Drug overdose deaths among teens and young adults are climbing dramatically, as more and more of them buy fentanyl-laced pills bought online, unaware that they are contaminated with the deadly synthetic opioid. Law enforcement authorities say an alarming portion of the nearly 108,000 overdose fatalities over the past year were young people: overdoses are now the leading cause of preventable death among people ages 18 to 45, ahead of suicide, traffic accidents, and gun violence. Although experimental drug use by teens has been dropping since 2010, deaths from fentanyl have surged over the past few years, to 884 in 2021 from 253 in 2019. Social media apps such as Snapchat are TikTok are the leading online marketplace for drugs such as Percocet, Xanax, and other prescription medications. Suppliers have embraced the anonymity and privacy of social media—for example, using encrypted or disappearing messages—to sell their deadly wares, unbeknownst to buyers. The drugs, made to look like real medications, are pressed in Mexico with chemicals from China and India and leading to not only deaths from higher rates of addiction.
Meanwhile, what are the tech companies doing to crack down on the deadly merchandise that is trafficked on their sites? The nonprofit Ad Council recently announced a new campaign—backed by Snap, Meta, and Google—to alert teens and young adults about the dangers of fentanyl, using social media platforms Twitter, TikTok, Twitch, and Reddit to spread the word. Some companies are already targeting and interrupting drug exchanges, with Snap saying it took action on 144,000 drug-related accounts in the U.S. from July to December last year. A recent survey found that only 27 percent of teenagers knew that fentanyl could be found in counterfeit pills and 34 percent of adolescents said they didn’t know enough about the drug even to rank its danger level.