Today’s Story: Woman sues Amazon over daughter’s suicide by cyanide

“Despite having a policy and procedure of prohibiting through its website offers and sales of prohibited items, illegal products and banned hazardous substances in the United States, including but not limited to cyanide products, Amazon failed to enforce that policy and procedure,” said the lawsuit. Amazon did start preventing the sale of cyanide on Feb. 2, 2013, but by then it was too late. The lawsuit said 51 other people purchased cyanide on Amazon before Singh, resulting in the deaths of 11 purchasers “within weeks of sale.”

In similar news last year, otherwise censorship resistant domain registrar EasyDNS took the step of pulling the domain of an unlicensed pharmacy after someone died from an overdose.

EasyDNS said that contrary to their resistance to pull content without a court order from the request for the PIPCU:

So in one case we have people allegedly pirating Honey Boo Boo reruns and on the other we have people dying. We don’t know where exactly, but the line goes somewhere in between there.

That said, Brian Krebs’ Spam Nation book features a great analysis of the unlicensed pharmacy world, including how major pharmacies refused to fund purity studies into these services because they know they will show 99.9% of the content is indistinguishable from expensive legal alternatives. (aside, this is a fantastic read about the global spamming machine)

Now we know markets like Agora banned poisons and that there have been poison-specific law enforcement action, I’m not sure what markets still allow their listing.

What’s clear to me is that there’s a strong message here from law enforcement, regulators, intermediaries, traditional ecommerce and darknet markets as a whole. Don’t sell poisons online and don’t kill your customers!