Imagine discovering that the “innocent” cartoon emoji pinging on your teen’s phone is not harmless fun, but instead a secret drug deal? To help you recognize dangerous dealings, I interviewed a recovering addict whose parents had no idea what he was up to until it was too late. With our Screen Safety Toolkit, you can get a head start with screen safety and prevention. The Screen Safety Toolkit is a resource guide that includes our best recommendations, how-to information, and easy links to our favorite easy-to-onboard parental control systems. Today’s GKIS article shares the true story of a young addict’s emoji workarounds, how to spot dangerous online dealings, and offers great tips to maintain your children’s safety when interacting online.
What are emojis?
Emojis are small digital icons that are readily available on screen devices. Emojis range from facial expressions to common objects, places, animals, and more. According to a report from the emotional marketing platform Emogi, about 92% of online users use emojis.[1,2]
The Pros and Cons of Emoji use
Pros
Emojis add fun and excitement to conversations and social media posts- help convey emotions in online chats. They are particularly helpful because of the lack of nonverbal cues online, such as body language or facial expressions. For example, testing “sure.” suggests annoyance, while “sure 😊” suggests happy agreement.[3]
Cons
Although emojis were originally intended to represent simple concepts, teenagers also use these symbols for encrypted messages about drugs and other illicit activities. Encrypted emoji messages enable life-threatening drugs to reach communities faster, easier, and cheaper.
At a glance, a conversation on your child’s phone may appear to be about being at the gas station but instead is about buying marijuana laced with fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that is 80-100 times stronger than morphine.[4,5,7,8]
How to Tell if Emojis are Indicative of Illicit Drug Use
According to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), the use of emojis alone should not be indicative of illegal activity. Concerns should be raised if the use of emojis is simultaneously accompanied by changes in behavior or appearance or a significant loss or increase in income. The DEA has even published drug decoding sheets for the public’s awareness.[4,6]
A Young Addicts Story
To better understand the workarounds of encrypted messaging, I interviewed a recovering addict. He reported that when he first started his drug use, he would use specific social media platforms to help keep his drug addiction a secret from family and friends.
Here are the tips he revealed:
Snapchat
The DEA reports that Snapchat is the number one social media platform for online drug activity, and my contact confirms that he and his dealers used it too. He explained that Snapchat is an application where people can keep conversations hidden. Snapchat has specific settings that allow users to quickly view pictures, videos, or messages that will disappear after viewing.
Privacy settings on Snapchat also allow users to ensure that only specific people can view what they refer to as “stories.” The young addict remembers his drug dealers adding him as a friend on Snapchat. From there he would track emoji-coded advertisements on their “stories” that revealed which drugs were available for sale.[6]
Venmo
Venmo was another platform that was used by the young addict. Venmo is an application that allows money transfers between users. LendEDU revealed that nearly 1/3 of their survey participants admitted to using this app to pay for drugs.
My interviewee admitted that this was not initially the way he paid for his drug transactions. Instead, before gaining the trust of his drug dealers, they’d come to his home to drop off the drugs and receive payment in only cash after sending an emoji encrypted text that they were outside. His mother reports being very scared to find out that her son’s drug dealers knew where their family lived, which made her reluctant to report the drug dealer to law enforcement officials despite figuring out his identity.[9]
Encoded Texts
The mother I interviewed confirmed that encrypted text messages are a useful way to suppress adult suspicion. She explained that, if it were not for other indicative factors like his drastic weight loss, mood swings, and incomes loss she would have never expected phrases such as, “Do you have kitty cat?” to be an encrypted message referring to the drug ketamine. She remembers seeing other emoji codes and “cute names” for drugs, but not giving them much attention initially. She said she was overwhelmed trying to research on how to stop dangerous online conversations and seek the help he needed.
If you worry things are getting by you, let go of the guilt and let us do the research for you! Researching digital safety tools is overwhelming! But lucky for you, we’ve made it easy. Our GKIS Screen Safety Toolkit is a resource guide perfect for those that need smart tech tools for filtering, monitoring, and management plus some time to find workarounds.
Dr. Bennett recognizes that it’s no longer possible to live a screen-free lifestyle or monitor 100% of the time. And it can be terrifying to know that kids can become victims of online predators and drug dealers. Our family-tested and outcome-based course helps you close screen risk gaps and improve family cooperation and closeness. Check it out to minimize risks and have easier dialogues for better parent-child relationships.
Teen curiosity online can be dangerous and teens don’t always make sound decisions due to lack of experience and poor impulse control. Our GKIS Social Media Readiness Course allows teens an opportunity to start taking accountability for their actions online and become proactive instead of reactive.
The story of the young addict demonstrates how parents can easily miss indications of digital injury and serious problems. Teenagers are becoming more innovative on how to keep their parents in the dark, such as emoji encrypted messages. With our GKIS Online Safety Red Flags For Parents, parents will learn what behavioral red flags they should be on the lookout for that may signal that a child is suffering from a digital injury.
Thanks to CSUCI intern Ashley Salazar for researching and co-authoring this article. If you suspect your loved one is struggling with substance abuse, please reach out for help. Contact your health insurance carrier or call SAMHSA’s National helpline for more resources and advice.
I’m the mom psychologist who will help you GetKidsInternetSafe.
We know there are dangerous sites on the internet. But most of us have never accessed the dark web, where visitors are anonymous and access to the unthinkable is possible. Recently I visited and discovered that kids and teens easily access it to purchase illegal goods such as fake ids and drugs. Find out what is on the dark web, how easy it is for kids to access it, and what you can do to prevent it in today’s GKIS article. Caution: this article contains graphic descriptions of illegal activities, sex, and violence.
What is the dark web?
The dark web is the part of the internet that is not visible to regular search engines (like Google or Chrome) and requires the use of a special browser named Tor. Once Tor is downloaded and opened, you have arrived at what many call “Onionland.” Tor uses the onion router hidden service protocol, meaning that the Tor servers derived from the onion router offer users complete anonymity. Also, every website ends with .onion instead of .com, .org, or .gov.
The dark web is a criminal underworld where bad actors online sell and purchase illegal goods like drugs, weapons, counterfeit money, bank accounts, passports and ID’s, and much more. Dark web online shops are set up with customer reviews very much like Amazon which gives users the confidence to purchase from specific vendors. There is even a darker side to the dark web which consists of images and videos of gore, pornography, child sexual abuse, bestiality, and even live murder shows called red rooms where paying customers can tell the person torturing the victim what to inflict on the victim next or how they would like to see the victim killed.
Clear Web Versus Deep Web
The clear web is the part of the internet that can be accessed from any browser. It’s the smallest part of the web, which is astonishing because it seems that the content there is infinite but in actuality, it only accounts for about 4% of the content on the web. Some browsers, like Google, will censor certain websites. The search engine used by Tor, Duck Duck Go, does not censor and will not save your search history.
Then there is the deep web which is not to be confused with the dark web. The deep web is the largest part of the web. It consists of all the content that is not indexed and will not appear on regular search engines. Many government and private company websites exist there, where you would need an exact address to access them. Accessing without permission is illegal.
Is it easy to access the Dark Web?
It is very easy to access the dark web. I’ve included the steps here so you can recognize them if you ever come across these searches on your child’s browser.
To access the dark web, all you have to do is:
Purchase a VPN for extra security and anonymity (optional)
Download Tor
Access Hidden Wiki Links
Use the links on Hidden Wiki to help guide you through the dark web
Create an anonymous email
Purchase bitcoin (which is an online currency)
Find an online store through the hidden wiki that carries the products or services you are looking for
Using the hidden wiki as a guide, you can follow the steps above by merely clicking links and it will guide you through. You can easily find the hidden wiki by typing “hidden wiki” on the search bar in the Tor app.
Dark Web Dangers
Fake IDs and Drugs
So, as a GKIS intern, how do I know that teens are accessing the dark web? I became interested when high school students that I worked with all had fake IDs and were getting into L.A. clubs. I asked how they got them, and they told me from the dark web using bitcoin. They also disclosed that they illegally purchase study drugs like Adderall and Modafinil as well as club drugs like cocaine and molly. I was shocked yet intrigued, so I followed these directions on how to get onto the dark web. I couldn’t believe how easy it was to access.
When I brought up my idea about writing about the dark web at our intern meeting, Dr. B worried we’d be publishing a how-to article. But I argued, and the other interns agreed, that there are plenty of YouTube videos showing the step-by-step process of accessing the dark web. Parents need to know about this!
It is mind-boggling how dangerous access to the dark web can be. As if purchasing illegal drugs from anonymous criminal vendors isn’t enough, consider that purity is not guaranteed. Drugs like cocaine and heroin have been known to be laced with fentanyl, an extremely powerful opiate that kills even the most severe addicts. And consider the risks teens take in 21-and-older clubs. Interaction with adults on the dark web can lead to any type of exploitive situation online and offline.
Violence and Pornography
Consider what watching violence and pornographic material can do to a child’s developing brain. For some kids, watching explicit material can lead to stress symptoms characteristic of clinical disorders such as acute stress disorder and PTSD. For others, they may become desensitized to shocking online content which may lead to craving and seeking increasingly dangerous content to experience that same rush. This type of explicit material can have a similar effect as addictive drugs due to the release of dopamine and endorphins.
Dopamine helps the brain recognize incentive salience. Incentive salience is the desiring attribute that includes a motivational component to a rewarding stimulus. In other words, dopamine is released when a reward is anticipated, and it motivates us to keep seeking that anticipated reward.
When shocking material is viewed, the opiate system in our brains begins to activate by releasing endorphins. Endorphins gives a sense of euphoria and eases pain, which is what heroin does. So, more and more shocking material may be craved due to dopamine released from the anticipation of viewing the shocking stimulus – and endorphins help ease the pain that the shocking stimulus caused. Endorphins are also what causes the “runners high” that people talk about after a good amount of cardiovascular exercise. So when we experience pain, endorphins are released to help ease the pain.
Hate Groups
An extremist group discussed in the media recently, the “Proud Boys,” is a group that is known for supporting President Trump and for their extremist chauvinist beliefs. If you search for their website on Google, you will likely not be able to find it. But if you use the search engine Duck Duck Go, it shows up right at the top.
Hate groups design their content to radicalize vulnerable adults and youth to their agenda. There have been many incidences where radical Islamic groups have radicalized western youth to fight for their cause. They do this on the clear web too. But when they need to be more discreet, they can use the deep web by creating a .onion site.
Facebook and other social media sites are on the deep web and their web address is www.facebookcorewwwi.onion. It is important to talk about these issues and set rules with your kids. because if they do not learn it from you they will learn from someone else who may not have the best intentions.
Without parent management tools, like those we recommend in our GKIS Screen Safety Toolkit, kids can spend hours over months interacting with extremists. These interactions can be moved offline and can result in child and teen trafficking as well as other crimes.
How You Can Keep Your Kids Safe From the Dark Web
If your kids have open access to the internet, GetKidsInternetSafe has an entire toolkit to get safety dialed in. Check out our GKIS Course Bundle in the plus and deluxe package options, which offers all of our GKIS courses plus bonuses for families with kids of all ages. Our course bundle option offers parent and teen education, communication tools, parenting tools, and tech tool recommendations. Our course summary page with the details can be found HERE.
Thanks to Andres Thunstrom for contributing to this GKIS article. Andres has been advised to never visit the dark web again. J
I’m the mom psychologist who will help you GetKidsInternetSafe.
The United States is in an opioid crisis. No longer are illegal drugs like heroin, or its synthetic, more powerful cousin Fentanyl, only used by inner city addicts and rock stars like Michael Jackson and Tom Petty. Thanks to chronic pain and an overuse of prescription painkillers, Americans from all walks of life are addicted and turning to cheaper and illegal options on the street and online. After two thirteen-year-olds overdosed on fentanyl recently in Utah, the US sought its first indictment of Chinese drug traffickers.
The Opioid Crisis in Perspective
Highly addictive opioids include legally-available prescription pain medicine like Percoset and Oxycontin, as well as the more powerful, illegal drugs heroin and fentanyl. Opioids impact the brain stem, which regulates life-supportive functions like heart rate and breathing. There is little difference between the amount of the drug necessary to get high and the amount that results in overdose. As a result, overdose is common and results from gradual asphyxiation due to suppression of breathing. There has been a seven-fold increase in US overdose from opioids since 1999. In 2014, there were 30,000 opioid related deaths in America. By 2015 that number had increased to 55,000, rising to a staggering 64,000 in 2016. This is almost eight times more American deaths than the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
What is fentanyl?
Fentanyl is an extremely powerful opioid that was responsible for the death of Prince and, more recently, Tom Petty. It is far more addictive than heroin. It induces euphoria and relaxation by affecting the areas of the brain that regulate emotions and pain. Up to 100 times stronger than morphine and 50 times stronger than heroin, just coming into skin contact can result in overdose. It can be taken as a tablet, lozenge, lollipop, transdermal patch, nasal spray, powder that can be smoked, or injected. Although available by prescription, fentanyl is also being made in illegal labs in Mexico. Raw materials are commonly smuggled in from China.
Fentanyl is commonly diluted with other substances like heroin, rat poison, or baking soda for increased profit, thus purity varies from batch to batch. Fentanyl has experienced a growing popularity among heroin users who crave more purity. Only two milligrams of fentanyl (the size of four grains of salt) is enough to kill an average adult.
What is online drug trafficking?
People not only buy drugs on the street, they also buy it on the dark net. The dark net is a hidden underground network where sellers and buyers can evade law enforcement with anonymity and clever encryption. They pay with digital currency, called bitcoin, and the drugs are delivered in their mailbox.
There are currently over 20,000 listings for opioids and more than 4,000 for fentanyl being sold on just one of the leading dark net drug markets.
From 2004 – 2010, emergency room visits resulting from prescription opioid abuse in children younger than 20 years old rose by 45%.
In 2015, 55% of people who died from an overdose of fentanyl additionally tested positive for heroin or cocaine, compared to 42% between 2013 and 2014.
A supervised injection site in Canada found that 90% of the heroin used there tested positive for fentanyl. Drug users have become more tolerant to stronger substances, reinforcing demand and raising death rates.
Two Utah Teens Overdose
Grant Seaver and Ryan Ainsworth were 13-year-old best friends from Park City, Utah. They overdosed after older local teens ordered fentanyl from the Internet, also called U-47700, “pink,” or “pinky.” Investigators uncovered conversations about the drug through their social media accounts.
Grant’s father spoke out after the devastating incident saying, “It’s unimaginable that Grant could gain access to a drug like Pinky so easily and be gone so quickly, poof. The pain and brutality of this tragedy is crippling.” A 15-year-old teenager from their community has been identified and charged with distribution of a controlled substance and reckless endangerment in connection with the deaths of Grant and Ryan.
Chinese Drug Traffickers Charged with Criminal Indictments
In a precedent-setting move, the U.S. Justice Department held a press conference stating that two major Chinese drug traffickers have been identified and are up for indictment. The two men identified are Xiabing Yan, 40 and Jian Zhang, 38. Tracing the whereabouts and identifying men like Yan and Zhang is challenging because, like most online drug traffickers, they use multiple identities to conceal their activities, shipments, and profits. They take advantage of the fact that the fentanyl molecule can be distorted in a multitude of ways to create an analogue that is not listed as illegal under US and Chinese law. When regulators are able to identify the new drug and illegalize it, the manufacturers swiftly switch to a new unlisted fentanyl analogue.
The U.S. and China have no formal extradition treaty, thus getting the men here is difficult. Yan was previously charged in a Mississippi federal court with producing and selling illicit substances. The case was brought about by a routine traffic stop, which resulted in the unearthing of a “domestic drug ring that sold various synthetic cannabinoids, called “spice” or “bath salts.” According to Rosenstein, federal authorities “identified more than 100 distributors of synthetic opioids involved with Yan’s manufacturing and distribution networks.”
What You Can Do to Protect Your Kids from Online Drug Sales:
Educate: There are many educational programs such as Teen Challenge of California that provide youth with knowledge and skills to help them avoid drug misuse and abuse. Research what programs are available in your area and get your teen Volunteer opportunities can be a great addition to college or job applications.
Talk to your children about drugs: Teens who have talked to their parents about drug abuse are half as likely to abuse them as those who do not. Make sure they understand that prescription drugs are not considered safer than any other drug. Be accurate about benefits and dangers. Discuss reasons people choose or are tempted to abuse drugs and offer healthy alternatives.
Get specific about fentanyl: Do not leave out the details, be specific about the drug fentanyl and its associated risks. Let them know that it’s being sold as counterfeit OxyContin, Xanax, and other prescription drugs.
Set a good example: If you’re using prescription drugs, do so responsibly and explain the purpose for your prescription(s), as well as the risks.
Don’t keep your prescriptions easily accessible:
Be proactive: Ask your children questions. Know who their friends are, where your child is going, and what kind of activities they are participating in. Ask specifics like, if they have ever been around any drug use. Show sincere interest without being judgmental or overly protective.
Keep your teen active: Facilitate hobbies and extracurricular activities for your child that interests them and keeps them engaged.
Get them treatment sooner than later if needed & have all member of your family participate in the process.
Our hearts ache for the families of the victims. Dr. Bennett attended Tom Petty’s last concert and is still heartbroken over his death. We need to do better!
Thank you to CSUCI Intern, Katherine Bryan for informing parents about online drug trafficking and the threat it poses to young people. For those who are not familiar with the dark net or the underground drug trafficking site called the Silk Road, please read our previous article, GKIS Sheds Light on the Dark Net: Drug Traffickers, Child Pornographers and Nude Selfies.
I’m the mom psychologist who will help you GetKidsInternetSafe.
