New Scourge in Deaths of Minors: Pills Bought Online

Fentanyl overdoses have become a leading cause of death for minors in the last five years or so, even as overall drug use has dropped slightly. And social media, where tainted, fake prescription drugs can be obtained with just a few clicks, is a big part of the problem, the AP reports. Experts, law enforcement, and children's advocates say companies like Snap, TikTok, Telegram, and Meta, which owns Instagram, are not doing enough to keep children safe. While data on the prevalence of drug sales on social platforms is hard to come by, the National Crime Prevention Council estimates that 80% of teen and young adult fentanyl poisoning deaths can be traced to some social media contact.

• In 2022, two weeks after she turned 17, Coco left home just outside New York City to meet with a dealer she'd messaged through Instagram who promised to sell her Percocet, said her mom, Julianna Arnold. She never made it home. She was found dead the next day, two blocks from the address that the guy had provided her. Whatever the dealer gave Coco, her mother said, was not Percocet. It was a fake pill laced with fentanyl, which can be lethal in a dose as small as the tip of a pencil.
• Mikayla Brown lost her son Eli to a suspected fentanyl overdose in 2023, two weeks after his 15th birthday. His father found him unresponsive on a September morning last year. His cause of death was accidental fentanyl overdose. But he wasn't trying to buy fentanyl, he was looking for Xanax, and, like Coco, ended up with tainted pills that killed him.

In a sweeping 2023 report on the problem, Colorado's attorney general called the availability of fentanyl and other illicit substances online "staggering." "Due to their ubiquity, convenience, and lack of regulation, social media platforms have become a major venue for drug distribution," the report said. "Where once a teen might have had to seek out a street dealer, hassle friends, or learn to navigate the dark web to access illicit drugs, young people can now locate drug dealers using their smartphones—with the relative ease of ordering food delivery or calling a ride-share service." (Click for more on what could come next.)