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Their kids died after buying drugs on Snapchat. Now the parents are suing
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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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 love this
Legal weed in Canada has determined THAT was a lie.
Weeds legal here too. The fun part is paying upwards of 30% tax on top of overpriced product.
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
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
I work in K12. The amount of kids who are trying drugs at a younger age is massively higher than when I was in high school 20 years ago.
Yep. It’s crazy and not in a good way. 20 years ago the edgy kids smoked pot and not much worse. Now there’s kids literally doing cocaine in bathrooms of high schools. Pot is not only normalized, it’s almost encouraged among teenagers now.
I’m a pothead to an extreme degree and I keep telling kids to not be like me.
I had kids doing cocaine in our high school bathrooms 25 years ago, which is why anecdotes are unreliable for sense-making.
Exactly, the 1980s existed and some of us were alive then. I was too young to see coke in high school as I started in 1989 but older siblings absolutely did.
Fair, and I’m not saying that it didn’t happen, but I’d bet it was less people than are doing it now. What we can all probably agree on is that high schoolers doing coke is bad and we’d like that number to trend down, not up.
Um, there's a whole lot to escape from, even if their home life is functional.
We don't get to totally neglect kids and parenting as a society, except to funnel them towards becoming an interchangeable, disposable laborer / soldier in some machine working towards a billionaire vanity project or into prison where their options are worse, and then not expect them to want to escape.
If a teen is seeking out drug sales on Snapchat, that's a symptom that something is amiss, whether or not the platform is being misused.
pretty much every kid in my high school was experimenting with drugs 20 years ago. we all smoked weed at the very least, lots of kids did coke, acid. ecstasy was crazy popular. this was way before fentanyl though.