Social Media, Fentanyl a 'Deadly' Combination, Researchers Warn | The Crime Report

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) confiscated millions of counterfeit fentanyl pills and over 28,000 pounds of methamphetamine as of 2020 — an amount large enough to kill every American—according to the most recent data.. But keeping track of the transportation and distribution of fentanyl-laced pills has become more complicated, because drug traffickers are using social media to sell the pills, according to an Addiction Center study. This presents an unprecedented problem, as roughly 85 percent of Americans have smartphones, many of them young people who are emerging as a major market for the pills, reports The Guardian in an analysis of the study. “In California, where fentanyl deaths were rare just five years ago, a young person under 24 is now dying every 12 hours, according to a Guardian analysis of state data through June 2021,” said The Guardian. “That’s a 1,000 percent increase over 2018.” In previous years, advocates were concerned about fentanyl-laced heroin or other street drugs, but with the popularity of social media, drug dealers are lacing commonly sought after prescriptions like OxyCotin, Xanax, and Adderall with the deadly drug — or replacing the prescriptions altogether with Fentanyl pills shaped and colored identically to the sought…
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