A recent BBC investigation revealed thousands of posts advertising illegal drug sales on seemingly innocuous social media platforms, many selling deadly nitazenes hidden within other drugs.
Want to get caught up on what's happening in SoCal every weekday afternoon? Click to follow The L.A. Local wherever you get podcasts.
Nitazenes, an illegal substance in the BBC’s home country of Great Britain, are synthetic substances similar to heroin and morphine. Created in laboratories though, nitazenes are hundreds of times stronger than either of those drugs.
Like fentanyl, nitazenes are used by drug dealers to cut costs but can be deadly since users don’t know of their presence.
According to the BBC’s report, almost 3,000 posts on the audio sharing platform SoundCloud contained simply a brief audio clip, usually only seconds long, with the name of the available drug and contact details listed as the track’s title.
Over 700 more posts advertising illegal drug sales were found on X, formerly Twitter, with a large majority of them having been posted since the beginning of 2023.
So far, it appears these posts were targeting dealers in the U.S. and U.K. rather than individual drug users.
Follow KNX News 97.1 FM
Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | TikTok