way to go, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Like 120 years worth (give or take) of prohibition in the US, and the drug problem has only gotten worse. If dude doesn’t want to see that evidence, dude won’t.
Because I don’t live in a country where drugs are rampantly abused like a past time? It’s a good thing you know?
What country do you live in?
Been 3 hours and he still hasn’t answered lul. Bet he Googled it and found out it is rampant.
Imaginationland
India, yes drugs exist here and yes I have had them. But for a country of 1 billion+ you will very rarely find articles about people OD’ing the way you do in other countries because that culture is not here. It is present in few specific states like Punjab but not a country wide thing.
You mean the culture of reporting and talking about it, right?
Wow, less than 5% of Indians even use alcohol. Quite a different culture for sure.
You’re country is missing out then. Drugs are a key aspect of the human condition.
It said the drug she bought wasn’t what was advertised and contained a lethal amount of fentanyl. Legalizing drugs will allow people to get what is advertised and users are able to seek help for addiction etc. Users are going to use regardless if its legal or not. So being able to get help for addiction and buy it safely can significantly reduce the number of unnecessary deaths.
Okay that actually makes sense and I’m an idiot.
Good ending
“lethal amount of fentanyl” whoever is selling those drugs sucks at their business.
Let’s use an example from history, Alcohol. Is the alcohol you can purchase in the store safer than the stuff some sketchy dude will sell you in the parking lot? Probably right? Same goes for drugs, much safer when it’s regulated because making it illegal clearly doesn’t do a good job at preventing deaths.
Street drugs are cut with nasty shit that kills people. Legal drugs would be regulated and not cut with the nasty shit that kills people. It’s pretty simple.
Also, if people’s lives and ability to get a good job aren’t fucked by going to jail for using drugs, they are more likely to want to eventually get clean so they can get one of those good jobs.
I think people miss the point of drug abuse, most addicts are suffering from some kind of trauma, yes, we shouldn’t put addicts in jail, but we have to find another approach.
I was in the “make all drugs legal” but that’s just another can of worms
there’s no easy fix, we must treat addicts like we would any mental illness. I spent most of my 20’s in and out of jails, I never hurt anyone but myself, and was treated like an animal.
I, personally, believe that everyone should have the right to their own consciousness and the ability to alter it. That should be the one thing that nobody can take away from you. There are many functional addicts even ones on harder drugs, and they aren’t hurting anybody. They would be hurting themselves less if they had access to clean and regulated drugs.
I do agree that we should have resources and tools for people to help get clean. Most people people don’t want to do drugs forever, it’s a phase in most people’s lives, but if they do want that, they should be allowed to. Nobody is forced to be a productive member of society or be successful. Our time here is short, nobody asked to be here, and the one thing we should be allowed full control over is what is in between our eyes.
That being said, I do agree that treating it like a mental illness can be the right thing to help someone if they are struggling, and I appreciate your addition to the conversation, very much.
Gets rid of any added substances, lessens the “forbidden fruit” appeal of drugs and implements safety checks so if you do OD or are worried you’ve OD’d you’re not afraid to call the ambulance.
Harm reduction bro
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
Except for
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.
“I will ask snapchat to stop doing bad things, but I will not delete their app from my kids smartphone. It’s their responsibility, not mine”
Wait, so the parent knew about this issue for over eight months and did nothing to actually get their kid help?
Who said they didn’t?
The fact that they still allowed their kid to have access to the drug dealing app/device that has the drug dealing app on it.
Or they removed it and then the kid put it back. Yes, they might have been able to take the device away entirely but that’s not really effective, and the strong parental controls are only available for kids up to 13 (at least on Android).
That doesn’t absolve Google or Apple for facilitating the download of the app where drug dealers frolic.
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
Google parental controls shut down automatically after a certain age.
Not much of a counter suit. It’s legal to buy your kid a smartphone and it’s legal to not put parental controls on it.
Another sad example of the harm caused by the war on drugs.
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!
So what you’re saying is is that we should have people surveilling children on the internet?
Try watching your kids and stop letting them go blindly on the internet…
One of the victims described was only a few weeks away from graduating from university.
Somebody needs to teach kids about actual drug safety. Abstinence from drugs is a shitty program that doesn’t work and often, the speakers just lie. Opipids are horrible enough that you don’t have to make up lies about them. When kids find out they lied about weed, they start to wonder what else they were lied to about. I can understand 14 year olds being dumb, but people in their 20s should know better than to be buying opioids on Snapchat and Telegram.
Also, I don’t see a way how Snapchat can possibly regulate this. Just like with Craigslist, criminals will use emoji and code words to sell drugs and get through language filters.
There are organizations that do this, it’s called harm reduction. Many people don’t listen to them because they state that the number one harm reduction technique is to not do them at all.
You gotta find these people in the real world. People like that aren’t gonna be on lemmy or even know about it. Those types can’t get past the settings menu let alone understand FOSS.
Or don’t give kids money so they can’t therefore buy drugs.
Wow inflation has even hit the drug market. X and acid has doubled since the last time I did anything. Shrooms seemed to stay the same though
Probably just the dudes on snapchat taxing. If you know the right people you can get it for cheaper
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.
Giving customers deadly drugs they didn’t ask to buy seems like an absolutely shit business plan. How do you get repeat business from dead people?
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.
I don’t really know for sure but I think that’s because they sometimes only have one table or pill press they make the pills with and they don’t clean off any residual fentanyl
Shut down and reopen as some other shady, fly-by-night internet business?
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
There’s no shortage of people with enough to despair to turn to drugs lately.
Here’s an idea: parent your fuckin kids better.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
The original article contains 1,269 words, the summary contains 216 words. Saved 83%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
What a waste of time.
They should also sue whoever invented language because the kids used language to communicate with the drug dealers.
Their kids made a choice and it ended badly. We are all responsible for the actions we choose to take.
