We bought illicit drugs through Facebook ads

Inside each package, no attempt was made to conceal the drugs before shipment. “REGULAR COKE,” read the label on the clear plastic container holding the gram of powder. An invoice lay beneath: “Refer a friend for $20 off your next order.”

Ads from the sellers of these addictive and illegal drugs ran on Facebook, the world’s largest social media platform. With one click the Star connected to online shops hawking cocaine, opioids, MDMA, Xanax, ketamine and other illicit substances. It took only a few minutes to order the drugs using Interac e-Transfer.

Meta, the Silicon Valley-based tech giant that owns Facebook and Instagram, has for years maintained that its advertising standards prohibit “ads that promote the sale or use of illicit or recreational drugs.” Meta told the Star that it has “zero tolerance” for such ads and continually works to improve its already “robust” systems to detect and remove them.

Yet they continue to flow into Canadians’ feeds, generating revenue for Meta from drug traffickers who use the firm’s lucrative advertising algorithm to reach new customers.

Too often, that algorithm puts the ads in front of those already vulnerable to the drugs’ lure.

Paul Savage assumed the ads were a scam when he first stumbled on them in 2024.

You can’t actually order drugs through an ad on Facebook, he thought. The 49-year-old fisherman from New Brunswick kept scrolling.

It didn’t take long before another ad popped up on his feed. When he clicked, he saw the site also sold Oxy, which he had previously struggled with. After hurting his back fishing over the winter, he bought two pills, along with the anti-anxiety medication Xanax.

“It was no different than buying anything else online, right?” he said. “It was just like shopping on Amazon.”

It took a few weeks before the drugs arrived. But once he took the Oxy, he immediately thought something seemed off. It tasted different than it had in the past. He waited a few minutes before trying a bit more.

“Next thing I know there was paramedics running at me,” he told the Star. “I stopped breathing, they said.”

The promos selling illegal drugs blend into a user’s feed, alongside photos of family and friends, distinguished as a paid ad by a small “Sponsored” label.

Some use suggestive language: “Looking for a trusted online supplier for your next trip?” Others are more explicit.

One ad the Star clicked on showed a picture of a pile of cocaine.

After sending $100 through an e-Transfer, the cocaine from a sleekly designed online drug shop called Trippi arrived within a few business days at a residential address via Canada Post’s Xpresspost. A printed label said the package was shipped from “The Art Loft” at an address that traces to a storage facility in Richmond, B.C.

The two 20 mg pills of Oxycodone — bought from another drug seller site, Moonhaus — were shipped from “Top Tier Consultation,” with an address that traces to a PO box in a Richmond mall located a few blocks away from the storage facility.

Neither Trippi nor Moonhaus responded to the Star’s questions.

In a statement to the Star, Canada Post said more than $9 million worth of illegal drugs were intercepted and turned over to police last year.

“We remain committed to supporting the efforts of our law enforcement partners to stem the transmission of illegal drugs through the mail,” a spokesperson said.

Facebook and Instagram users told the Star that sellers based in B.C. sent the drugs to their homes in other provinces.

The RCMP, whose responsibilities include policing interprovincial drug trafficking, told the Star it actively targets “individuals and networks” who profit from online drug sales, including through “cyber tools” and collaboration with domestic and international law enforcement.

The RCMP did not comment specifically on the websites that brazenly sold cocaine and opioids to the Star. The force said illegal drugs “are a main priority” and it is investigating ads on web platforms that are “used by drug dealers to mask their identity and facilitate distribution of their products,” but provided no details.

The RCMP also referred the Star to officials at other regulators, including Health Canada, which the Mounties said play a role in enforcing the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act.

Health Canada said it takes illegal drug trafficking seriously and is committed to safeguarding public health in collaboration with law enforcement.

Grant, a 38-year-old Toronto resident, had been sober for two months when he first saw ads on Instagram while in a treatment facility in Southwestern Ontario. One featured a picture of what appeared to be an AI-generated Tony Montana — the drug lord portrayed by Al Pacino in “Scarface” — seated behind a large pile of white powder.

He had sought help after a year of devastating losses — his job, his relationship and the death of a loved one — that led him to start abusing laughing gas and ketamine, an anesthetic that can cause hallucinations at high doses.

Every time he went on Instagram, he said, the ads were a constant temptation.

“It’s like, ‘OK, I’ve been doing so good in rehab. And this is so easy to get. Maybe I should just do one order,’” said Grant, which is a pseudonym as he did not want to be identified out of fear it could harm his job prospects.

While still in rehab, he ordered ketamine and checked out five days before his program was scheduled to end. The package was sitting at his doorstep when he returned home.

The drug ads reviewed by the Star appeared to be targeted at Canadian adults, according to Meta’s Ad Library, which provides information on advertiser pages and the individuals who run them. But the websites themselves can be easily shared.

For seven months after first seeing the ads, Grant ordered from another website that has advertised on Meta’s platforms. He’s been sober for a few weeks and is attending Narcotics Anonymous meetings.

“They took somebody who was making an honest and frankly desperate effort to get clean and they completely derailed that.”

Meta has long faced scrutiny about drug sellers using its platforms to market narcotics.

As early as 2013, a BBC investigation revealed how users on Instagram could search for illegal drugs if they knew the right hashtag to use. The image-sharing platform responded by blocking certain search terms and encouraged users to report this content.

But the issue has continued to dog Instagram and Facebook.

Last year, the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. prosecutors were probing whether Meta’s platforms profit from the illegal sale of drugs. A spokesperson for the United States Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Virginia refused to comment. Meta has consistently said the ads are prohibited and removed whenever found.

Since March, the Star has seen ads on Facebook for at least 20 drug websites. Some remain active for weeks or months.

“And if that ad has already reached people and they’ve already been able to connect with the trafficker and Meta’s profited from it, the harm is done. They made their money,” said Katie Paul, director of the U.S. non-profit Tech Transparency Project, which found more than 450 ads for prescription and recreational drugs on Meta’s platforms.

“They can’t regulate with too much of a heavy hand and risk their business model because their business model is one based on scale, not margins. It’s about doing as much of this as possible,” said Brett Caraway, a professor at the University of Toronto and acting director at the school’s Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology.

Between April and June, Meta said it “took action” on 3.7 million pieces of drug-related content on Facebook and 820,000 on Instagram. Nearly 96 per cent of such content on Facebook was “actioned” before being reported by a user, while on Instagram, that figure dropped to roughly 85 per cent, Meta said. The company did not say whether taking “action” on certain content means it was removed.

If an account is caught selling or promoting cocaine, fentanyl or other “high-risk drugs,” it will be disabled, Meta told the Star.

The company said it uses “robust measures” to detect and remove content that violates its standards, such as human review and artificial intelligence, including technology that can discern images of drugs. It also said that it works with law enforcement in its ongoing efforts to improve detection of offending content and supports non-profits and other organizations to help raise awareness of the dangers of drug misuse.

A Meta spokesperson did not say why ads showing cocaine remain on its platforms.

One such ad appeared on both Facebook and Instagram through a page managed from Austria and the United States, according to Meta’s Ad Library. It’s possible, however, to misrepresent one’s location by accessing the internet though a virtual private network (VPN).

The ad led to Trippi’s website, which promises to “transform your life with psychedelic medicine.” The website’s domain was originally associated with the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, a tiny Australian archipelago in the Indian Ocean, though now forwards to a website linked to the tiny island nation of Niue.

Brian Wieser, a digital marketing analyst and CEO of the media and tech consultancy Madison and Wall, said he’s long urged companies that run so-called “self-service” ads — where the buyer creates, manages and pays for the ad directly — to establish rules to ensure the ad publisher knows who their clients are. “Unfortunately, there is none practically,” he told the Star. “Anyone can buy anything.”

In a statement to the Star, Meta said it also relies on reports from users to identify material that violates its standards. But three Facebook and Instagram users interviewed by the Star said that after reporting drug ads they received messages from Meta saying it had decided not to remove the ads in question.

After the Star flagged specific online drug shops to Meta, the company removed some of their ads, though others still appeared, including through a Facebook page the Star had identified to the company.

Moonhaus seems to have stopped running ads. Trippi ads showing cocaine appeared in the last week, according to Meta’s Ad Library.

More human moderation would improve Meta’s ability to crack down on illicit content, experts told the Star.

As “one of the most brilliant engineering companies in our history,” its automated moderation should work better than it appears to, said Jeff Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next, an American trade group for content providers.

Meta can keep certain illegal material off its platforms, specifically images depicting child sexual abuse, Paul noted.

“The company is completely capable of doing this,” she said. “It has the technology to address these issues. It’s a choice at this point to not do so.”

Savage, the New Brunswick fisherman, hadn’t touched Oxy for about five years when he received the two 20 mg pills in the mail in February. He ordered from Moonhaus, the same online store the Star bought from months later.

He’d used heavily in the past but never overdosed. He crushed up and snorted one pill. After lighting a cigarette, he passed out in a chair and stopped breathing.

As Savage’s wife called 911, his adult son pounded on his chest and splashed him with cold water, trying anything. Savage took a big gasp and came to just as paramedics rushed in.

He suspects the pill may have been tainted with fentanyl or another potent opioid. He flushed the rest of what he bought down the toilet.

“I apologized to my (son) a dozen times. It scared him bad. It scared all of us,” said Savage, a grandfather of five. “I don’t want to see it happen to somebody else.”

The Star gave both substances it bought through the ads to a community drug checking service that uses infrared light to identify what’s in street drugs. The tests found no trace of fentanyl. But the cocaine was adulterated with levamisole, an animal dewormer that’s often added to cocaine to maximize profits. It can cause skin necrosis.

Savage remains frustrated with the ease with which people can buy potentially dangerous drugs through Facebook ads and said the RCMP needs to do more to stop it.

“I mean if a hillbilly like me in the middle of Charlotte County, New Brunswick, on a small island, can get access to pills out of British Columbia. And I can track them on an app through Canada Post coming across the country—”

He paused. “They can’t seem to slow this down any?”