Patterns of Routes of Administration and Drug Tampering for Nonmedical Opioid Consumption: Data Mining and Content Analysis of Reddit Discussions

TL;DR

This study analyzes Reddit discussions to uncover patterns in nonmedical opioid use, focusing on routes of administration and drug tampering, revealing trends and risky behaviors to inform public health strategies.

Contribution

It introduces a novel data mining and content analysis methodology using word embeddings to characterize nonmedical opioid consumption patterns from social media data.

Findings

Identified over 86,000 Reddit users discussing opioid use.

Detected increasing trends in synthetic opioids like fentanyl.

Found evidence of understudied abuse behaviors such as chewing fentanyl patches.

Abstract

The complex unfolding of the US opioid epidemic in the last 20 years has been the subject of a large body of medical and pharmacological research, and it has sparked a multidisciplinary discussion on how to implement interventions and policies to effectively control its impact on public health. This study leverages Reddit as the primary data source to investigate the opioid crisis. We aimed to find a large cohort of Reddit users interested in discussing the use of opioids, trace the temporal evolution of their interest, and extensively characterize patterns of the nonmedical consumption of opioids, with a focus on routes of administration and drug tampering. We used a semiautomatic information retrieval algorithm to identify subreddits discussing nonmedical opioid consumption, finding over 86,000 Reddit users potentially involved in firsthand opioid usage. We developed a methodology based on word embedding to select alternative colloquial and nonmedical terms referring to opioid substances, routes of administration, and drug-tampering methods. We modeled the preferences of adoption of substances and routes of administration, estimating their prevalence and temporal unfolding, observing relevant trends such as the surge in synthetic opioids like fentanyl and an increasing interest in rectal administration. Ultimately, through the evaluation of odds ratios based on co-mentions, we measured the strength of association between opioid substances, routes of administration, and drug tampering, finding evidence of understudied abusive behaviors like chewing fentanyl patches and dissolving buprenorphine sublingually. We believe that our approach may provide a novel perspective for a more comprehensive understanding of nonmedical abuse of opioids substances and inform the prevention, treatment, and control of the public health effects.