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And there is a trigger warning. Talk of true crime and suicide.
I want to write a little bit about the paper I’m writing in my social control class.
We have been learning about deviance. What causes it, what keeps it from happening, and why people under the same conditions may or may not behave the same.
I was given a prompt to write about a Canadian man named Kenneth Law who helped over a thousand people die by suicide by coaching them and sending them a substance in the mail. He was getting paid for these packages through his five online companies that people could purchase from. Law had sent over 900,000 packages to over 40 countries and counting from end of 2020 until May 2023.
Story has it that while covid hit in 2020, he needed to make money, so, he built a website and started to counsel people to take their lives by targeting vulnerable people online. Four months later he declared bankruptcy but kept working his business online from a rented basement he lived in, near Toronto.
Although my paper follows his story and applies concepts and theories to why he came to be this way, I am also writing about the perspectives of the victims.
I searched through the list of some of them with their photos and ages and what their families had to say about this. I was so surprised by the ages as all of them were between ages 16 and 36.
So many parents claimed that if Kenneth Law did not target their child, that they would still be alive today. I truly believe that.
It reminded me of how my brother got his hands on steroids at such a young age through the internet and long story short, he is no longer with us as buying drugs online can have adverse effects, and misinformation can lead to fatal life choices.
The point of this post is to remind us how vulnerable we are to what we see online, and in a moment of weakness, people can be lured in to misguided counsel.
The more people text, talk, Google or look for information about something, the more the algorithm will target those people. There are no laws against that. Studies have proven than companies target vulnerable people. Shopaholics can’t pass up deals. Depressed people are more likely to fall into click bait about depression, and so on.
So as I leave this blog I say to you, stay alert and aware. I don’t think Kenneth Law is the last deviant suicide serial killer.
