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Black Market Drug Use Causes Teen Deaths

Pill Bottles with Dangerous Drugs

Many teens succumb to peer pressure and take dangerous risks to fit in. They experiment with drugs purchased from black market websites, such as Silk Road 2.0. Often times, these teens are unsuspecting and unaware of what they are actually taking, and they are putting their lives at risk.

Synthetic drugs, such as hallucinogens, are becoming increasingly more available online, coming from black market websites and countries where there is little regulation and oversight. According to Dawn Dearden of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA),”We’re seeing a lot of kids ordering them online, they’re available on the Internet, and there’s no regulation in the production of these substances. You have no idea of the dosage you’re getting. It can be different form buyer to buyer, purchase to purchase.”

Below are some unfortunate tragedies caused by dangerous drugs purchased by teens online:

  • Patrick McMullen was a 17-year-old in the United Kingdom, who experimented with drugs he purchased on the original Silk Road. During a chat on Skype with some friends, he took a half a gram of ecstasy and three tablets of LSD, and mentioned taking Ketamine, all purchased from the same illicit, black market site. During the course of the conversation, Patrick stopped making sense, and then he grew silent. His friends watched and listened helplessly as he died of a drug overdose in his bedroom. The post-mortem examination revealed that the cause of Patrick’s death was ecstasy toxicity due to dangerous counterfeit drug use.
  • Eighteen-year-old Christian Bjerk was a popular high school student from Grand Forks, North Dakota. He went to a house party one night, and was found dead the next morning, lying face down on a sidewalk a few blocks from his family’s home. A search of the house where the party was held turned up a white powder, but police couldn’t determine what it was. Days later, another teen was dead, and again, the same mysterious white powder was involved. The substance was purchased from an illicit online drug website called Motion Resources. The founder of the site, Charles Carlton, was arrested recently and is facing life in prison.
  • Preston Bridge was a 16-year-old from Perth, Australia, who died the morning after his high-school dance at a local hotel. Prior to his death, Bridge took two tablets of what was believed to be synthetic LSD, purchased by a 17-year-old classmate from Silk Road. He then jumped to his death from the hotel room balcony. Preston’s dad, Rod Bridge, has been campaigning for the website to be shut down since his son’s death. “We can sit here all day and try to point the finger at people, but when it comes to internet sites and dealing drugs – they’re the ones that are responsible,” he said.

Our colleagues at Partnership for Drug-Free Kids provide public education through various initiatives, including public service announcements. They advocate for greater access to adolescent treatment and recovery support, and fund youth prevention programs. At CSIP, we also offer educational resources for consumers, and recommend that parents and teens pay attention to suspicious packaging.

If you have concerns about a website or drug seller, please report the information to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for further investigation using our online portal. In addition, before buying online, make sure the website is safe by using our partner LegitScript’s Pharmacy Verification Tool.

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The Center for Safe Internet Pharmacies (CSIP) and our 13 member companies have the shared goal of helping address the growing problem of consumer access to illegitimate pharmaceutical products on the Internet. Continue to read this blog for updates on CSIP’s education, enforcement and information-sharing efforts.