Parents of children killed by fentanyl worry closing border won’t stop drug epidemic

The Republican National Committee vowed in its 2024 platform to “deploy the U.S. Navy to impose a full Fentanyl Blockade on the waters of our Region — boarding and inspecting ships to look for fentanyl and fentanyl precursors.”

However, it is the parents of underage fentanyl poisoning victims who are leading the charge educating the nation about the fentanyl scourge within America’s borders and pushing politicians in Washington to crack down on the problem in a multitude of ways.

“There’s this whole concept of, ‘We need to close the border,’” said Amy Nevile, who lost her 14-year-old son in February 2020 when he unknowingly consumed a pill laced with fentanyl. “That’s a lot harder than it sounds.

“The Trump administration’s plan … cutting off the supply from places like Mexico and China may temporarily reduce the flow of fentanyl, it’s likely not a long-term fix,” said Neville. “The reality is that even if we disrupt international trafficking, the demand will still drive the problem. We could see fentanyl production simply shift to domestic sources, and the epidemic would continue.”

The National Crime Prevention Council, a nonpartisan nonprofit that receives federal funding and helps empower crime victims to speak out, said it is optimistic about working with the Trump administration to help educate them “as to how broad the problem is — it’s not just a China-Mexico problem,” said NCPC Executive Director Paul DelPonte in an interview in Washington last month.

Much of the problem is with Snapchat and its parent company, Snap, Inc., according to the parents and NCPC.

Samuel Chapman

Samuel Chapman and his wife, Dr. Laura Berman, lost their son, Sammy, after a drug dealer added him through Snapchat’s “quick add” feature and was then able to send him a colorful list of emojis that claimed to be real pharmaceutical versions of drugs like Percocet, Oxycodone, Xanax, and more.

What Sammy, 16, did not know was that these were not real prescriptions but copycat versions pressed by non-pharmacists in Mexico and infused with fentanyl as the primary ingredient.

Sammy was a high school football player who quipped that he wanted to be the world’s first trillionaire. He had been secretly mining Bitcoin in his bedroom, his father said, working on becoming a real entrepreneur.

Through the use of Snapchat’s “quick add” feature, a mutual friend of Sammy’s had been able to contact him and offer him drugs. 

“[The feature] allows people to network inside all of your contacts if you have the quick add feature turned on, and the algorithm drove a dealer to him. He was presented with a colorful drug menu with emojis, and was offered something for free,” said Chapman. “At the bottom of the drug menu, it said, ‘Mr. Dan, I deliver,’ and a counterfeit drug was delivered to our front yard like a pizza after we were asleep, and we found him dead on the floor in his bedroom.”

Berman is a therapist and regularly appeared on the Oprah show before and after Sammy’s death to warn parents and children alike of the silent killer lurking in their communities.

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Sam has made the media rounds through the years, 150 TV appearances to be precise, in his new life as an “accidental activist.”

Since then, he and his wife created a nonprofit called the Parent Collective and provide free public relations services for families who lost a child to fentanyl poisoning to help them get their story out to the public.

“I thought, ‘If there was a way to bring everyone together, we would be this powerhouse of political power across the country, and we would be so big together,’” said Chapman.

“When this happened to us, no one knew that Snapchat was dangerous or what fentanyl was almost four years ago,” Chapman said. “We put a group together on Facebook, which now has over 13,000 parents on it who have had this happen to them, and it’s called Parent Collective. And it’s a grief support site and an advocacy site, and sort of staying up to date on information and making community.”

Amy Neville

Amy and her husband lost their 14-year-old son, Alexander, in 2020, days before he was scheduled to enter an addiction treatment facility.

Neville said they talked to Alexander about drugs because they knew he was not risk-averse. Despite those warnings, Alexander tried what he thought was an Oxycodone pill. He survived, but several days later, he went to his parents to say he felt drawn back to it and wanted help.

“He proceeded to tell us ‘I wanted to experiment with Oxy. I got it from a dealer on Snapchat and it has a hold on me,’” said Neville, recounting the conversation in a phone call with the Washington Examiner.

The following morning, Neville said she called a treatment facility and got the plan in motion. Alex went out to lunch with his father, went to a candy store, skateboarded, played video games then hung out with his friends from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. before coming home.

“As far as we were all concerned, he was going to be going into treatment and probably be gone for at least a month, so he wanted to see his friends. And he came home that night about 9 o’clock, and we said, ‘Good night,’” said Neville. “Last time we saw him alive.”

The family found Alex deceased in his room the following morning. They later found out he had been propositioned on Snapchat and told to pick out the drug he wanted from a list of emojis, leave a Visa gift card where the dealer would drop off the drug, and the transaction could be that simple. He had taken one of two pills he purchased that night after coming home.

On the afternoon that Alex’s parents found their son, a law enforcement task force from San Diego visited the bereaved parents.

“There was a pill left behind, and they tested it. It tested positive [for fentanyl],” said Neville.

Neville had thought her son had died from consuming too much Oxycodone since that was the drug he had said he consumed for the first time days earlier. The shock was the beginning of her years-long journey to understand how drugs are being made and disseminated to youth.

How they organized

Chapman began to hold Zoom calls with other parents every two weeks then began organizing trips to legislative hearings in Washington with bereaved parents.

Neville said several parents reached out to her after her son’s death in February 2020. She was invited later that year to Ohio to speak at a meeting with bereaved parents, where she met the head of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

“A lot of families out there are like, ‘Let’s fight China. Let’s fight Mexico.’ That’s just not my fight,” said Neville. “I don’t feel like I can have any type of impact in that. And that’s why social media — I feel like I can really have an impact on the social media side of things.”

Neville created the Alexander Nettle Foundation and regularly takes part in listening sessions with minors who have been arrested for selling lethal doses of fentanyl in an effort to understand the system.

The NCPC, which connected the Washington Examiner to the bereaved parents, said in the past few years, a movement has been birthed by grieving parents intent on preventing more tragedy.

“There really is a whole vibrant parent movement that is speaking out about fentanyl and other social media harms,” said DelPonte, whose organization exists to empower loved ones or victims to speak out.

Problem grew worse under Biden, parents claim

Under the Biden administration, this problem has grown worse, the parents said.

“We thought that when Biden came in, at least since he lost a child, that he would understand that this crisis was happening and not let it continue, but more children have died on his watch than ever before,” said Chapman. “It’s hard for us to accept what’s happened in the last four years, as the border has been open, no one has done anything to shut down social media who are the modern-day drug dealers.”

“[The Biden administration is] now bragging about only 100,000 deaths in this past year,” Chapman continued. “It topped out at 117,000 and it’s nothing to be proud of.”

Neville said that as the bereaved parents began meeting with politicians at local, state, and federal levels, they were disappointed those in power weren’t stepping up to do more.

“Meeting with them and finding out they were [aware] and they just weren’t talking about it or really going after it was so disheartening,” said Neville. “We’re letting over 100,000 people here die from drugs, and we’re not talking about that?”

Drug-related deaths, historically referred to as overdoses, have changed in recent years to reflect the fentanyl epidemic. In recent years, parents and politicians have begun using the term “fentanyl poisonings” to describe the deaths from fentanyl for anyone who died from the drug but was not aware that they were consuming it, as was the case for Sammy Chapman and Alexander Neville.

Pills can be packed with varying amounts of fentanyl and unknown to the user if it’s a lethal dose.

Last year, 7-of-10 pills containing fentanyl seized by the Drug Enforcement Administration were determined to contain a fatal amount of the drug. More recently, that figure has dropped to 5-in-10, the DEA Administrator Anne Milgram has touted.

“[Milgram] says, ‘This is good news that the pills have gone from being 7-out-of-10 are deadly to 5-out-of-10 are deadly,’” said Neville. “Alex died when 3-out-of-10 were deadly. So that is not good news. And the DEA didn’t do that — the cartel did that. So you’re telling me that the cartel got better, a little bit better, at making their drug? I don’t understand that. Or have we created more addicts so that now the tolerance is higher?”

Additionally, the wider availability and understanding of how to use Naloxone, or Narcan, to reverse overdoses and poisonings has saved countless people who would otherwise have died.

Heartbroken parents sue Snap, Inc.

The two parents who spoke with the Washington Examiner said their children were targeted on social media platform, Snapchat.

On the platform, pictures and text messages sent between users automatically disappear, allowing for no trace of communication between people and the perfect cover for online drug deals as opposed to normal text messaging or on other social media platforms.

The parents are united in that they are focusing their energy on Snapchat, not against China or Mexico, who also play a role in the fentanyl scourge.

Chapman is one of 65 families that lost a child to fentanyl through a Snapchat transaction in California who have collectively sued in California Superior Court.

“Social media has become the drug dealers of our times, solving the last mile problem for the cartels. Snapchat is the main offender when it comes to connecting drug dealers with children,” Chapman wrote in a follow-up text message. “Snapchat is a collaborator in the death of our son, Sammy.”

Neville is also suing because she believes “Snapchat isn’t about giving kids access to drug dealers; it’s about giving drug dealers access to kids.”

“Snapchat isn’t just where kids might stumble upon drugs; it’s designed to take advantage of their vulnerabilities. It turns strangers into ‘friends’ and uses games and rewards to keep them engaged, making kids feel good about connecting with dangerous people. It targets them with drug ads and dealers, even pushing things like marijuana to a 12-year-old who’s never heard of it,” Neville wrote in a text message. “On top of that, Snapchat makes it easy to hide or delete data, even allowing users to erase evidence. This platform shouldn’t be marketed as safe for kids, especially with all these risks built in.”

Last month, a California judge ruled that a lawsuit against Snap, Inc. involving 65 bereaved parents could move to trial on the grounds of a product liability approach and having created an open-air drug market that was the “foreseeable result” of how Snapchat was designed in the first place. 

Legislative solutions

The most comprehensive and meaningful bill to stop fentanyl from being sold to children and teenagers via Snapchat faces a standstill in Congress.

Parents of fentanyl poisoning victims have spent several years lobbying for the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, and were thrilled to see it pass the Senate last year, only to see it denied a chance for a vote in the House.

KOSA goes after Snap, Inc. for how it has designed its products and applications to keep children online as long as possible, and target children.

Sammy’s Law would alert a child that a third-party safety software had been downloaded by a parent or guardian to monitor what the child is viewing, even on Snapchat, where messages disappear instantly.

“I want to get Sammy’s Law passed,” said Chapman. “It would not just help [with the] fentanyl crisis. It would help all drug-dealing online, all suicide, all firearms sales to minors, anything illegal that would be happening online. … We’re hopeful that [Mike Johnson will] come to the table and that the House Energy and Commerce Committee will let it go to the floor and work.”

Meanwhile, TikTok and Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, have implemented safety measures in recent years to crack down on any attempted drug sales or solicitation to minors and adults, according to representatives for the companies.

Oftentimes, sales that start on these other social media applications are moved over to Snapchat because of the app’s disappearing function, which wipes away proof of what happened.

In November 2023, Meta introduced a stricter policy to address the sale and promotion of fake pills with a punishment of account disablement, if caught. Between July and September 2024, Meta took action against 3.1 million pieces of content that violated its drug policies, 95% of which it took down before it was even reported by the public.

It also blocks hashtags that could be used by dealers or buyers to link up people for sales.

TikTok now allows family pairing, or parents and guardians to link their TikTok account with their child’s in order to implement safety controls, such as making the child’s account public or private, restricting direct messaging, customizing keyword filters, and setting screen time caps.

TikTok touted that between April and June last year, 99.5% of content it removed for violating its Alcohol, Tobacco, and Drugs policy was addressed proactively.

How the Trump administration can act

The NCPC said there are four areas where the government can target fentanyl: supply, manufacture, distribution, and demand.

DelPonte anticipated that the Trump administration could be “very helpful” in dealing with the demand by surging significant money to public education campaigns that explain that lookalike pharmaceuticals contain fentanyl.

“[Would-be buyers] become aware. They realize, ‘No, I’m not going to buy it. I’m not going to buy a pill off social media just because some random person I had a chat that told me it’s real,’” said DelPonte. “We do have to drill that into people over and over again.”

Neville wants to see a multifaceted strategy put into place that includes law enforcement measures and prevention, education, and expanded access to addiction treatment.

“Addressing the root causes of addiction, providing support for those in need of recovery, and changing the cultural dynamics around drug use are crucial for sustainable change,” said Neville. “A purely supply-side approach overlooks the complex nature of the issue, and anyone who believes that cutting off foreign sources will end the problem is underestimating the depth of the crisis.”

A spokesperson for the incoming Trump administration also blamed the Biden administration for allowing fentanyl to continue “pouring” into the U.S.

“In his first term, President Trump established the President’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid crisis and worked with Congress to pass the SUPPORT Act. Under the Biden-Harris Administration, fentanyl from China has been pouring into our communities through the Southern Border at record rates,” said Trump-Vance transition spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt.

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“President Trump has long been deeply moved by the stories of great Americans like Anne Funder, who tragically lost her son to deadly fentanyl,” said Leavitt. “President Trump will lever every power necessary to secure the border and stop deadly drugs from illegally entering our country.”

Snap, Inc. did not respond to a request for comment.