Following her 16-year-old son’s overdose death, Dr. Laura Berman is warning parents to keep a close eye on their children’s social media activity. The Oprah Winfrey Network host said she and her husband Samuel Chapman felt “helpless” following their son Sammy’s death. “I didn’t intend for us to be on the news; I just felt helpless,” she told NBC News’ Kate Snow on the Today show Tuesday. “All I was thinking about is that this couldn’t happen again and I was so furious and helpless.”
Sammy died after buying fentanyl-laced Xanax from a drug dealer on Snapchat, Berman and Chapman said. “Each different drug had a different color, the way a kid would love to see it,” Chapman said of the “menu” Sammy used to purchase the drugs on Snapchat. Both parents insist there was “no way” Sammy knew if the drugs he had bought had fentanyl in them.
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“The big tech is not taking responsibility for helping police find the dealer and there’s no excuse for it,” Chapman said in a clip from an interview that aired on NBC News Monday night. Berman added that they hope their story can help other parents be aware of potential dangers on social media. “When they see our son and can relate to him and see what happened to him, maybe it will sink in,” the sex and relationship therapist said. “And if it helps one kid, it’s worth it.”
A spokesperson for Snapchat told PEOPLE the company is “committed to working together with law enforcement in this case and in all instances where Snapchat is used for illegal purposes.” The statement continued, “We have zero tolerance for using Snapchat to buy or sell illegal drugs. Using Snapchat for illegal purposes is firmly against our community guidelines and we enforce against these violations. We are constantly improving our technological capabilities to detect drug-related activity so that we can intervene proactively. … We have no higher priority than keeping Snapchat a safe environment and we will continue to invest in protecting our community.”
Berman said everything seemed normal on the day of her son’s death, even an hour before she found his body. “He asked his dad for a cheeseburger,” she explained. “An hour later, I went into his room because we’d been talking about an internship for the summer that he wanted to do, and he was on the floor, gone.”
She said that while Sammy was “full of intellectual curiosity and excitement for the future,” he was bored at home amid the coronavirus pandemic and therefore susceptible to experimenting. “There is a rash of kids like ours who are home bored during the pandemic and trying to entertain themselves,” she said. “I was just saying to a girlfriend the other day that one of the silver linings of the pandemic is that I’ve had both of my teenage boys trapped in the house, safe. And I was wrong.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that fentanyl, a fast-acting opioid classified as a Schedule II drug by the federal government, is 80 times more potent than morphine and hundreds of times more potent than heroin. Its medical uses are typically pain management following surgery or for chronic pain.
