Policing social media’s role in the new drug trade – and how it affects young people.
by Jimmy Magahern
Matt Shay, a veteran Phoenix law officer with nearly three decades of experience in drug enforcement, has seen the evolution of drug trafficking from street corners to the digital domain.
“In the past, you had to physically go to certain parts of town to look for drugs,” he says. “Then pagers came around. You’d put in a certain code, a guy would call you back, and you’d arrange to meet in a 7-Eleven parking lot.
“Now, you peruse Instagram or Snapchat and choose what drug you want like you’re picking movies on Netflix,” Shay says. “You don’t go get the drugs anymore; the drugs come to you. It’s basically Uber Drugs.”
Shay’s first big job in the Phoenix Police Department involved trailing Sammy “The Bull” Gravano’s adult children around Phoenix in the late ’90s, when they were helping their father run a major ecstasy ring. Now, Shay mostly trails drug traffickers online via undercover social media accounts, as a detective in the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office Special Investigations Division.
Not surprisingly, the age of drug traffickers has skewed younger as social media platforms – where teens and young adults know the landscape best – have made it easier for young dealers to set up shop from their bedrooms, advertise products through coded language and emojis and conduct business entirely through digital transactions.
“The age is generally going to be 17 to 24 years old,” Shay says. “That’s the primary group. We do get a bunch of people that are older, but nowhere near as many.”
The digital marketplace also allows them to operate under relative anonymity, using fake profiles and encrypted messaging to conceal their identities. However, as Shay warns, the risks are still high – many young dealers quickly expand into harder drug sales, encountering sometimes violent buyers (“Everybody comes with a gun”) in what they initially saw as an easy side hustle.
“They almost always start with cannabis and then expand into dealing molly, ecstasy or promethazine, and eventually harder drugs like cocaine, fentanyl and methamphetamine,” he says.
In the process, they tend to move from popular apps like Instagram and Snapchat into encrypted messaging apps like Telegram and Potato, which are harder (but not impossible) for law enforcement to crack.
Shay’s job involves limited direct cooperation with the tech companies behind the social media platforms that dealers use. But he believes the companies could do much more to monitor and flag problematic activity.
“We do serve them with a lot of search warrants to get data. But I don’t see them doing anything proactive against limiting the amount of obvious drug sales happening on their platforms.”
Decoding the Digital Drug Trade
Detective Shay admits it can be challenging staying ahead of the constantly evolving coded language, emojis and symbols used by traffickers to obscure their activities on social media apps. “Hopefully, you get yourself a millennial, Gen Z or Gen A on your squad,” he says, with a laugh. “They can keep up with it.”
But here are a few emojis and their meanings that Shay says have stood the test of time – or at least a few TikTok updates.
