Submitted 8 months ago by L4s@lemmy.world [bot] to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/oct/18/snapchat-sued-overdose-deaths
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
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: Image
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Shut down and reopen as some other shady, fly-by-night internet business?
There’s no shortage of people with enough to despair to turn to drugs lately.
Besides the issues caused by dealers adding adulterants and impacting the purity of drugs that way, because illicit drugs aren’t professionally tested and produced in less than optimal conditions it’s possible that drug labs will produce at varying purity levels or make something completely different to what they intended, even if they’ve been successful hundreds of times before.
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.” en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desmethylprodine
Here’s an idea: parent your fuckin kids better.
Their kids made a choice and it ended badly. We are all responsible for the actions we choose to take.
What a waste of time.
They should also sue whoever invented language because the kids used language to communicate with the drug dealers.
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!
isles@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Suing Snapchat won’t fix the environment that led to their daughter desiring drugs, sadly.
Pxtl@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
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.
3ntranced@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Except big pharma will gouge the fuck out of any opportunity market and have people still resort to the street level junk.
Hadriscus@lemm.ee 8 months ago
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
isles@lemmy.world 8 months ago
How did you come to this conclusion?