eDarkTrends: Harnessing Social Media Trends in Substance use disorders for Opioid Listings on Cryptomarket

Abstract

Opioid and substance misuse is rampant in the United States today, with the phenomenon known as the "opioid crisis". The relationship between substance use and mental health has been extensively studied, with one possible relationship being; substance misuse causes poor mental health. However, the lack of evidence on the relationship has resulted in opioids being largely inaccessible through legal means. This study analyzes the substance misuse posts on social media with the opioids being sold through cryptomarket listings. We use the Drug Abuse Ontology, state-of-the-art deep learning, and BERT-based models to generate sentiment and emotion for the social media posts to understand users' perception on social media by investigating questions such as: which synthetic opioids people are optimistic, neutral, or negative about? or what kind of drugs induced fear and sorrow? or what kind of drugs people love or thankful about? or which drug people think negatively about? or which opioids cause little to no sentimental reaction. We also perform topic analysis associated with the generated sentiments and emotions to understand which topics correlate with people's responses to various drugs. Our findings can help shape policy to help isolate opioid use cases where timely intervention may be required to prevent adverse consequences, prevent overdose-related deaths, and worsen the epidemic.