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
Suing Snapchat won’t fix the environment that led to their daughter desiring drugs, sadly.
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.
Except big pharma will gouge the fuck out of any opportunity market and have people still resort to the street level junk.
Just let people buy the same stuff people take for prescriptions, at the same prices they would pay if they were uninsured.
If you’re uninsured, a month’s supply of cheap ADHD stimulant meds is like $40, and that’s for somebody taking it daily not recreationally. Fancy patented stuff like Vyvanse costs like 10X more but there you’re paying for timed consistent long-term release, which isn’t exactly a huge concern for recreational use.
“I wanna buy some ritalin”
“Do you have a prescription?”
“No.”
“Can I see some ID?”
“Okay.”
“Okay. That’ll be $40. Since you’ve never taken this before we strongly recommend you take your first hit now and sit in that chair for 40 minutes so we can make sure you don’t OD and die. Fill out this consent form, watch this video, and give me another $40 for this one-time onboarding.”
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
when almost every kid is going to test that kind of thing at some point in their teens.
How did you come to this conclusion?
Being around teenagers in the last decade pretty much leads to this conclusion.
The number of people I knew who didn’t do some kind of drugs in high school (grad 2017) was lower than the number that did, and I went to the known “upper middle class white people” school.
This day and age has led to teens increasingly seek escapism and other, less healthy coping mechanisms
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:
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.
Better drugs, more accountability, better regulations, better education, stronger supports funded by the Revenue from drugs.
How is this news to you?
Because I don’t live in a country where drugs are rampantly abused like a past time? It’s a good thing you know?
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.
I think people miss the point of drug abuse, most addicts are suffering from some kind of trauma, yes, we shouldn’t put addicts in jail, but we have to find another approach.
I was in the “make all drugs legal” but that’s just another can of worms
there’s no easy fix, we must treat addicts like we would any mental illness. I spent most of my 20’s in and out of jails, I never hurt anyone but myself, and was treated like an animal.
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.
Wait, so the parent knew about this issue for over eight months and did nothing to actually get their kid help?
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
Another sad example of the harm caused by the war on drugs.
