Fentanyl Almost Killed Michael Brewer. Now He Wants Snap to Pay

Michaelis a star witness in a lawsuit 64 families are pursuing against Snap Inc., alleging that the company’s Snapchat app helped fuel an epidemic of teen overdoses. At 13 he connected with a dealer he met on Snapchat and bought a pill that, unbeknownst to him, was laced with fentanyl. He took it, blacked out and stopped breathing. Now 17, Michael is a star witness because he’s one of only two teens in the case who can describe what happened firsthand. All the other kids are dead.

Since 2020 drug overdoses, driven by fentanyl, have become one of the leading causes of death for teens in the US, killing more than 1,600 each year. The Drug Enforcement Administration has stressed the role social media is playing in the crisis, saying criminal drug networks are “now in every home and school in America because of the internet apps on our smartphones.”

Although drug sales can be found on all social media platforms, teens, lawyers and law enforcement officials have singled out Snapchat, the yellow app with the ghost logo, whose 850 million monthly users send billions of messages every day. The DEA has linked some deaths to Snapchat, and the FBI is investigating the platform’s role in the spread and sale of fentanyl-laced pills as part of a broader probe into counterfeit drugs.

Snapchat’s popularity is based on its automatically disappearing messages. It thrives on evanescence, unlike Instagram and Facebook, which retain every message or photo sent and only recently began offering the option of vanishing messages. Snapchat users can be silly, or naughty, because everything disappears within 24 hours by default. The app attracts minors who want to hide things from their parents, and drug dealers who want to hide evidence from police.  

Snap says its disappearing messages are meant to mimic the ephemeral nature of real-life conversations, not to enable crime. “We are deeply committed to the fight against the fentanyl epidemic, and our hearts go out to the families who have suffered unimaginable losses,” says Jacqueline Beauchere, Snap’s global head of platform safety. The company says it’s spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing technology to detect dangerous content and wants to become the most hostile place on the internet for dealers. It removed 2.2 million pieces of drug-related content in 2023 and locked more than 700,000 dealer accounts.

Inside the courtroom, Snap makes a different case for itself. There, the company says it shouldn’t be blamed for the fentanyl crisis because, like a phone provider, it isn’t responsible for what’s said on its platform. The families’ lawsuit should be thrown out, Snap argues, because Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act immunizes it from liability. Social media platforms have long cited this controversial provision to assert that they can’t be held responsible for what their users say or do, and courts have agreed.

But a novel legal theory is starting to crack that immunity shield. Over the past three years, more than 1,000 lawsuits have been filed in the US against social media companies, alleging that they’ve harmed children in myriad ways, including addicting them to screens, connecting them with sex offenders and promoting suicide content. The cases argue that the platforms are dangerous products and that the companies building them should be held accountable when they cause harm. It isn’t about the platforms’ content, they say; it’s about the design. Some judges are proving receptive to the argument.

The families’ lawsuit has gotten further than most. On Dec. 5, an appeals court in California denied Snap’s second request to dismiss, and now the plaintiffs could be in for a yearslong legal battle that goes all the way to the US Supreme Court. A win would upend a law that has shielded tech companies for decades, radically changing our digital world.

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