Team Trump wants to talk online drug sales with big tech

Representatives of five major tech companies have been invited to meet with US President-elect Donald Trump’s team in mid December and discuss ways to curb online sales of drugs.

Members of Trump’s transition team and a representative for Jim Carroll, the drug czar during Trump’s first term, emailed staffers from Google, Microsoft, Meta, Snap, and TikTok to invite them to a call, The Information said.

The transition officials want to hear from the companies about their priorities and any barriers to addressing issues around the sales of drugs online, said the report.

According to The Information, organizing this is pretty logical for Trump’s camp, which has been claiming – not without reason – that the US needs to deal with the fentanyl crisis more effectively.

Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, is about 50 times more powerful than heroin but it has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (DEA) for use as a pain reliever and anesthetic.

Americans frequently mix fentanyl with heroin and other dangerous substances after buying them from illegal online pharmacies and other digital marketplaces, the DEA says.

Unfortunately, Americans using fentanyl die in their hordes – as of July, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s data recorded over 73,000 fentanyl overdose deaths in 2023 alone.

Mexican cartels are the main source of finished fentanyl in the US, officials say, while China is the main supplier of the precursor chemicals and pill presses the cartels then use to produce the drugs.

Producing fentanyl is cheap. Journalists from the Reuters news agency recently penetrated the illicit fentanyl trade, buying chemicals and gear online for $3600 to make millions of pills.

Trump has vowed to get Mexico to do more to stop the flow of fentanyl to the US and threatened to impose steep tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada unless those countries curb fentanyl trafficking and illegal migration.

In late November, Trump also announced plans to launch a “large-scale” ad campaign with the goal of educating Americans on the effects of fentanyl.

In March, The Wall Street Journal reported that US prosecutors were investigating Meta's role and whether it profited from the sale and distribution of drugs on Facebook and Instagram.

However, holding tech firms responsible for what third parties post on their platforms is difficult. Efforts to do so have been complicated by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which says that online platforms aren’t liable for what third parties post.