On Reddit, intimate glimpses of addicts in thrall to opioids

Every day, thousands of people who are consumed by the nation’s opioid epidemic connect on the popular discussion website Reddit.

Addicts lament the deaths of fellow users who have suddenly stopped posting.

[...] the dispatches left behind tell a surprisingly intimate story about the tenacity of the crisis, the trajectory of the addicted and Reddit’s role in facilitating access to drugs tied to the mounting toll across America.

Like others on the Reddit forums, Frazier had a long-standing addiction, her family said in interviews, and she procured painkillers in a variety of ways, not just online.

On the public Internet, drug buyers have been able to use sites over the years including Craigslist and Topix, forums on Google Groups and, more recently, mobile apps such as Snapchat, Instagram and other social media services.

A Reddit representative said that using the site “as a marketplace for illegal goods and services will get users and communities banned from Reddit.”

The company said it evaluates violations of its user agreement case by case but did not explain why the opiate-buying forum had escaped detection from Reddit and law enforcement for at least four years.

While police departments and federal officials are often aware that the public sites are used for drug sales, they tend to focus on major suppliers — such as clinics flooding the market with pain pills — rather than low-level individual sellers.

“Given the volume of Internet activity and the many ways to communicate online, it is obviously difficult to police everything, given limited resources,” Rusty Payne, a spokesman for the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, wrote in an email.

“When you shut it down, it will pop back up and it will have evolved into something new,” said Dan Palumbo, research director of Digital Citizens Alliance, an organization dedicated to Internet safety issues.

Reddit hosts more than 1 million groups it calls subreddits, which are organized around a broad range of topics — bicycling, books, frugality, health, music, politics, “The Simpsons.”

A group called jailbait — it contained provocative images of teenagers — led to a ban of “suggestive or sexual content featuring minors” about two years ago.

The opiate-buying forum that Reddit shut down last week offered a state-by-state directory where people could post their area code to show where they wanted to make a deal.

Details of where and when to meet up were worked out in private messages, phone calls or texts.

Reddit’s mostly anonymous users, called redditors, could vouch for people they met buying or selling drugs online.

[...] the opiaterollcall forum highlighted the ease of finding pain pills, heroin and sometimes fentanyl, the especially deadly drug that has accounted for a nationwide escalation in overdoses.

People talk about drug use in Reddit forums, and members of her group die every month, she says.

By Reddit standards, the forums are tiny — about 13,000 unique users posted on the buying and selling group over the past four years, some of them overlapping with the nearly 38,000 subscribers to the forum Helton Mitchell moderates.

Greger’s father discovered she was part of the opiates and opiaterollcall groups a few days after she overdosed last summer in State College, Pa.

Later, while working in coffee shops, managing a sandwich shop and advising her friends on the best new bands, she became consumed by addiction, according to her father.

The police in State College tried to find out who sold her the heroin and fentanyl that killed her, but were not successful.