Snapchat has stepped up detection measures to root out drug dealers from its platforms, launching an education campaign to steer young people away from those pushing drugs within the app. The Senate Commerce subcommittee on consumer protection, product safety, and data security convened a hearing in October with representatives from TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube on whether tech giants do enough to keep children safe online - with the ability for teens to buy dangerous drugs as one of the primary arguments. ![]() These are fake pills.” Pushing for Accountability from Social Platforms “Nobody dies from taking a Xanax nobody dies from taking a single Percocet. ![]() “These are not overdoses these are poisonings,” Shabbir Safdar, director of the Partnership for Safe Medicines, a nonprofit fighting pharmaceutical counterfeits, told The Guardian. Tests conducted on the pills by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) found that approximately 40% of the counterfeits contained enough fentanyl to kill. įederal agents seized nearly 10 million counterfeit pills in the first nine months of 2021, more than they had in the previous two years combined. Dealers have begun selling pills that are labeled as Ox圜ontin, Percocet, or Adderall on places like Instagram and Snapchat.Ī Tech Transparency Project (TTP) investigation created multiple Instagram accounts for minors between the ages of 13 and 17 and found that the platform’s algorithms helped the underage accounts connect directly with drug dealers selling everything from opioids to ecstasy. No longer does a teenager or college-age adult need to have a sustained connection to buy illicit drugs. Finding Potentially Deadly Pills Is Just a Click or Two Away With young people more active than ever on social media due to the constraints of the pandemic, the drug trade has found a new home. Which drugs are specifically the biggest culprits in this jump? The Guardian found that accidental drug deaths among youths under age 24 increased by 50% in 2020, and a large part of that spike was due to the vast quantities of fentanyl that are appearing in the U.S.įentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is up to 100 times more potent than heroin, and federal authorities say that it is being pressed into millions of pills that are made to look just like traditional pharmaceuticals. That number climbed over 100,000 in a 12-month period for the first time in 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). ![]() The pandemic has also fueled a surge in drug-related deaths in the United States, with fatalities rising to 93,000 in 2020 - a 32% increase from 2019. Nearly every study that has examined the mental health impacts of the pandemic by age has found that the younger the person, the more likely they are to have been negatively affected. There was also a more than 50% increase in suspected suicide attempt ER visits among girls in that same age range in early 2021 when compared with the same point in 2019. The COVID-19 pandemic has been rough on nearly everyone’s mental health, and young people have been affected more than any other age demographic.īetween March and October 2020, the percentage of emergency room visits for children who had mental health emergencies rose by 31% for ages 12-17.
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