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In a written response to lawmakers on Thursday, Brian Huseman, Amazon’s vice president of public policy, offered his condolences to the families of those killed while defending Amazon’s compounding practices and sales. He said it is used for a number of purposes and is available from other retailers.
“Amazon offers a wide range of products available to our customers because we trust them to use these products as the manufacturers intended,” he wrote. “Like many widely available consumer products,” he added, “unfortunately, it can be abused.”
Lawmakers found the company’s answers insufficient.
“With their response, Amazon has taken the opportunity to cooperate with us on this issue that has tragically ended the lives of people in our nation,” said Representative Trahan. “Instead, they failed to answer many of our most critical questions”
In email exchanges with The Times, an Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on the 10 deaths The Times identified.
Other sites said they were restricting sales of the compound.
Last year, an eBay executive wrote to a UK coroner that the company banned global sales of the compound in 2019 after receiving a report of its potential use in suicides. However, the Times has since identified eight suicides involving the sale of poison on eBay, including one death that the coroner is examining.
EBay did not respond to detailed emails and messages seeking comment. But in his letter to the coroner, the eBay director acknowledged that despite the ban, it’s possible for “unscrupulous or uninformed sellers to circumvent our policies and filters.” He wrote that the company will support government restrictions on the online sale of the chemical to prevent future suicides.
A spokesperson, who declined to explain why, said in November 2020, Etsy banned the sale of the compound. An Etsy customer reported that he plans to use the product he purchased in May 2018 to kill himself. In August 2020, a 35-year-old in Mississippi wrote to the suicide site that he had purchased the compound on the site. Days later, he died.
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