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The Alliance to Prevent Drug Harms is a joint effort of the U.S. Mission to the United Nations and Meta which owns Facebook and WhatsApp, X and Snap Inc., the owner of the photo-sharing app Snapchat.
The United States signed a memorandum with several of the world’s biggest social media companies on Thursday aimed at preventing the use of their platforms for the distribution of synthetic drugs.
U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield told a signing ceremony that technology companies have a critical role to play in both stopping the illegal manufacturing, trafficking and marketing of synthetic drugs and just as importantly, educating the public.
The Alliance to Prevent Drug Harms is a joint effort of the U.S. Mission to the United Nations and Meta which owns Facebook and WhatsApp, X and Snap Inc., the owner of the photo-sharing app Snapchat.
The U.S. Mission said the signing parties will collaborate to disrupt” illegal drug activities online and “amplify public awareness of the dangers of synthetic drug misuse.
Thomas-Greenfield said at the ceremony at the U.S. Mission that synthetic drug use is an “international crisis” that “no one government and no one sector can tackle alone.”
The Prevent Alliance is a result of talks that began at the U.N. General Assembly’s annual gathering of world leaders in September 2023, Thomas-Greenfield said.
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According to the 2024 World Drug Report, 292 million people used drugs in 2022 — a 20% increase from the last decade, Schantz said. The report estimated that 60 million of those people used opioids. In the same year, nearly 82,000 people died from opioid use in the United States, representing a 24-fold increase since 2010.
