Kansas teen’s fentanyl death spurs bill to hold social media accountable

The death last year of a Johnson County, Kansas, teenager poisoned by fentanyl has led to a congressional effort to make social media companies report illegal drug activity on their platforms.

The Cooper Davis Act, introduced Thursday by Republican Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas, requires communication service providers to work more closely with federal authorities who need data to fight illegal drug sales.

Cooper’s parents had told The Star the pill laced with the synthetic opioid that killed their 16-year-old son was purchased by a friend who used Snapchat to hook up with a dealer in Missouri. Cooper and his friends thought they were taking Percocet pills. He was the only one who died.

Libby Davis had said she had monitored her son’s Snapchat account and, “I could see drugs being sold on Snapchat, so it’s not hard to find. It’s definitely happening.

“People were posting pictures of what they had for sale and how much they cost. And it was people in our area. I know he had routes to drugs on Snapchat.”

Last month in a back-to-school message to families, Marshall warned parents that “your children through social media, through the Snapchats, are able to purchase one tablet of fentanyl, which can kill them. So please parents, teachers, talk to your children about the dangers out there.”

Marshall has described his proposal as a way to hold social media companies accountable. Law enforcement officials warn that an alarming rate of fentanyl-laced pills are sold through TikTok, Snapchat and other popular social media sites. Drug cartels trafficking fentanyl in the United States use vast distribution networks on social media, Marshall says.

Drug dealers take payment via apps.

Marshall and seven other Republican senators sent a letter this week to the CEOs of Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, and TikTok asking them to identify the “steps your companies are taking to protect children and crackdown on illegal drug sales on your platforms” and “recognizing the role your platforms play in the evolving illicit drug ecosystem.”

“Social media platforms like yours provide a convenient venue for dealers to anonymously and discreetly peddle these counterfeit pills to a young audience,” they wrote. “With 4 in 10 of these pills containing a lethal dose of fentanyl, more and more of these online transactions are ending in tragedy.”

Some of the companies, however, have already taken steps to combat illegal drug sales on their platforms. Snapchat unveiled new safety policies last year. For instance, it developed an educational portal that users are directed to if they search for drug-related keywords. The company said it also increased its detection rates by more than 200% in the early part of last year alone.

“We are determined to remove illegal drug sales from our platform, and we have been investing in proactive detection and collaboration with law enforcement to hold drug dealers accountable for the harm they are causing our community,” the company said in a statement.

Facebook has said its standards are clear to users: Neither Facebook nor Instagram allow people to buy, sell or trade pharmaceuticals on their platforms, and they have created partnerships with experts and groups fighting the opioid crisis.

TikTok also prohibits the depiction, promotion or trade of drugs and other controlled substances — violators of the platform’s community guidelines get kicked off. But some users still find ways to work around those rules.

As easy as Grubhub

Cooper’s death was one of two high-profile fentanyl deaths of young people in the Kansas City area in the past year tied to social media.

In the Northland, Oak Park High School sophomore Ethan Everly died on March 29, five days after taking a tiny blue pill he apparently thought was Percocet, a narcotic used to treat pain but also sold illegally to people looking for a high.

His father told The Star that Ethan didn’t know it was a fake packed with a lethal dose of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50 times stronger than heroin and up to 100 times stronger than morphine.

Young people like Cooper and Ethan are taking pills they think are Xanax, Percocet, OxyContin and other pharmaceuticals, not knowing that some are counterfeit pills jacked up with enough fentanyl to kill them.

Ethan was communicating with the person who sold him the fake Percocet via Facebook Messenger. His father later saw the conversation on Ethan’s phone. His son paid for the pill that killed him through Cash App.

“So it’s no longer the idea of you going to a back alley in this dangerous area and making a buy,” Rogeana Patterson-King, assistant special agent in charge with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s Kansas City district office, told The Star earlier this year.

“These drug traffickers have become very savvy, and they know how to solicit buyers on different types of apps on your phone.”

In the era of social media, teenagers can get drugs now as easily as having Grubhub deliver dinner. “They don’t leave the house anymore,” Kevin Kufeldt told Johnson County parents at a drug seminar earlier this year.

Kufeldt, a counselor with Johnson County Mental Health Center who works with adolescents being treated for addiction, warned Blue Valley School District parents not to dismiss the growing fentanyl crisis as something that doesn’t affect their kids. It’s at your front door, he warned.

Libby Davis, Cooper’s mother, spoke that night, too.

She didn’t know anything about the fentanyl crisis before her son died in August 2021, shortly after starting his junior year at Mill Valley High School in the De Soto district. But since then she has put aside a fear of public speaking and has talked to countless parents in the metro. She was scheduled to appear with Marshall at a press conference Friday morning.

She and her husband, Randy, also launched a public awareness campaign in his memory, Keepin’ Clean for Coop. Marshall’s office said it worked with the couple in crafting the Cooper Davis Act.

Snapchat, the popular instant messaging app, lets people share images and video clips that disappear, often within seconds, after being viewed.

“The concept of Snapchat I despise,” Davis told The Star. “I don’t believe that parents should not be able to see exactly what their kids are doing on that platform. The built-in privacy for immature children I think is a disservice to society. It just shouldn’t be. You shouldn’t be providing an avenue for kids to do secretive things, or bad things.

“It provides an avenue for anything you might not want seen two minutes from now, they put it on there because they think it’s going to go away.”

Fentanyl deaths rising

The letter that Marshall and his Republican colleagues sent the social media giants pressed for details about what they are doing to stop illegal drug activity on their platforms.

The senators, who also requested a meeting with the CEOs, asked the social media platforms for the number of illegal drug transactions and the accounts it removed for that activity. And they asked whether the companies were sharing information with other social media companies and law enforcement.

Last year in Kansas, overdose deaths from fentanyl-related substances topped all other drug-related overdose deaths. Among the 338 people who died of a drug overdose between Jan. 1 and June 30 last year, 149 involved fentanyl or a fentanyl analog.

The Kansas City Police Department said earlier this year that accidental overdoses from fentanyl had climbed nearly 150% from 2019 to 2020, particularly noticeable among ages 15 to 24. Last year, out of 129 overdoses, 50 were fentanyl-related, KCPD said.

Law enforcement officials nationwide are in a full-court press warning families about this explosion of overdoses, including the DEA’s public awareness campaign, One Pill Can Kill.

Marshall’s proposal is modeled after federal code that requires reporting of activities related to sexual exploitation and other abuse of children to the Justice Department.

Under his plan, the information companies would report at their “sole discretion” includes details about the people involved in illegal drug activity — email addresses, screen names and payment information excluding personally identifiable details.

They would also report area codes or ZIP codes that could identify geographical location, and information related to drug sales, such as photos or direct messages.

It has built-in privacy protections, however, noting that providers are not required to “monitor any user, subscriber, or customer” or “search, screen or scan” their accounts.

The act calls for the DEA to make the reports available to other law enforcement agencies.

And it outlines penalties for providers who knowingly and willfully fail to report such activity — no more than $150,000 for the first offense, no more than $300,000 after that.

Marshall frequently uses the fentanyl crisis to push for stricter security at the U.S. border with Mexico, part of the hard-line approach his party has taken to immigration issues.

It’s one of the party’s featured messages in their effort to win control of Congress this November.

Marshall, who is not up for reelection until 2026, is among the Republican lawmakers who have made trips to the southern border to emphasize their opposition to illegal immigration.

After his trip, Marshall called Kansas a border state, given the number of fentanyl overdoses in the state and lambasted President Joe Biden over what he said was a humanitarian crisis at the border.

“Border security is related to fentanyl poisoning, 90% of the fentanyl is coming across the border because we don’t have a secure border,” Marshall said.

“It has nothing at all to do with illegal immigration, except from the standpoint of the border guards are so overwhelmed with the volume of people coming across that they can’t pay attention to the bad guys.”

The Justice Department said in August that more fentanyl is being seized at the California ports of San Diego and Imperial than at any other port in the country and that in the first nine months of the fiscal year, 60% of the fentanyl seizures in the country were along the southern border.

Marshall’s bill faces an uphill battle in passing through the Senate, which is currently narrowly controlled by Democrats.

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(Includes reporting by The Star’s Daniel Desrochers.)

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