The man who called himself ‘The Poison Seller’ sat in a London courtroom this week and admitted to something chilling: he helped people kill themselves. For years, Kenneth Law, a 61-year-old former engineer from Mississauga, Ontario, sold sodium nitrite and other lethal substances online, shipping them to vulnerable individuals across the globe. His arrest in 2023, after a series of suicides in the UK and Canada, revealed a dark corner of the internet where the deepest despair meets a profit motive. But this is not just a story of one man’s moral bankruptcy. It is a story of a society that leaves its lonely and its hurting to be preyed upon by algorithms and indifference.
Law’s case is exceptional in its scale. Prosecutors say he sent over 1,200 packages to addresses in more than 40 countries, with at least 88 deaths linked to his products in the UK alone. He sold sodium nitrite, a common food preservative that is lethal in small doses, often marketed as ‘99.9% pure’ or as a ‘research chemical’. His customers were mostly young people, often struggling with mental health issues, who found him through online forums and encrypted messaging apps. He provided not just the poison but encouragement, offering instructions on dosage and even suggesting they lie to coroners to avoid suspicion. The question that haunts this case is not why he did it, but why the system allowed it to happen for so long.
On the ground, the human cost is devastating. Families have spoken of their shock at discovering that their children had ordered from a man thousands of miles away, that their last act was a transaction with a stranger who treated their pain as a business opportunity. The social fabric here is frayed by isolation. In an age where we are more connected than ever, the paradox of loneliness is acute: a teenager in a quiet English town can find a poison seller in Canada before they can find a therapist. Law’s website was easy to find, his products easy to order. The platform he used ignored warnings. The postal services dutifully delivered. Each handoff was a missed chance.
Culturally, this case reflects a world where the boundaries of ethics have blurred online. The internet promised community and information, but it also hosts a subculture of suicide instruction, where vulnerable people are guided towards death by anonymous ‘helpers’. Law’s admission is a rare moment of accountability. Yet the broader phenomenon persists: the unregulated sale of lethal substances, the forums that normalize suicide, the algorithms that connect despair with a solution. This is a collective failure. Policymakers, tech companies, and mental health services have all been slow to adapt to a digital world that operates beyond borders.
Class dynamics play a subtler role. Those who die by these means are not typically the privileged. They are often the already marginalized: young, isolated, struggling with economic precarity or family breakdown. The ‘poison seller’ exploited a vacuum left by overstretched health systems and a social safety net with holes big enough to drive a parcel through. In the UK, where austerity has gutted mental health services, the waiting list for therapy can be months. The internet offers instant gratification, even for death.
As Law awaits sentencing, the lessons are uncomfortable. We have built a global marketplace for nearly everything, including the tools of self-destruction. The answer cannot simply be more police or more laws, though those are needed. It must be a reckoning with the loneliness that makes such a market possible. For every poison seller, there are thousands of buyers, each one a person failed long before they made that purchase. The courtroom drama is over, but the real story is just beginning.
