FBI Probes Snapchat's Role In Fentanyl Poisoning Deaths (latimes.com) 65
Federal agencies are questioning Snapchat's role in the spread and sale of fentanyl-laced pills in the United States as part of a broader probe into the deadly counterfeit drugs crisis. The Los Angeles Times reports: FBI agents and Justice Department attorneys are zeroing in on fentanyl poisoning cases where the sales were arranged to young buyers via Snapchat [...]. The agents have interviewed parents of children who died and are working to access their social media accounts to trace the suppliers of the lethal drugs, according to the people. In many cases, subpoenaed records from Snapchat have shown that the teenagers thought they were buying prescription painkillers, but the pill they swallowed was pure fentanyl -- a synthetic opioid 100 times more potent than morphine.
On Wednesday, the involvement of technology companies in the ongoing fentanyl crisis will be discussed on Capitol Hill at a House Energy and Commerce Committee roundtable. One of the listed speakers, Laura Marquez-Garrett, an attorney with the Social Media Victims Law Center, said Snapchat will be the focus. "The death of American children by fentanyl poisoning is not a social media issue -- it's a Snapchat issue," she said. [...] While dealers use many social media platforms to advertise their drugs, experts, lawyers and families say Snapchat is the platform of choice for arranging sales. Dealers prefer to use Snapchat because of its encrypted technology and disappearing messages -- features that have given the platform an edge over its rivals for fully legitimate reasons and helped it become one of the world's most popular social media apps for teens.
Former White House drug czar Jim Carroll said drug traffickers are always going to flock to where the young people are. "From everything I have read, I do believe that Snapchat has been more widely used for facilitating drug sales," than other platforms, said Carroll, who serves on Snap's safety advisory council and now works for Michael Best Consulting. "I think that's because of its popularity among the young." In December, Snap reported 363 million daily active users in its quarterly earnings report. That same month, the National Crime Prevention Council wrote a letter to Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland, urging the Justice Department to investigate Snap and its business practices. "Snapchat has become a digital open-air drug market allowing drug dealers to market and to sell fake pills to unsuspecting tweens and teens," the letter said. Garland didn't respond, but federal investigators have started to ask questions, multiple people said. Santa Monica-based Snap, which makes Snapchat, said it has worked with law enforcement for years to clamp down on illegal activity on its platform and has boosted moderation efforts to detect illegal drug sales. Last year, Snap said it removed more than 400,000 user accounts that posted drug-related content.
"We are committed to doing our part to fight the national fentanyl poisoning crisis, which includes using cutting-edge technology to help us proactively find and shut down drug dealers' accounts," Rachel Racusen, a Snap spokeswoman, said in an emailed statement.
On Wednesday, the involvement of technology companies in the ongoing fentanyl crisis will be discussed on Capitol Hill at a House Energy and Commerce Committee roundtable. One of the listed speakers, Laura Marquez-Garrett, an attorney with the Social Media Victims Law Center, said Snapchat will be the focus. "The death of American children by fentanyl poisoning is not a social media issue -- it's a Snapchat issue," she said. [...] While dealers use many social media platforms to advertise their drugs, experts, lawyers and families say Snapchat is the platform of choice for arranging sales. Dealers prefer to use Snapchat because of its encrypted technology and disappearing messages -- features that have given the platform an edge over its rivals for fully legitimate reasons and helped it become one of the world's most popular social media apps for teens.
Former White House drug czar Jim Carroll said drug traffickers are always going to flock to where the young people are. "From everything I have read, I do believe that Snapchat has been more widely used for facilitating drug sales," than other platforms, said Carroll, who serves on Snap's safety advisory council and now works for Michael Best Consulting. "I think that's because of its popularity among the young." In December, Snap reported 363 million daily active users in its quarterly earnings report. That same month, the National Crime Prevention Council wrote a letter to Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland, urging the Justice Department to investigate Snap and its business practices. "Snapchat has become a digital open-air drug market allowing drug dealers to market and to sell fake pills to unsuspecting tweens and teens," the letter said. Garland didn't respond, but federal investigators have started to ask questions, multiple people said. Santa Monica-based Snap, which makes Snapchat, said it has worked with law enforcement for years to clamp down on illegal activity on its platform and has boosted moderation efforts to detect illegal drug sales. Last year, Snap said it removed more than 400,000 user accounts that posted drug-related content.
"We are committed to doing our part to fight the national fentanyl poisoning crisis, which includes using cutting-edge technology to help us proactively find and shut down drug dealers' accounts," Rachel Racusen, a Snap spokeswoman, said in an emailed statement.
Snapchat is from a Chinese company? (Score:1)
Re:Snapchat is from a Chinese company? (Score:4, Informative)
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No mystery (Score:1)
If you want to stop the "fentanyl poisoning crisis", look at what started it. Access to prescription opiates was restricted, and so the cartels stepped in with something deadlier. Entirely predictable.
If you want to stop the "fentanyl poisoning crisis", you set up methadone and buprenorphine clinics so addicts will at least know how much they're taking.
If you want to stop the "fentanyl poisoning crisis", you promote a society worth living in, so people don't feel the need to check out with dope in the first
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You can also restrict the flow of fentanyl into the country, just stop illegal human trafficking across the Southern border.
Re: No mystery (Score:2)
Relatively few drugs get in that way, so that wouldn't really effect it
One of the main reasons drug dealers are preferring fentanyl is because you need very little of it that it's incredibly difficult to find if hidden, and it's synthetic, so you don't need large plots of vulnerable land to farm it.
It's just like prisons trying to stop drugs by stopping mail delivery. Most drugs get in through guards.
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If you want to stop the "fentanyl poisoning crisis", you set up methadone and buprenorphine clinics so addicts will at least know how much they're taking
If my tax dollars can't go to a girl or woman who's been raped to get an abortion, I most certainly do not want it going to someone who has chosen to do drugs.
If you want to stop the "fentanyl poisoning crisis", you promote a society worth living in, so people don't feel the need to check out with dope in the first place.
That's where you're going? It's soci
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And a real problem when EVERYTHING is laced with fentanyl. Don't ask me why they lace the drugs, but there is some campagn in Mexico to mix everything with elephant doses of fentanyl. Pot, coke, and ironically herioin. I've known someone to die from fentanyl ODs from pot and coke. Somebody is trying to kill off a certain group of people IMO.
I don't think the plan is to kill the users.
Rather, fentanyl is ~50x times more potent than heroine, meaning you can cut your heroine with fentanyl and your profits go through the roof.
The problem is that drug traffickers aren't the most reliable mixers, and when mistakes happen users OD.
As for the mixing into pot & coke I'm guessing that's the dealers trying to create a "special" product or trying to migrate their users to an opioid addiction. Again, not the best pharmacists so some of their users inev
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Where in the hell did you get THAT? Fentanyl is a specific compound that is about 50 times stronger than heroin. There are not multiple types or definitions of fentanyl.
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Actually there are. For example, for a while, if not still, most street "fentanyl" was carfenil, not fentanyl, but an analog, i.e. a related compound. There are multiple analogs. What their relative potency is, I don't know.
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No. They are analogs with different strengths, but the very fact that you called the analog carfenil, not fentanyl and said it is "a related compound" proves my point. They are not the same thing.
All of those plus codeine, methadone, heroin, and morphine are in the opioid family of drugs. Just because I mis-label gasoline as water doesn't make gasoline a kind of water that burns.
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Because OP is an idiot. The reason fentanyl is added is because users need something stronger, it's a restricted market, but still a market with supply and demand. The problem is the supply comes from China through the human traffickers at the southern borders and into the hands of local criminals, where OP is right, they aren't pharmacists so they often don't know and don't care what their users get.
Most places legalized pot and there is a toleration policy virtually everywhere on any drugs, people are tol
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Because OP is an idiot. The reason fentanyl is added is because users need something stronger, it's a restricted market, but still a market with supply and demand. The problem is the supply comes from China through the human traffickers at the southern borders and into the hands of local criminals, where OP is right, they aren't pharmacists so they often don't know and don't care what their users get.
Users don't want or need something stronger, they can just take more heroine, the cost goes up but you don't become immune to heroine. And local dealers generally don't want to cut with fentanyl because it's too dangerous and they don't actually want to kill their customers (often their addict buddies).
The problem comes at the level of the traffickers, it's way easier to smuggle 1kg of fentanyl than 10kg of heroine and you can cut that into a vastly larger quantity of "heroine" at the street level.
So you up the dose, or if that's not possible, use a different drug, but the bodies, despite the brain chemistry being resistant, the rest of your organs such as your heart is still just as weak as it was when you began, probably even worse. All the overdoses we see today is a result of decades of toleration of drug usage.
I won't a
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Most addicts know very well they're getting fentanyl. The fentanyl laced are cheaper and get you a bigger high for less. You can still get pure heroin, but as you said, it's more expensive, rich people like Hunter Biden are much less likely to die of a fentanyl overdose as a result but some do eventually OD on something stronger than heroin.
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Rather, fentanyl is ~50x times more potent than heroine, meaning you can cut your heroine with fentanyl and your profits go through the roof.
"Cut" generally means replacing a given volume of the real thing, with an exactly equal (or larger) volume of something else that is much cheaper than the real thing.
If you're claiming to sell a gram of X, you would very much want whatever it is you're selling to be a gram.
Fentanyl costs orders of magnitude more than heroine, and are many many orders of magnitude different in dosages.
Ok, lets be more precise, heroin is cut with many things including fentanyl [nbcnews.com].
You wouldn't replace 0.5 doses of heroin with 500,000 doses of fentanyl, which is 500,000 times the cost.
You wouldn't if profit was your goal anyway.
To use your numbers (I don't know the actual costs), you cut your 1 dose of heroin with 1 dose of fentanyl (and other stuff to make up the weight) for 10% the cost and your profits skyrocket.
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Rats kept in an enriched stress free environment show little interest in opoid laced water. Rets kept in standard lab cages can't get enough opioids.
How 'bout some evidence based statecraft?
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You’ve never used drugs?
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In that time the overdose death rate tripled from around 5 per hundred thousand to 15. Which was became a crisis for some even tough these people were voluntary ending their lives with doctors approval. So the great experiment ended. Drug mills were closed down. Prescription rates
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Wrong. The overdose crisis didn't start until after chain pharmacies agreed to stop filling opiate prescriptions, the CDC opiate prescribing guidelines tightened up, hydrocodone compounds were moved to DEA schedule II, and OxyContin was reformulated, doctors started getting sued, etc etc.
All that happened in the mid-2010s. That is when overdoses spiked. Not in 2005, not in 1995, not while the pill mills were in full swing.
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Re: No mystery (Score:4, Insightful)
Uhhmm... You realize that this case is about people who aren't addicted right? Basically just kids wanting to get high, probably to impress their friends. All the free methadone in the world won't fix that. And TFS doesn't specify, but if this pure fentanyl pill is as big as the typical oxy pill, that's enough fentanyl to kill a horse. I'm surprised it's not cut with anything, but then fentanyl is cheap. Your comments about the cartels going to it is wrong for this reason as well, it's because it's a purely synthetic drug, and it's even cheaper to make.
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It *is* cut with something, because a small pill made from pure Fentanyl is enough to kill not a horse, but a whole school full of children.
https://www.statnews.com/2016/... [statnews.com] has a very nice picture that shows the problem clearly.
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The victims in question are teens popping pills for the same reason why all teens experiment with drugs. They aren't necessarily addicts yet. But they're still looking to get high.
Increasing access to even more dope leads to situations like San Fran and the street shutters.
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Yes. But you missed the first step: Getting people hooked on prescription opioids. Too many doctors used them as first and not last way to treat pain, or had to do that as way too many people have a too high tolerance for regular pain med due to careless everyday use.
So... (Score:4, Interesting)
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can hold the phone companies responsible for drug deals arranged over the phone?
Phone communications were regulated at the time privacy mattered, similarly as paper mail. Phone communications are private and the carrier holds no responsibility on the contents of phone or paper mail communications.
Modern on-the-internet companies chose to not register as telcos. They chose to claim the messages exchanged on their networks are inherently insecure and can intercepted by intermediaries, including by them for data mining, and they make big money with that. It also means they gained a certai
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Because snapchat uses that new-fangled internet thingy. Completly different as everyone this internet is a series of pipes full of porn and drugs.
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SnapChat chooses to regulate, inspect, filter and mine the content on their platform as a business feature. So they're not common carriers, they're editors, like newspapers and responsible for whatever happens on their platform.
Taking their sweet time (Score:3)
"We are committed to doing our part to fight the national fentanyl poisoning crisis, which includes using cutting-edge technology to help us proactively find and shut down drug dealers' accounts," Rachel Racusen, a Snap spokeswoman, said in an emailed statement.
The Drug Enforcement Administration subpoenaed Snapchat for her son's messages and, the complaint states, it took nine months for the platform to respond.
Police subpoenaed Snapchat for his messages, too, and found he had arranged to purchase Percocet from a dealer who used the Snapchat account Arnoldo_8286. It took Snapchat seven months to remove the dealer from its platform, the complaint states.
Self-deleting pictures? (Score:3)
Orly? (Score:5, Insightful)
"The death of American children by fentanyl poisoning is not a social media issue -- it's a Snapchat issue," she said.
Sounds to me like it's a drug issue.
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It's not a drug problem, it's a drug prohibition problem.
There's never been a drug-related problem that prohibition didn't make a million times worse.
If low-dose codeine were available OTC (* see below) and stronger opiates were readily available by prescription without doctors risking losing their license to prescribe then people wouldn't need to turn to the black market.
Black market drugs are of unknown quality and unknown strength, with unknown impurities, and all manner of dangerous short-cuts during pr
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It's not a drug problem, it's a drug prohibition problem.
There's never been a drug-related problem that prohibition didn't make a million times worse.
This.
If the US didn't have such a hard on over locking up as many people as possible over largely benign crimes like possession, kids would still be smoking weed like they do in other countries.
And don't get me started on that insane 21 years before you're allowed a drink. You can kill in the army at 16 but a kid cant have a bottle until 21.
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Huh? (Score:2)
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I don't get that from the article at all, what I get is that "children are buying fentanyl unknowingly and dying". The article is not talking about drug addicts (they too die from unknowingly ingesting Fentanyl, also thinking they are getting something else), it's just focussing on a separate-but-very-related trend: selling Fentanyl-laced drugs to a younger clientele. These teenagers are not "fentanyl abusers", they are not addicts, they are kids looking to party and be cool and have fun with drugs. A lot
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Communication mechanism (Score:4, Insightful)
Snapchat, Telegram et. al. are communication mechanisms. They're not Silk Road FFS. What the Feds don't like is the inability to wiretap a Snapchat session w/o having to jump through hoops to obtain private communications via the Patriot Act because of the war on { drugs, terror, trafficking, and anything else we can make up}. But hey, it's not like the DOJ has ever violated the Patriot Act or its provisions before, right? [jurist.org]
The Patriot Act must die, if the feds want your communications they need to go to a judge and get a warrant first.
A link to a 16 year old article? Really? (Score:2)
If you're going to offer a link, it's better to be just a little bit more up to date perhaps? I have this perhaps over optimistic belief that bureaucracies do, sometimes, actually start behaving better...
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I have this perhaps over optimistic belief that bureaucracies do, sometimes, actually start behaving better...
yeah, about that.. [wsj.com]
One bad actor is not enough evidence (Score:2)
I get it; the police and three letter agencies in the US are out of control. But offering one of instances like the WSJ article proves nothing very much, especially as this case was a specific instance of corruption rather than general abuse of power.
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Crime is a parenting issue. Drug addiction is generally not. It is a being stupid issue because I want to have fun and/or get laid.
The future is weird (Score:2)
I bet when that guy in sneakers brought out the iphone
he never thought this would happen.
Back in my day you didn't need the snapchat (Score:1)
to know who had the good shit, who was throwing a rager while their parents were out of town, and whose genitals smelled like what.
Just more grandstanding to show the they're Doing Something...anything...except making an example of a few dealers and drug runners so the rest of them learn to tone it down around the youngins.
FBI still misbehaving (Score:3)
They're supposed to be a Federal bureau that INVESTIGATES. Over the decades they have become a federal police agency.
They're supposed to be politically neutral. They've gradually become a police force that treats the left and right very differently.
Consider: Is the huge increase in fentanyl-related deaths caused by Snapchat or by TONS of fentanyl pouring across the southern border?
Snapchat is not transporting a single dose of fentanyl into the country. By opening the border ILLEGALLY, the Biden administration is directly responsible for millions of doses of fentanyl entering the country. If you were a truly unbiased federal investigator looking into the fentanyl deaths, would you examin Snapchat, or the current president and his underlings?
This is the same FBI that, a year before the 2020 election, had proof that the allegations of Trump-Russia collusion were lies, AND had proof that Hunter Biden's laptop was real (it contains proof of numerous crimes) yet hid the laptop and pushed social media companies to bury the info while continuing to investigate Trump. If thinking about the Bad Orange Man hurts your head too much, then imagine the same fact pattern but with some other person as a placeholder for Trump ... because this is about far more than Trump - it's a basic principle of government. Career government employees and their agencies are not supposed to be putting their fingers on the scales of justice or on the elections.
Are these deaths intentional? (Score:2)
Former White House drug czar Jim Carroll said... (Score:2)
Those are people who died, died