Amazon is not responsible for this customer’s suicide

In February of 2013, Arya Singh took soluble cyanide crystals in her University of Pennsylvania dorm room, killing herself after two years of dealing with an alleged sexual assault that could not be proven. Now her mother is suing Amazon for selling the pills to her daughter.

But Amazon is as guilty as the Swedish chemist who discovered cyanide, Carl Wilhelm Scheele; in that they bear zero responsibility in this.

There were numerous signs, in retrospect, that Singh was not emotionally coping with the alleged assault. The Philadelphia Inquirer says charges were never filed against the accused student and points out that after the alleged assault, Singh would fail to show up for classes, was arrested and hospitalized for alcohol intoxication, and was subject to a number of academic and misconduct investigations. These were all likely the result of her struggle to cope with the alleged assault.

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About two months prior to her suicide, Singh purchased the cyanide crystals through a third party seller on Amazon. As it turns out, Amazon blocked all sales of cyanide on its website six days prior to Singh’s suicide.

Now, the mom is suing Amazon for allowing the purchase.

The mom is misplacing her ire. I don’t blame her. When your 20-year-old daughter kills herself, I imagine you will blame everyone because there was no justification for such a young soul to take their own life. This very well may be part of the mom’s coping process. But Amazon did not kill her daughter; the daughter killed herself.

We often have conversations in the gun control debate about magically stopping the gun violence. Well, when about two-thirds of gun violence is from suicide via gun, I frequently talk about on my show how access to guns is not causing the suicides; it’s just providing a tool to go through with the act. It makes more sense to treat the mental illness likely leading to the suicide, rather than go after the weapon because the weapon can be replaced. Take away cyanide from Amazon and she can just as easily have purchased a knife from the re-seller (or, frankly, nearly any OTC drug that can be used to form a deadly cocktail).

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It’s fair to ask why cyanide was for sale in the first place, given there is no reasonable common use for it. But this was likely sold through a loophole by the third party operator using Amazon to sell its own products.

This still doesn’t make them culpable, in my eyes, for a suicidal person who kills herself. She’d very likely have found another way, especially since purchasing cyanide a full two months prior to using it shows a level of planning.

While I sympathize with the Singh family (suicide has impacted my life with a close friend killing himself when I was in college), I feel like we should heighten the long overdue crisis of mental health and work towards suicide prevention because you won’t be able to stop someone intent on killing themselves without addressing the root cause of why they’re committing such a tragic act.