The number of Australians dying from a substance frequently discussed on a pro-suicide web forum has spiked in recent years. One family who lost their son fought to get the site blocked — but it's now back online.
Ross and Debbie Cameron walk every day.
The path from their home takes them past the lawns and mostly manicured gardens of suburban brick homes to the banks of the Canning River in Perth.
Sometimes they pause under an enormous gnarled gum tree where there is a park bench dedicated to their only child, Lachlan.
It's a peaceful place to remember him.
Lachlan took his own life in 2019 after spending time on a web forum that experts say has guided suicidal people toward death instead of away from it.
The ABC will not be naming the website in this story.
"He was getting encouragement from them," Debbie says.
"No-one was saying, 'Don't do it'. They were all just saying, 'Oh, well, I hope it's painless'."
"The authorities should be clamping down on these things," Ross adds.
In the past five years, there has been a spike in the number of deaths in Australia linked to a lethal substance that is frequently discussed on the web forum as a method of suicide. Lachlan's death is one of them.
Commonly used in the food industry, the substance had been ordered online in most of the recorded cases.
In Victoria alone, there were 20 recorded deaths from the substance between 2017 and 2020. In the 16 years prior, there were none.
While the substance has long been known to advocates for euthanasia and assisted suicide among seniors, Australian data shows that many of the deaths since 2017 were among younger people.
Some states do not routinely test for the substance during autopsies, and coroners acknowledge it is possible more deaths have occurred.
The ABC is aware of one other Australian who had researched the substance on the website that Lachlan used before using it to take their own life.
Since Lachlan's death, Ross and Debbie have spearheaded Australian efforts to shut down the US-registered web forum and restrict access to the substance by pressuring authorities to respond.
But despite new laws and some temporary successes, the website has re-emerged under a new URL and remains accessible to many Australians.
"You can end up playing a game of whack-a-mole if you have a determined enough host or predator," Julie Inman Grant, Australia's eSafety Commissioner, says.
"They can set up different servers or VPNs, or sites in other permissive hosting areas.
"While we have been tracking, we can't trawl or totally police the entire internet."
Authorities on the other side of the world are grappling with how to respond to the website.
A New York Times investigation last year identified 45 people globally who died by suicide after spending time on the site, including Lachlan.
A further 500 members had written "goodbye threads" and never posted again, the Times said.
"This is not just a hypothetical harm or potential harm," Ms Inman Grant says.
"A young Australian man has actually learned how to make a potion on this specific site, and has learned and used it to take his own life.
"Now that is preventable."
A search for support
From swimming with dolphins in Hawaii as a child, to dressing up as Doctor Who in his teens, Debbie remembers Lachlan's wicked sense of humour and how he could light up a room with his laugh and smile.
After school, Lachlan started studying media and business at TAFE.
"He loved making short videos and then adding in special effects.
"That's what he was hoping to do [as a career] because that's where his interest was."
Signs of a change in Lachlan's mood started in high school but his depression was deemed to be mild.
The Camerons say he saw psychologists but not all the time, sometimes feeling comfortable enough to go around a year without an appointment.
"He always came and said that he wanted to see somebody when he thought he needed to," Debbie says.
While on the surface it appeared Lachlan was taking positive steps to manage his mental health, the Camerons did not know he'd also stumbled upon a troubling corner of the internet in his search for support.
Posts on the web forum contain detailed directions on suicide methods and sometimes encouragement to those who are considering it.
Ms Inman Grant says the website "incited" people toward suicide in multiple ways.
"People who are obviously vulnerable, who could have had the opportunity to get mental health counselling or psychological help … were encouraged to go into the light and to take their life."
The website contains multiple "goodbye" posts in which commenters wrote that they had taken the lethal substance in an attempt to die.
In some cases, none of the comments in the thread attempted to discourage the person or guided them to seek help.
Rather, they offered well wishes for "peace" and a "comfortable journey".
Other topics discussed include how to avoid "involuntary hospitalisation" that could interfere with a suicide attempt.
Frustration with society's attempts to discourage suicide is regularly discussed and attempts to direct people to helplines or other supports are sometimes greeted with hostility and criticised as being "pro-life".
The website describes itself as being a safe place to talk freely about suicide.
Rules posted by the site administrators say that users are not allowed to promote or encourage suicide, and those who do will be banned.
It also has a "recovery" section that contains support helplines.
However posts on the website contain explicit instructions on methods.
The ABC asked administrators what efforts, if any, were made to regulate the material on the site, and how they felt about the deaths of people who had spent time on the site.
They did not respond.
Search engine anger
Since the New York Times investigation brought public attention to the website in the United States, a congressional committee there has tried and failed to get search engines such as Google to remove the link from its search results.
In Australia, Ms Inman Grant said she was angered by the responses from Google and Microsoft Bing which she had asked to delist the website. They refused.
"Some of the responses to informal requests for them to de-index was, 'Well, you know, we just hold the mirror up to society, we don't decide what's good or bad'," she said.
"And I also got, 'Well, it's not strictly illegal content. It's harmful content, but it's not illegal anywhere'.
"I said the fact that you're saying that it's harmful, and you're not willing to take it down, deeply troubles me."
Google Australia senior manager of public policy Samantha Yorke says it is guided by Australian law when it comes to questions about what information people should be able to find online.
"This is a deeply painful and challenging issue, and we continue to focus on how our products can help people in vulnerable situations," Ms Yorke says.
"If people come to Google to search for information about suicide, they see features promoting prevention hotlines that can provide critical help and support."
Ms Yorke says Google has specialised ranking systems designed to prioritise the "highest quality results available" for self-harm queries, and that it blocks auto-complete predictions for those searches.
"We balance these safeguards with our commitment to give people open access to information," she says.
Microsoft says it has also responded by adjusting the rankings of search results regarding suicide.
"When this was previously brought to our attention, we took action in line with our policies and addressed the ranking associated with this website in our results," a spokesperson says.
"While we remain committed to free access to lawful information for searches related to suicide, we always elevate support and prevention resources prominently."
The spokesperson says Microsoft constantly tests whether its search results are consistent with its policies "and will continually work to improve on this critical topic".
A tipping point
Lachlan Cameron's computer history showed that he was interacting with members of the suicide web forum the night he died on January 4, 2019.
"He was describing what he was doing that very night, and taking [the cocktail], and others were sending him notices saying, 'Oh, you know, best of luck. We'll see you on the other side' — this sort of thing," Ross Cameron says.
Ross and Debbie had been out that night. When they returned home they thought Lachlan was asleep — but he didn't respond when they tried to wake him.
"Two lots of ambulances came and worked on him for 20 minutes, but in the end they couldn't revive him so they had to phone the police," Mr Cameron says.
When detectives arrived they seized Lachlan's laptop, phone and some of his medications, but Mr Cameron says they did not find or take the substances Lachlan had used to take his life from his bedroom.
The Camerons only found the substances when they went into Lachlan's room a few days later.
Officers could not access Lachlan's laptop in the early days after his death so Mr Cameron took it back.
He used an old password to log in to Lachlan's accounts and discovered the website, along with messages between his son and members of the forum on the night of his death.
The Camerons say previous messages on Lachlan's devices indicate he had been unsure about whether to take his own life in the days and weeks prior, making them think the website was a tipping point for him.
"They were egging him on and encouraging him. He was listening to the wrong people," Mr Cameron says.
Demand for action
Within days of his son's death, Mr Cameron had informed the WA Coroner about the website and started contacting local politicians, who referred him to federal authorities including the Australian Federal Police and the eSafety Commissioner.
Ms Inman Grant's office was quick to react, arranging a next-day video call with the Camerons before starting its own investigation into the website.
By January 25, eSafety had started contacting search engines to ask that the website be removed from their search results.
"They weren't going to act," says Ms Inman Grant, who wrote to the heads of Microsoft Bing and Google.
"I did pick up the phone and talk to some of these people to prevail upon them to do the right thing, as did many in the Australian mental health community.
"This is the type of thing that I think they should be applying their advanced technologies to helping rather than being concerned that this lawful but awful content is available."
By April 2019, the AFP had used Section 313 of the Telecommunications Act 1997 to block most direct access to the website in Australia, although there were some ways for determined users to get around it.
The Camerons' efforts had paid off, for the time being, but they were troubled that none of these measures would have occurred had they, as grieving parents, not acted so quickly to investigate their son's death, notify authorities and push for change.
Mr Cameron expressed his frustrations in a letter to the state coroner.
"The fact remains this action in blocking the website would not have been expediently undertaken, so possibly saving further lives, had I not retrieved my son's laptop and phone from the WA Coronial Police Investigation Squad and followed through in my determination to have the website blocked to Australian users.
"Without my action in this matter, these items would be lying on a shelf gathering dust."
The coroner's role
When a suicide death occurs in Western Australia, it must be reported to and investigated by the coroner. "Reportable deaths" include those that were unexpected, violent or occurred in the care of police or medical services.
It was almost a year by the time the Deputy State Coroner completed their investigation into Lachlan's death.
The Camerons were shocked when the resulting two-page report did not make recommendations on the basis of public safety.
"The coroners' role really comes in two parts: One is to determine the cause of death, and the second one is to do what they can to prevent a similar death from occurring in future," Debbie Cameron says.
"Now the coroners here in WA are not taking on that preventative role as they should."
The WA Coroner's office does not routinely make recommendations in a case unless there is an inquest — inquests are held for just 3 per cent of reportable deaths.
The WA Coroner's Court declined a request for an interview but said a coroner could hold an inquest at their discretion, even beyond cases where it was legally required.
"In exercising that discretion, the coroner must consider whether an inquest is likely to generate further relevant information to assist the coroner in making the findings, and/or whether there is a prospect of highlighting a risk to public health and/or safety to prevent similar deaths in the future," it said in a statement.
It did not respond directly to questions about why it did not make recommendations, investigate further or hold an inquest in Lachlan's case.
It said it monitored for trends and passed on statistics to the National Coronial Information System and other relevant authorities.
When a 41-year-old woman died in similar circumstances in Victoria, the coroner there wrote a 13-page report investigating the prevalence of deaths from the substance in Australia and what could be done about it.
The report also identified a disturbing rise in the number of deaths from the substance in Australia.
A worrying trend
Toni Samara (not her real name) died in her Melbourne unit in May 2019.
Her father said she had first attempted suicide when she was a teenager after the family moved from Germany.
He said Toni later developed a keen interest in dentistry and studied to become a technician.
"She put her entire energy and attention to her job that she was very proficient at."
But her father said she later became disenchanted with her work and the dental laboratories she worked for.
"I suspect that she was not used to the structured job environment at dental labs, a condition exacerbated by the bipolar syndrome she suffered from."
After Toni's death, police found that she had used the suicide web forum to research the lethal substance she used to end her life.
Deputy State Coroner Caitlin English did not hold an inquest, but her report gathered data on the number of deaths from the substance in Victoria.
It revealed there had been 20 suicide deaths from the substance between 2017 and October 2020. There were no deaths from the substance in the 16 years prior.
Similar trends have been identified by the University of South Australia and the National Coronial Information System (NCIS).
Both the NCIS and Victorian coroner note the numbers may be higher because some states, including Victoria and WA, do not test for the substance unless there is evidence to suggest it was used.
As a response to the trend, Ms English suggested education for doctors and death investigators to test and look for signs of poisoning from the substance.
She said there was a type of antidote that could reverse the substance's effects if it was quickly identified as the cause of poisoning and first responders were aware of the substance as a possible cause of death.
Daniel Passingham, the detective called to Toni's suicide, said it would be easy for officers to miss the signs of poisoning from the substance.
"There were no containers or anything left to indicate that she had taken anything to excess. There was no alcohol," he said.
With no indication of Toni's cause of death, he returned to her unit about a week later and found a second phone that he was able to access without a passcode.
"We did a further search and we located some fluids that were in the fridge that had been made up.
"If I wasn't able to get into her phone, if it had've been blocked with a code … it may never have been identified that she had made those inquiries online."
Controlling the substance
Restrictions on the sale of the substance have been introduced since the deaths of Lachlan and Toni.
Only businesses can purchase it in its most potent form following a reclassification by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) earlier this year.
Although it is not a prohibited import, the TGA says it can be intercepted in some cases.
"Control of imports of goods containing [...] that may be diverted for self-harm depends on how these are presented for supply or use, including the claims and stated purpose on labelling," it said in a statement.
"The TGA works closely with [Border Force] to detect potentially harmful products being imported into Australia unlawfully."
Multiple requests to source the substance have been posted on the suicide website this year by people claiming to be in Australia.
Commenters are advised by administrators to only share sources in private messages and not the public feed.
In the US, a class-action lawsuit launched last month accused Amazon of selling the substance to teenagers.
Amazon says it has restricted the sale of the substance in its more potent form to buyers on its business wholesale platform, which is not available in Australia.
Blocking website access
Although the eSafety Commission was able to work with the AFP to get internet service providers to block access to the website in 2019, some have not blocked the website since it re-emerged at a new URL this year.
The ABC understands the AFP has reduced its involvement in blocking these types of websites because its stance is that the responsibility now rests with eSafety.
While some ISPs such as Telstra voluntarily blocked access, others have not.
The eSafety Commission has powers under the Online Safety Act which came into effect in 2020.
It can demand that search engines remove links to material that "promotes, incites or instructs in matters of crime or violence".
According to eSafety, that includes material that promotes or provides instruction in a particular method of suicide — an offence under the Criminal Code Act.
"If they fail to respond … we could take them to court and fine them up to $555,000 [per day] for each failure to remove," Ms Inman Grant said.
But the strength of the legislation is yet to be tested.
So far, other link-deletion orders sent to Google have been honoured without legal action.
eSafety's orders are also limited to specific links containing material that breaks the law — not necessarily the whole web forum or community.
Its response is complaints-based, which is part of the reason it has to date not responded to the re-emergence of the website it worked to block in 2019.
"eSafety relies on complaints from Australians to trigger an investigation into illegal and restricted online content," a spokesperson for Ms Inman Grant said in response to additional questions.
"eSafety does not proactively police the internet but acts as a safety net to help get seriously harmful content removed when online service providers fail to act."
In the US, a bipartisan bill introduced this month would allow criminal charges to be laid against anyone who intentionally uses the internet or mail to assist with a suicide.
A spokesperson for Communications Minister Michelle Rowland says the federal government is serious about preventing access to pro-suicide sites and forums.
"Following being made aware of this, the Minister has sought advice from her department about what more can be done to improve the ability of regulators and industry to tackle this complex problem," they said.
"The Minister is deeply concerned, as any parent would be."
The government says it is also important to address the underlying reasons why people are seeking information from this type of website, and is committed to ongoing reform with an additional $114 million investment in mental health in the latest budget.
Louise La Sala is a research fellow in suicide prevention at Orygen, which works with young people to research and develop mental health resources and care programs.
She says spaces for people to seek support and connection need to exist online because people turn to the internet for information.
"I'm not for shutting down online spaces that are providing support or providing community," Ms La Sala says.
"And I think there are spaces that we could direct people to for that, but I think spaces that share information, graphic details, methods, all the things that we know, aren't helpful. I think they should be shut down."
Ms Inman Grant says eSafety remains steadfast in its opposition to the website.
"We won't stop fighting and responding to reports, or anything that can help us tackle this scourge and this promotion of suicide and this incitement to suicide, when we could instead be helping people get the help that they need."
The Camerons hope that speaking publicly will help raise awareness about the extent of the dangers online, not only for families but for the medical and mental health communities.
Credits
- Reporting: Alicia Bridges
- Photography: Cason Ho
- Animation & illustration: Sharon Gordon
- Digital production: Daniel Franklin