# Redditors in Recovery: Text Mining Reddit to Investigate Transitions into Drug Addiction

## TL;DR

This paper uses text mining on Reddit data to predict transitions from casual drug discussion to recovery, revealing linguistic and drug-related indicators that can help address the opioid crisis.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel approach combining classifiers and survival analysis to predict drug addiction transitions from online forum data.

## Key findings

- Certain drugs are linked to higher transition rates.
- Linguistic features can predict user transitions.
- Tools developed may aid in combating opioid abuse.

## Abstract

Increasing rates of opioid drug abuse and heightened prevalence of online support communities underscore the necessity of employing data mining techniques to better understand drug addiction using these rapidly developing online resources. In this work, we obtain data from Reddit, an online collection of forums, to gather insight into drug use/misuse using text data from users themselves. Specifically, using user posts, we trained 1) a binary classifier which predicts transitions from casual drug discussion forums to drug recovery forums and 2) a Cox regression model that outputs likelihoods of such transitions. In doing so, we found that utterances of select drugs and certain linguistic features contained in one's posts can help predict these transitions. Using unfiltered drug-related posts, our research delineates drugs that are associated with higher rates of transitions from recreational drug discussion to support/recovery discussion, offers insight into modern drug culture, and provides tools with potential applications in combating the opioid crisis.