> Why is it amazon’s responsibility to safeguard your children? That’s your responsibility.

Indeed. And we intend to exercise that responsibility to safeguard our children by stopping Amazon from mixing suicide kits in with shipments of innocuous household goods.

You intend to exercise your responsibility by abdicating it, and instead insisting that Amazon and other retailers do it for you, and society at large bear the cost?

I think we disagree on the definition of “responsibility”.

Yes. Society can bear the cost of having to jump through a few extra steps to buy pure concentrated chemicals that have been demonstrated to repeatedly kill teenagers.

So the people who have legitimate use for those chemicals can jump through a few hoops to get them.

And Amazon, a trillion dollar company, can do a better job with its algorithms and stop recommending them and selling them to teenagers.

I am super comfortable inflicting those costs on the world.

I’m sure you’re comfortable with whatever authoritarian bureaucratic nonsense would help calm your social media-induced panic attack if the hour, but that’s not a standard of evidence under which I’m willing to make the world a bit worse.

It sounds like we won’t agree on ethical fundamentals, much less this topic, so I wish you well, and hope you can source enough bubblewrap to feel safe existing in the world.

The world is worst because a trillion dollar company don't have the incentive to operate responsibly. Because they don't care, and shrug responsibility at every turn. Because they are not willing to uphold any standards. Nobody expects a bubble-wrap, just a recommendation engine that's safe around chemicals. What an expectations from a trillion dollar company. Please don't recommend dangerous chemicals to children or information that tells them how to harm themselves.

By the way your car is not a death-trap because of us nagging the industry to do better. You are welcome!

It’s not authoritarian nonsense to have and enforce basic principles of product safety in commerce.

For evidence refer to the fact that your family hasn’t died of botulism or a falling building facade.

This is pretty basic stuff. It’s not a social media panic attack it’s an active lawsuit backed by sworn statements and evidence, and the fact pattern is genuinely apalling. I get skepticism at the headline but read through the details.

To be clear, Amazon isn't just selling these things. They're actively promoting their sale, together. Their systems are literally encouraging the combined purchase of multiple products from different sellers in different categories to create a deadly suicide kit. Are you suggesting Amazon has no responsibility for what their systems—unprompted—promote?

If you can't see the difference between things like "Amazon shouldn't sell dirty magazines to kids" and "Amazon should have basic protections in place to avoid selling lab grade chemicals along with drugs to facilitate a painless suicide as a bundle to whoever wants them with free shipping," I don't know how to have a reasonable conversation.

It's not about parents having oversight over kids. It's about mental illness: "kits" like this shouldn't exist at all for kids or otherwise. You use it once and you're dead because that's the whole point of the combination of goods. We as a society should be past the point where we need to discuss whether selling a literal suicide kit is okay or not. It's not, and we know from research that making suicide more accessible and convenient leads to more suicide. The only outcome of allowing Amazon to do what it's doing is additional deaths that could have been prevented.