EXCLUSIVE: White House Works With Social Media Companies on Deadly Drug Crisis  

The White House is hosting a roundtable Wednesday with representatives of social media companies working to end the sale of illicit drugs on platforms like Meta, X, YouTube, and TikTok.  

Sara Carter, director of the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, will lead the discussion on ways to keep children and youth safe from drug traffickers who may target them online.  

“Throughout my career, I have spoken to countless families who lost a child or loved one to drugs purchased through social media,” Carter said in a statement first provided to The Daily Signal.  

“In many of these cases, the victim thought they were purchasing a safe pill, which actually contained a lethal dose of illicit fentanyl,” Carter continued. “These drug poisonings are incomprehensible tragedies that cannot continue.”  

Angel Mom Anne Fundner will attend Wednesday’s roundtable. Fundner, who testified before Congress in 2024, lost her 15-year-old son Weston in 2022 after he took drugs that contained fentanyl.  

“When your child dies, the whole family dies. We’ve lost everything with Weston’s death. We lost everything but each other. It has been a very hard road,” Fundner told members of Congress in her prepared testimony after her son’s death. 

When young people become addicted to drugs, for “$7.50 they can go on an app like Snapchat or Instagram and have it delivered and put underneath the doormat at your front door,” Fundner said.  

Over the past decade, roughly 500,000 lives have been lost in the United States to synthetic opioid overdoses, mainly fentanyl, according to the National Institutes of Health. 

In an effort to prevent more parents from suffering a loss similar to the Fundner family’s, the Office of National Drug Control Policy “will need full-scale cooperation from social media companies, law enforcement, and the whole-of-government,” Carter says. 

Carter is also calling on families to educate their children on the dangers of drug use, and is encouraging parents to monitor their children’s “social media use to protect them from those who seek to do irreparable harm.” 

The meeting is Carter’s first event since being confirmed as President Donald Trump’s drug czar in January. Prior to serving in the White House, she was an investigative journalist and reported extensively on the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border.   

Multiple Trump administration officials will join the roundtable, including Terry Cole, administrator of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, Ronnie Kurtz, assistant secretary for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Debbie Seguin, acting deputy director for the Office of National Drug Control Policy.  

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