Hopestream for parenting kids through drug use and addiction

Gone in a Snap: Inside Snapchat’s Teen Opioid Crisis, with Paul Solotaroff

July 02, 2024 Brenda Zane, Paul Solotaroff Season 5 Episode 226
Gone in a Snap: Inside Snapchat’s Teen Opioid Crisis, with Paul Solotaroff
Hopestream for parenting kids through drug use and addiction
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Hopestream for parenting kids through drug use and addiction
Gone in a Snap: Inside Snapchat’s Teen Opioid Crisis, with Paul Solotaroff
Jul 02, 2024 Season 5 Episode 226
Brenda Zane, Paul Solotaroff

ABOUT THE EPISODE:

Over 35 years of reporting on the terrible consequences of both drugs and the war on drugs, Pulitzer Prize finalist Paul Solotaroff developed deep contacts with DEA, Homeland Security, and other branches of law enforcement across the country.  Paul had already seen the deadly wave of fentanyl-spiked heroin in 2013-2014, so when a top official at the DOJ called him last year sounding more desperate than ever before, he knew there was a serious crisis.  

Paul was informed that 5-10 children were dying every day from a new scourge: fake pharmaceuticals like Adderall and Oxycontin made from fentanyl.  Even more disturbing, he discovered that kids no longer even have to know a dealer to obtain the pills.  In his lengthy new article in Rolling Stone, Paul details how Snapchat - a platform designed for its content to disappear - has been helping dealers find kids who might otherwise have never bought illegal drugs.

In this episode, he shares the terrifying truth about the latest fentanyl crisis, how social media companies have facilitated underage drug use, and the upcoming legal battles to hold them accountable.

EPISODE RESOURCES:

This podcast is part of a nonprofit called Hopestream Community
Learn about The Stream, our private online community for moms
Learn about The Woods, our private online community for dads
Find us on Instagram: @hopestreamcommunity
Download a free e-book, Worried Sick: A Compassionate Guide For Parents When Your Teen or Young Adult Child Misuses Drugs and Alcohol

Hopestream Community is a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit organization and an Amazon Associate. We may make a small commission if you purchase from our links.

Show Notes Transcript

ABOUT THE EPISODE:

Over 35 years of reporting on the terrible consequences of both drugs and the war on drugs, Pulitzer Prize finalist Paul Solotaroff developed deep contacts with DEA, Homeland Security, and other branches of law enforcement across the country.  Paul had already seen the deadly wave of fentanyl-spiked heroin in 2013-2014, so when a top official at the DOJ called him last year sounding more desperate than ever before, he knew there was a serious crisis.  

Paul was informed that 5-10 children were dying every day from a new scourge: fake pharmaceuticals like Adderall and Oxycontin made from fentanyl.  Even more disturbing, he discovered that kids no longer even have to know a dealer to obtain the pills.  In his lengthy new article in Rolling Stone, Paul details how Snapchat - a platform designed for its content to disappear - has been helping dealers find kids who might otherwise have never bought illegal drugs.

In this episode, he shares the terrifying truth about the latest fentanyl crisis, how social media companies have facilitated underage drug use, and the upcoming legal battles to hold them accountable.

EPISODE RESOURCES:

This podcast is part of a nonprofit called Hopestream Community
Learn about The Stream, our private online community for moms
Learn about The Woods, our private online community for dads
Find us on Instagram: @hopestreamcommunity
Download a free e-book, Worried Sick: A Compassionate Guide For Parents When Your Teen or Young Adult Child Misuses Drugs and Alcohol

Hopestream Community is a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit organization and an Amazon Associate. We may make a small commission if you purchase from our links.

Paul:

Snapchat very quickly realized that its entire demographic was children, tweens, and teens. And it steered straight for that market. The very features that made Snapchat such a catnip to children also made it a paradise for predators. No forensic evidence lasting longer than 24 hours. On the backend, Snap's server farms were deleting all data.

Brenda:

You're listening to Hopestream. If you're parenting a young person who misuses substances, is in a treatment program or finding their way to recovery, you're in the right place. This is your private space to learn from experts and gain encouragement and support from me, Brenda Zane, your host and fellow mom to a child who struggled. This podcast is just one of the resources we offer for parents. So, after the episode, head over to our website at hopestreamcommunity. org. I'm so glad you're here. Take a deep breath, exhale, and know that you have found your people. And now let's get into today's show. Hi friend, this is a bit unusual to drop a midweek bonus episode, and I only do it once in a blue moon, because each episode is a ton of work. But, last week I caught wind of an article in Rolling Stone Magazine about Snapchat's role in the teen opioid crisis and after I read all, I don't know, 9, 000 plus words of it, I said to myself, I have got to make parents. And you know me, I have to write on getting in touch with the journalist who wrote it, Paul Solitero. Paul has been a senior writer at Rolling Stone for 25 years and at Men's Journal for almost 20. He covered the NFL concussion scandal. He was the first to report the horror show conditions at Walter Reed Hospital. And he has written a series of stories that help free innocent men who are doing life without parole in state prisons. He goes deep. Paul is a Pulitzer Prize and National Magazine Award finalist and six of his stories were optioned for TV dramas or films. And I was lucky enough to get him to agree to come on HopeStream. In this conversation, Paul explains how Snapchat's features make it the perfect playground for all sorts of criminal activity, including drug dealing. We talked about why Snap and other social media platforms Act as a genius distribution network for dealers and how this was especially true during the pandemic lockdown. You are going to hear how the cartels are involved and Paul breaks down the economics of fentanyl. It is all I have to say pretty disturbing and in the end, the article and this conversation just made me even more passionate about helping you have real honest communication with your kids. Because the only way that we are going to be able to protect the young people we love from organizations like this is to make them aware that they are not the consumers of social media. They are the product and they have got a big target on their foreheads that makes them extremely vulnerable to so much that can harm them. Please, please, please take a listen. Share it widely. This is not something we can ignore. Here we go. Paul, thank you so much for taking the time of what I know is a really busy couple of weeks for you after the publishing of this article, for joining me on Hope's Dream. You're sitting with a A lot of parents who have a lot of experience with their kids struggling, and I know this is going to really hit home for them. So I appreciate the time and welcome.

Paul:

I'm honored, privileged, and purpose driven to tell every mommy, daddy, grandma, grandma, Granddaddy, aunt, uncle, what kids are walking around these days with, which is the internet in their back pocket and a bullseye on the back of their head.

Brenda:

Yes. And I don't think that that's been so much. What parents are thinking about. I think everybody's getting aware of the fact that, Ooh, there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of stuff there that they can have access to, but I don't know, and I didn't know until I read the article, how much, what you just said, the bullseye on their head is so true. I mean, they are really being targeted as a product really. And, and the parents don't know it. And I know even, you know, when, when my son was younger, I thought I knew what was on his phone. And then I found out that there's like little apps that look like other apps that hide the apps. So you really aren't ever totally sure what's on there, which is terrifying. So. Yeah. So I'm really glad to talk. Why don't you take us to. I would love to know sort of how this germinated with you. I know you cover incredibly in depth stories with all kinds of interesting people, but how did this come across your desk?

Paul:

So a little bit of backdrop on me. I've been reporting out the war on drugs for the better part of 35 years. Have seen more human misery, more bungled pursuit of what is chronic illness, or a kind of cocktail of chronic illnesses that come together as substance disorder. I have seen the enormous criminalization of what is very clearly a biochemical disorder or a cluster of biochemical disorders, you know, you never meet a kid with a single diagnosis. Addiction is never the beginning or end of the story. Addiction is the latest stop. On a therapeutic or self therapeutic grail, kids don't self medicate because they're bored on a Tuesday. They self medicate because they're in pain. And in those 35 years, they I've walked tens of thousands of wrongly convicted drug offenders out of prison. I've helped free six innocent men who were serving life without parole, broke the NFL concussion scandal, the Walter Reed Army Medical Field Hospital scandal, got the rapper Meek Mill out of prison for being framed for two crack rocks by the Philadelphia Field Narcotics Unit, In the late nineties Aaron Hernandez America's favorite tight end slash serial killer, who was out of his mind on angel dust, chronic, and reportedly at the end, cocaine and meth. And so along the way, I've built up very rich contacts with the DEA, Customs and Border Patrol Homeland Security. Local cops, sheriffs, et cetera. And, you know, every ten years, I find myself reporting a new vector of mass death. Last summer, I got a call on my bat phone from one of the two or three DOJ. And I've never heard a federal official leader sound this desperate. He said, Paul, we are losing five to ten children a day. Their mothers are making the 20 foot walk down the hall to their kid's bedroom to wake their 12, 14, 15 year old son up for school, to find him blue in his bed, vomit on his lips, wooden chest, Dead six hours from a single. It ain't an Oxycontin. It's a fake Oxycontin. It's not an Adderall. It's a fake Adderall. It's not Valium. It's not Xanax. It's all fentanyl, and we can talk, if time permits, about how the cartels learned from these white boy narcos, 2016, 2017, 2018, to get out of the heroin business entirely and get into fake pharmaceuticals. Why did they do that? Because they were selling a brick of fentanyl. At the border for 4, 000 to 5, 000. That brick of fentanyl will throw off 500, 000. Fake oxys, fake Adderall. It costs a kid in his basement with a cheap hand cranked pill press. Bought on Amazon. Four cents to make a dead perfect replica of a Xanax. of an Adderall and sell that pill on Snapchat for 30. So do the math. One brick, 5, 000, 500, 000 pills sold for 30 a pill. Let's say he's wholesaling them for 15. It's seven and a half million dollars from a 5, 000 expenditure. We went from tiny little hot spots of fentanyl distribution in America in 2017, 2018, to blanket saturation coverage. There's not a town, there is not a county, there isn't a city or a borough in America that isn't needy in fentanyl being processed into all of These fake pharmacies.

Brenda:

So when the DOJ is calling you for help, at first, were you a little like skeptical, like What's going on or how, how was it that you started digging in and then getting hooked to the point where I don't know how many words the article is, but it is long and in depth and so well researched that I have to imagine you, you spent quite a bit of time on it.

Paul:

It was full gestation and I, when I broke the NFL concussion scandal story, that was three months, the Aaron Hernandez story. three months, make mill three months. I thought, you know, I've been writing about fat mills for the last 10 years. Sure. What else I can say about it? And then my friend, the DOJ directed me to a law firm in Seattle, the one law firm, actually it's one of two with the courage, the cash cushion, The 100 percent commitment to hold these monsters, these social media CEOs responsible in a court of law for the massive die off of children. I want to be clear about who these kids are before I go any further. Oxycontin really changed the profile of addiction in the country. It suddenly became over a 15 year period, 97, 2012 the party drug of choice for high school kids college kids on campus frats Raves, et cetera, et cetera. It mixed beautifully with everything, right? With Molly, with with Ketamine. And You know, if you began to develop a tolerance, all you had to do was crush it up. That so called protective enteric shell is a joke you just, you know, stuck an Oxycontin 30 under your tongue and that protective shell would dissolve in five minutes. And then you'd simply chop the thing up and snort it. Depending upon where you were in your addiction shooting. All right, so 2012 the DEA Really begins to run herd on all these pill mills these quack doctors chiropractors all over the country who were running these enormous pill dispensing operations in which people would show up with 200 cash allegedly for an MRI or an x ray on their back and just get a refillable script for 90 oxy 80s, which were worth 10 K on the street. And if you had a Medicaid card instead of 200, it would cost you 3. So the story leads off. With this gorgeous 14 year old boy named Alexander Neville who lived and loved his life in Aliso Viejo, Orange County, California. This kid was O. C. down to the bone. You know, the androgynous haircut, the braces utter fearlessness in nine foot waves. He would jump off balconies on skateboards. He was that kid, right? He had more than a touch of ADHD, but he also had an IQ of 150. Like all these kids, he was the highest achieving, most intellectually curious, emotionally sensitive and available kid. And when the pandemic hit in March of 2020, it was for Alex and so many thousands of other boys and girls, the final straw. Suddenly they were on lockdown. This kid lived within five miles of the beach. Couldn't get there. Couldn't even get on his bike. He didn't just lose the ability to move about town. He lost his tribe. He lost all those kids who kept him sane. And. Like every kid in my story, trapped in his room at two in the morning, doomscrolling social media, he ran across someone posing as a friend. Someone posing as an acquaintance of a friend of his. That someone was a hardcore MS 13 gangbanger with the username AJ Smokey. And four mothers told me that A. J. Smokey killed their children within a two month span in 2020. And Smokey wasn't subtle. Smokey, every single day, was posting videos. live streamed to his Snapchat stories of him driving in LA with an entire car full of fake Alprozolam, Xanax, bars, whatever they're calling them fake M30, Oxycontin, Percocets, Valium, edibles Adderall, mushrooms, guns, his gang tents, bragging, essentially screaming to the cops, come get me. But he was selling on Snapchat, and as I'm sure so many of your mothers know already, Snapchat, which was not born to be a conduit for drugs and drug dealers, nonetheless had the perfect build out for this purpose. It. Was. Created. on a single revolutionary that nothing on the internet should be perfect. Nothing should outlive being seen, being read. Being held on to for 24 hours and then bye bye so that it didn't come back to haunt you on a job application 10 years later. It didn't get discovered by your mom when you left your phone in the back of your jeans. It didn't wind up. on a dean's desk somewhere. And he'd said some outrageous or silly or bullying thing, and suddenly you were looking at suspension or expulsion. So Snapchat very quickly realized That it's entire demographic was children, tweens and teens, and it's steered straight for that market with those cute little face filters, with the geo filters that allowed them to kind of cast themselves to Paris, Chipotle, the mall, the talk feature enabled them. to talk to each other 8, 10, 12 at a time, and they could now communicate with each other without texting. All they had to do was take a goofy picture and send it to one another. So the very features that made Snapchat such a catnip to children also made it a paradise for Predator. No forensic evidence lasting longer than 24 hours. On the backend, Snap server forms were deleting. all data within 30 days. Snap says that's changed. I have no way to independently verify that. I couldn't verify a single thing Snapchat told me in five and a half months of high level direct conversations with its senior senior leadership.

Brenda:

Hi, I'm taking a quick break to let you know some exciting news. There are now two private online communities for supporting you through this experience with your child or children. The STREAM community for those who identify as moms and The Woods for guys who identify as dads. Of course, this includes step parents and anyone who is caring for a young person who struggles with substance use and mental health. The STREAM and The Woods exist completely outside of all social media, so you never have to worry about confidentiality, and they're also ad free. So when you're there, you'll be able to focus on learning the latest evidence based approaches to helping people change their relationship With drugs and alcohol in both communities, we have a positive focus without triggering content or conversations, and we help you learn to be an active participant in helping your child move towards healthier choices. You'll also experience the relief of just being able to be real, connect with other parents who know fully what you're going through and have battle tested mentors alongside. You can check out both the stream and the woods for free before committing so there's no risk. Go to hopestreamcommunity. org to get all the details and become a member. Okay, let's get back to the show. It is the perfect playground for criminal activity because it vanishes. I mean, it's really, when you think about it, it's so scary what could be going on there with, because they know this is only going to. You know, be around for a very short amount of time and then be gone. And, and as I recall, then they're just resetting up a new account. Oh, well, they probably have multiple accounts all at once, but it's just kind of this ongoing charade of I'm here. I'm gone. I'm here. I'm gone. All of the features that add people into the kids feeds or their friend It's terrifying.

Paul:

Snapchat claims and claims and claims and claims, that kids can only get friend recommendations from Snap by virtue of knowing at least one or two people connected to that new friend recommendation. This is laughable. In fact, what forensic test after test after test have demonstrated is the second a kid signs up for Snapchat, he is instantly confronted with a screen that says, here are 200 people, you know, or your friends know. And at the bottom of that screen, there will be a button that says add all. Yeah, this has changed slightly. And subtly in the last year or so. ever since that lawsuit really began to make inroads. Snapchat has responded, again according to my sources, with these minor updates. Nonetheless, kids for years were finding and being found by drug dealers, they had no conceivable connection. Additionally, there is the feature called Snap Maps, which enables a drug dealer, press on the Snap Map button, see where there's a cluster of users hanging out, a mall, a skate park school yard. Where that cluster of users is likely to be kids. There are many ways that that drug dealer can then determine by that kid's snap score, whether he is in fact a kid or an undercover cop trying to pose as a kid. The dealer can then post his drug menu and banners and daily specials. on his snap map, pin it to his snap stories, and have it seen by kids walking to Mrs. Fields for a free cookie sample, or, and so it's enormously Easy for dealers to find new customers on Snapchat. By the way, this process, this migration from street corner, from skate park had already begun in 2018, 2019, as the dark web chat board were raving up all the money that dealers were making No longer doing business on alpha bay on silk road 2. 0 where no kids are but taking the stuff that they were buying wholesale on the dark web and Advertising it not just on snapchat. Tick tock instagram roblox Youtube, etc, etc. But interestingly many if not, most of those dealers would You Post ads for their drugs and then tell kids to hit them back on their Snapchat address to close the deal.

Brenda:

Oh, this just, this just gets my heart racing. I have such anxiety when I hear this stuff. I'm thinking of the logistics of this, like, obviously there has to be a pretty sophisticated supply chain to get down to the neighborhood level, right? If you have somebody posting, like you said, to their snap map, is that what it's called? A snap map. So that's, you know, maybe I'm working in this neighborhood or this city or whatever, not even a city, but like, how does that work from the cartel level all the way down? This has to be a theory. intricate, like, organization to have people distributing through a social network at a community level. That's, that's like Amazon level logistics.

Paul:

What the DEA told me is that Snapchat, Helge, Sinaloa, and Jalisco, the two primary drug cartels in operation these days, two biggest, solve what has always been called the final mile problem. It has never been a challenge for Chapo or his sons, the Chapitos, to roll 18 wheeler trucks. a by five from Tijuana across the San Ysidro Bridge to warehouses either in San Diego or going further up to warehouses in Los Angeles. The problem is you've got all this bulk. How do you get that bulk first of all, processed into individual retail Lots of pills and then sell them within five, 10 square miles of those warehouses and our social media. A social media is became a way for drug dealers, Who were not working with each other who were in fact completely disorganized, you know The cartels are organized crime So much of what is happening in america these days is disorganized Because the barrier to entry is so low because all you need is a dark web connection Five thousand dollars to get a brick of You a key of fentanyl from Wuhan province where last time I checked there were 150, 000 Unregulated chemical manufacturers in that province alone to mail you a brick get yourself over to amazon buy the hand crank pill press buy the little widgets that say m30 And stamp out pills. So there's this kind of chaos in the market where kids are retailing to other kids. They're wholesaling to drug gangs. And And all of this, how do I say this? There is one trucking firm in particular that is America's great drug dealer. Can't say the name of it because it may be a story next year.

Brenda:

We will just wait for that.

Paul:

Let us say that the biggest supply chain distributor in America. Is also by far the biggest disseminator of fake drugs So as I say you've you've got gangsters You know, coordinating their efforts in, you know, Logan Heights, San Diego, in Dana Hills Dana Point, Orange County, et cetera, et cetera. And then you've got kids in the middle of nowhere who are you know, working with 15 or 20 different runners. And The whole kind of beauty of this for drug dealers is Snapchat tells you exactly where that kid lives. If you don't want to knock on that kid's door and drop off 15 Percocets, tell him to open his snapback. It will fix his position if he's out walking the dog and wants to meet you on the corner of his suburban block. Boom, done. No court cams, no witnesses. It's the perfect.

Brenda:

Yes. And I heard a lot of parents say, gosh, you know, my, my kiddo during the pandemic, it was great. They kept getting on their bike and going on bike rides. And I thought it was so wonderful until I realized they were going to meet up with the dealer. you know, at the park or wherever, or they think it's Uber Eats. You know, some parents said, Oh yeah, my kid seems to be getting a lot of Uber Eats lately. Yeah, you might want to take a look at what's in that bag.

Paul:

What Eminem used to call Scooby Snacks. Yep. Yes. So we began to see this enormous wave of death in 2020. You know, we'd seen spikes that 2014, 2015 mass infusion. of heroin spiked with fentanyl in the Northeast Corridor. But this was different. These were 11, 12, 14 year old children with no history of drug use, with no psychiatric history, with no behavioral, no, you know, even innocent run ins with law enforcement. These were the kids nobody thought could possibly be. victimized by these predators. But again, acute national mental health crisis called the pandemic exacerbated by the lockdown. It was impossible to get a hold possible to be seen by a doctor, right? Nobody was getting in to see a doctor. No one could even see a nurse's assistant. And so these kids got pills, get to sleep at night, or so they thought, from a place where they were readily available.

Brenda:

And they were already there because that's how they were staying in touch with their friends while they were locked up in their rooms. There probably were kids who were using Snapchat very innocently. Because it is such a great way for them to stay in touch. And then they start getting sort of infiltrated with these new people. And, and as I learned, you know, their snap score goes up, like the more connections you have. So of course, if Snapchat saying here's 200 people, you don't know them, but you know, your friend knows them. You can add all to your account. Wow. That just got my score up. Huge, in no time. You just let the entire world into your child's bedroom, basically.

Paul:

Precisely. And, you know, I could only, in a story of 9, 500 words, focus on one of the greatest harms of social media, which is the fentanyl poisoning of America's children. There was no room and, you know, no bandwidth to report. on child sex abuse material that is being promulgated at insane volume. Sex trafficking, sextortion, cyberbullying. Essentially every bully, every sociopath has found a home on TikTok, on Snapchat, on Instagram, etc. And It costs them nothing to do business. There is virtually no chance of arrest, virtually no chance of detection, and at least some kind of public shaming. You know, back in the day, when we were still prosecuting prostitution in America. Cops would take these guys licenses and post them on a website That was essentially a Dear John website letting their wives know Hey, this is what your man's up doing instead of picking up milk. Can't do that. Not with snapchat It's all gone. I

Brenda:

think you had said in the article as well that snap wasn't a They weren't necessarily meeting you and your you know, your inquiries with open arms that you really were getting a lot of kind of getting the hand from them. Maybe talk a little bit about what that was like.

Paul:

It was a lot like talking to snaps AI bot. So what I got was first of all answers to questions I never asked. And no answers to the questions I did ask. Helpful. No matter how many times I rephrased the question, no matter how angry I got, no matter how Aggressively, I pointed out that their failure to respond to subpoenas, to search warrants, to orders of retention, to orders of confidentiality had allowed A. J. Smokey His buddy, Arnaldo8286, to kill people with no consequence and no enforcement from SNAP. It didn't even remove them for years. And parents all across the country have been reaching out to SNAP in terror, panic. This kid, this person is contacting my child. Block him. Do something. Do it. And they get AI responses back telling them, Oh, well, maybe you ought to think about blocking him, mom, or, you know that data that, that drug battery you sent us that doesn't violate our terms and guidelines of community safety. Absolute madness, a total disconnect. I wrote this story, Brenda, because I had to ring the alarm. I haven't seen this reporting. I certainly didn't expect to spend nine years playing Paul Revere. It is so important that every parent tells every other parent who tells every other parent. It is the only way. You and I talked about this briefly. This story has been shadow banned across all social media. Hundreds and hundreds of my friends, contacts allies have been tweeting, posting, reposting, goes nowhere. It is stopped in its tracks. Typically I'll do a week to 10 days of major broadcast news and cable news. None of that has happened. I've done four or five appearances plus podcasts. It is very hard to amplify the signal on this national nightmare. It is only by appealing directly to the folks who are most at risk. And I want to say something to parents who are watching. If you think your kid, too high achieving, Too responsible, too popular, can't be him, can't be her. No, it's exactly him. It's exactly him. These were kids with 145 IQs and up. These were kids who were wildly popular in their tribes. These were kids who We're going to go to Stanford where these cretins who created snapchat met

Brenda:

right

Paul:

What I learned when I began talking to the lawyers at social media victims law center and I want to say something That probably is outside the scope here. But if you have lost a child to a Snapchat deal. Social Media Victims Law Center needs to be your first call. So they were the only law firm in conjunction with a much smaller firm in New York with the star power and the financial cushion to take on what they thought might be a 10 year struggle to hold Snapchat and eventually Instagram, i. e. Meta. Tick tock and Google responsible. For the deaths of minor from fake pills sold. They were stunned that their second amended complaint was greenlit by a judge, Judge Riff. In a California court just this year, meaning within a year, we fully expect the 64 families who've lost their babies to be able to depose, cross examine Snapchat executives, Snapchat law enforcement, trust and safety executives about what they knew, when they knew it, what they did and what they failed to do to protect children until this lawsuit somehow gets to a jury verdict. until Chuck Schumer and Mike Johnson finally grow a spine and introduce a bill called COSA, Kids Online Safety Act for a vote, a full vote on the floor of Congress and Senate. Until that happens, we're The only thing we can do is ring the alarm. That social media isn't just addictive, it isn't just an enormous soul and spirit killer. It isn't just a way to get girls really, really unhappy with their bodies with their inability to apply makeup or catch the eye of that guy. but in fact are permanently damaging their brains with this constant dopamine loop that social media engenders. And many kids who have not fallen victim to a fake pill or to, you know, sextortion are nonetheless absolutely prisoners of their iPhones. And again, there will be an accounting. But before that accounting happens, we all have a responsibility to protect. The most vulnerable people in this country and that is our babies.

Brenda:

That is so true Well, we are working to get the word out. I'm gonna put links in the show notes to the various references that you made so that people can look those up and Yes, don't be don't think that you have the kid who would not fall victim to this And, and it's really time to have that very direct conversation with your kids about what's going on because really, and it's not just snapchat, it's, it's all of these platforms. It is literally like, think of the worst part of the town that you live in or the city that you live in and just dropping your kid off there for four to six hours a day and just see what happens. I mean, who knows what might happen, but that's the equivalent of what's going on because it's in their phone. And they're looking at that phone for, you know, I think the last report I looked at, like sometimes six to eight hours a day is the screen time for these kids. Have you, I just, I have to ask this because I, I feel like it's, this is so crazy. Do you worry for your safety? at all in writing this because clearly there's a lot of money involved.

Paul:

Yeah.

Brenda:

And I think I'm so grateful for you blowing the whistle on this and, and really like dropping this huge bomb, but are you concerned for your own safety?

Paul:

At no time. I write about sociopaths for a living. I collect them. Whether it's cartel assassins. bike gang presidents, whether it's paratroopers who got half their head shot off in Mosul and came home and suddenly don't know who they should point the M4 at anymore. You know, I write about what I call beautiful monsters for a living. And I have, wouldn't say a soft spot in my heart for them, but I do find them endlessly compelling. They're rarely happy with me when these stories are out. I'm much more concerned about the economics of the media industry than I am about the economics of Somebody putting a bounty on my

Brenda:

head. Okay. Well, I just want to make sure you're around to write the next article. So thank you so much for sharing this, for writing this. Obviously there's links in the show notes to the article itself. And, and for those of you who are willing to share it with your friends and every parent, you know I think we will all be better for it. So thanks, Paul. I appreciate it so much. Okay, my friend, that is a wrap for today. Don't forget to download the new ebook, Worried Sick. It's totally free and it will shed so much light on positive tools and strategies you can use right now to start creating those positive conditions for change in your home and in your relationships. It is at hopestreamcommunity. org forward slash worried. And guess what? We have moved the entire podcast to our website at HopeStreamCommunity. org. So now when you want the show notes or resources, or if you want to download a transcript, just go to HopeStreamCommunity. org and click on podcast and you will find it all there. You can search by keyword, episode number, guest name. And we have created playlists for you, makes it much easier to find episodes grouped by topic. So we're really excited to have that done and hope you like the podcast's new home. Please be extraordinarily good to yourself today. Take a deep breath. You've got this and you are going to be okay. You're not doing it alone. I will meet you right back here next week.