FACEBOOK have shut down a group page which was allowed to openly offer drugs for sale for several months.
Social media users in the UK wide “The Sesh Life Group” posted pictures of prescription drugs, including Diazepam and Xanax, that were available to buy.
Some members of the 14,000 strong group posted asking for recommendations of where to get illegal substances including cocaine, ketamine, cannabis and hallucinogen DMT.
And users on the closed group shared videos of themselves taking what appear to be illegal substances, including one where a man snorting a line of white powder from spinning vinyl.
The group had been running for at least four or five months and the National Drugs Prevention Agency today slammed the social media giant for not taking action sooner.
They claimed Facebook should be doing far more generally to find and shut down groups of this type.
One user in the group openly offered a supply of Class C prescription drugs – including Xanax, a tranquiliser, Zopiclone, a sleeping pill, and Diazepam, also known as valium.
Amazingly, he even took pictures with his name emblazoned across a piece of white paper, with the date and his name to prove he was in possession of them.
Other users used the platform to reach out and look for drug dealers across the country, from Glasgow, to Leeds and Somerset.
They asked for everything from cannabis, to cocaine and dangerous hallucinogen DMT – which can cause horrifying effects days after the drugs have been taken.
One user asked: “Blues and hash? Good reliable vendor please.”
Another posted a picture with the words “Any drug dealers participating in black Friday by any chance?”
To which one user replied: “Messaged you x”
One video showed a man in a wheelchair, whose face had been covered, sitting in a disabled toilet seat with the top of the cistern in his lap – appearing to prepare drugs on top of it.
Another video showed ground up cannabis in a plastic container, as the person who filmed the video appeared to show it off to those in the group.
David Raynes, from the National Drug Prevention Agency, said: “The use of social media to peddle drugs is commonplace. It’s not good, if your going on to the internet it is now part of modern life. You can find drugs, guns, and solicitations of minors on any number of sites, and when it’s on the dark web it’s even more hidden.
“I’m pleased the group has been taken down, but Facebook could do more. They must have some huge keyword search powers, because they have huge amounts of money. There would need to be a lot of money used to stop this, and in my experience they are not willing to put any money into it.
“They take things down when someone tells them about it, but they are not being very proactive about the problem.”
A spokesman for Facebook said: “This kind of activity is not allowed on Facebook and we quickly removed the group once it was reported to us.
“We encourage our community to report any activity like this using the reporting tools that exist on every page on Facebook.
“We recently announced that we’ll be doubling our security team to 20,000 people over the next year to improve how we detect and remove content that shouldn’t be on Facebook.”
