The Cutprice Guignol

Please note this article will contain explicit discussion of drug and alcohol abuse.

In Phoenix, Arizona, on the evening of 11th January 2003, Brandon Carl Vedas sat down in his bedroom, switched on his webcam, and livestreamed his own fatal overdose.

The night started like any other for Vedas, then 21; at around 4pm, with his mother doing crosswords in the room next door, he logged in to an online chat service, IRC, under the username ripper, and invited members of the chat to watch him on livestream in a private room. He told the chat that he had “a grip of drugs” – when the stream started, he already claimed to be on 80mg of methadone, 8mg of klonopin, and several Vicodin pills. He showed off the drugs he had acquired for the evening ahead, a mixture of illicit and prescription substances which Vedas claimed to have come by for his ongoing medical issues: propanolol, more Vicodin, benzodiazepines, psychedelic mushrooms, and several bottles of methadone. Reactions in the chat ranged from incredulity (“you’re making drugs up!” accused one user), disdain (“your [sic] fucking nuts ripper”), and outright concern. One user remarked, early in the evening, “damn if you die you fucking bitch I am going to feel so bad”, though Vedas insisted that he knew what he was doing, describing his drug haul as the beginning of “a weekend of fun”. While logs of any previous streams or chats aren’t accessible any longer, a couple of users in the chat made flippant references to Vedas’ apparent history with deliberately reckless drug use, with one remarking that the stream that night was just “attempted suicide #84”.

Over the course of the next hour or so, ripper would begin to consume the various drugs he had acquired while the chat bantered about drugs, sex, and other topics. However, as the evening drew on, a few members of the chat began to express concern at the sheer amount that ripper was consuming. Once he had taken an additional 80mg of methadone and mentioned consuming 151 (a highly-potent alcohol which contains almost double the amount of alcohol by volume as compared to standard liquor), one user suggested that he give them his cell phone number in case something went wrong. Less than an hour after the IRC log began, Vedas remarked that he had taken a total of 320mg of methadone, a synthetic opiate used in pharmacology for the management of opiate addiction which can cause lethal respiratory depression in high doses. While the fatal dose for methadone varies based on the user’s prior tolerance, estimates put the average for an opiate-experienced adult, such as Vedas, at between 120-200mg.

Users became more agitated as the stream went on, insisting that Vedas call poison control or attend a hospital, fearing for his life after such a dangerous dose of methadone. Vedas insisted that he was capable of handling the drugs, telling the chat they were “so fucking stupid” and boasting “i told u i was hardcore”. At 5.04pm, Vedas sent his final message to the chat, and what follows is the panicked debate of those still watching his stream. Several users tried to encourage Vedas to throw up before the methadone digested, suggesting that he swallow raw eggs until he vomited up everything in his stomach. One of the chat members called him and spoke with him briefly, only to lose contact with him soon afterwards, and, on the stream, he seemed to have become unresponsive. With little information to go on, users contacted emergency services, but were unable to locate him with just a cell phone number. At around 5.45pm, the livestream went dark. A few more messages were exchanged between the remaining members of the chat before it was closed off:

[05:48] <theKat> you will never know if he died unless he get back on here
[05:49] <grphish> i know
[05:49] <grphish> thats kinda freaky
[05:49] <hast> yeah
[05:49] <theKat> oh well
[05:49] <hast> then all the logs get to be analyzed
[05:49] <hast> and we all get to be investigated
[05:50] <grphish> oh shit
[05:50] <Pnutbot> shit is going to hit the fan soon

The next day, on 12th January, 2003, Vedas’ mother found him dead from an overdose in his room. His obituary noted “whether online or in person, Brandon had his own unique way of doing things…Brandon will always be remembered by his family, friends, and the online communities he was involved with”, something which has, in the two decades since his death, proved true. Vedas’ livestreamed overdose has become a part of internet history, though the stream itself, mercifully, has been lost. While you might imagine that the event has primarily survived as a morbid warning against the dangers of substance abuse and the internet, the last few years have proved otherwise – and that the overlap of substance abuse and livestreaming has only grown more concerning in the years since Vedas’ death.

As social media has allowed a more intimate view into the lives of content creators, it has brought along with it a first-hand look into the substance abuse that plagues so many. Many prominent so-called “lolcows” (internet personalities who generally develop a following for their outrageous, offensive, or infuriating behaviour rather than a more traditional fandom) become notorious for their alcohol or drug-fuelled antics, such as Josh Saunders, who went by the handle KingCobraJFS; his livestreams, in which he would often become belligerently drunk, were the backbone of his content, with compilations made of his recurring promises to cut back on his drinking that would inevitably go unrealised. He described himself as a “high-functioning alcoholic”, and, after nearly fourteen years producing content, he passed away in 2025 at the age of 34, at least in part due to complications from his alcohol abuse. More recently, a TikTok user Angie Tonachio began chronicling her “fifty-day bender” in the lead-up to her college graduation in June 2026, posting videos of her daily heavy drinking sessions – while she earned a significant amount of criticism for her series, she surpassed 50,000 followers during this period, a huge leap from the 20,000 or so she’d celebrated the year before.

But even beyond the more incidental inclusion of substance abuse in online content, some platforms have seen an uptick of users actively using drug and alcohol use as a way to attract viewers and donations. JoeyBdez, for example, a creator who began his TikTok career in 2020, regularly streamed holding a whiteboard with a list of the various alcoholic beverages he had available to him, along with his CashApp and Venmo, which viewers could donate to in order to see him take another shot. Operation Hangover, a channel run by a man called Dave, took a similar approach to earning donations, with him and his partner Carla charging viewers between $5-15 per shot taken on livestream. In December 2022, however, after a particularly heavy night during which Dave been paid to down Four Loko, a notoriously strong alcoholic beverage, on livestream, he stopped breathing, leaving Carla to call paramedics in an attempt to save his life. As the stream continued to broadcast to nearly 300 people, paramedics tried to revive Dave while Carla sobbed in the background. The livestream ended with an unidentified family member screaming “he’s dead, Carla!” after Dave succumbed to alcohol poisoning. JoeyBdez, by then going under the moniker The Eating Hour, announced shortly after Dave’s death was confirmed that he’d be doing a drinking live that night and sending the proceeds to Dave’s family.

TikTok is, of course, not the only platform with these issues – Spanish streamer Sergio Jiménez, who rose to prominence on Twitch and Kick, died just a few months ago at the age of 37 during a private New Year’s Eve stream where he had snorted around 6 grams of cocaine and consumed a large amount of alcohol in exchange for money. As reported on 22nd May 2023, a user going by the name Brother3000 on the Chinese livestreaming platform Douyin partook in one of the community’s popular “drinking battles”, wherein personalities would compete to earn the highest amount of gifts from viewers in a short space of time – Brother3000, having lost several in a single night, drank at least three bottles of Baiju, a Chinese liquor that contains around 60% alcohol. His family found him the following afternoon. Within weeks, in early June of the same year, another Douyin creator, Zhong Yuan Huang Ge, died after performing a similar challenge, with his wife revealing after his death that he was attempting to clear his debts with his excessive alcohol consumption online.

Most platforms, of course, have rules in place regarding the consumption and promotion of alcohol – on TikTok, “portrayal of excessive drinking, intoxication, or reckless behavior under the influence of alcohol” is restricted, and Douyin banned Brother3000’s accounts several times due to his excessive drinking, but he simply remade them and continued till his eventual death. Despite this, there seems to be a certain market cornered for those willing to use and abuse substances online – but where exactly does the responsibility for extreme harm and even death lie when they take place in front of a live audience?

After Brandon Vedas’ death, his brother expressed desire to bring a case against the anonymous users in the chat who watched Vedas consume his fatal cocktail, though I couldn’t find any record of the case actually being put into motion, and , following the passing of Dave of Operation Hangover, some users debated the culpability of those who had “purchased” the alcohol during the livestream that led to his death. It could be argued that the financial incentive in such cases amounts to coercion, and I really do believe that those choosing not just to fund such behaviour but to actively pay to watch it unfold are morally dubious at best and downright exploitative of a person struggling with a destructive disorder at worst. To be honest, as someone who has dealt with my fair share of substance abuse issues over the years, I feel like assigning complete blame, either legally or morally, to those watching edges into some questionable territory; when substance abuse becomes an issue, it’s more than likely due to underlying mental health problems, and that should be the main focal point of trying to treat and manage such concerns.

But with that said, it’s impossible not to see the connection between mental health issues, substance abuse, and poverty as a profoundly dangerous combination that drives some of the more extreme examples of this behaviour online – Substance Use Disorder is more likely to affect people living in poverty, and often causes financial strain in and of itself as a result of the pursuit of substances to satisfy the growing addiction. With financial instability and substance abuse being so intimately connected, the potential to make money directly from the substance abuse in question is a profoundly dangerous lure, and perhaps the tragic outcomes I’ve covered in this article were, in some ways, grimly inevitable.

When Brandon Vedas died in 2003, his fatal overdose was viewed by somewhere in the realm of a dozen people – but in the years since, the number of viewers tuning in to watch and even actively pay online content creators to engage in substance abuse has swelled into the thousands, and shows no signs of slowing down. This is a subject I’d love to hear your opinion on, especially with regards to culpability for either the viewers, those offering donations, or the platforms they’re hosted on, so please let me know in the comments below.

If you’d like to support my blog, please consider dropping me a tip via my Support page. You can check out my other longform writing here, or, if you’d like more articles like this one, here are some specific pieces on the internet, technology, and culture here:

“In The End, I Watched Him Go”: The Criminal Case of Suicide-Baiting via Internet

The Sex Slave, the BDSM Blog, and the Murder: A Deep Dive into the Delia Day Case

The Suicide and the Chatbot: The Rise and Risks of AI-Human Relationships

Autassasinophilia, Fetish Forums, and the Early Internet: The Murder of Sharon Lopatka

The Surgeon, the Eunuch Maker, and the Curious Ethical and Legal Status of Voluntary Amputation

Sources

Brandon Vedas Chat Logs 1 – 2