{"id":763,"date":"2013-07-28T08:41:08","date_gmt":"2013-07-28T12:41:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/?p=763"},"modified":"2017-07-28T09:09:47","modified_gmt":"2017-07-28T13:09:47","slug":"ferreting-illicit-drug-data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/2013\/07\/ferreting-illicit-drug-data\/","title":{"rendered":"Ferreting Out Illicit Drug Data"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"drug-data\"<\/a>In recent years, recreational drug use has become particularly dicey, as young people turn to surprising new sources for a fix. After swallowing, snorting, smoking, or injecting drugs that turned out to be mephendrone\u2014known colloquially as bath salts\u2014some users even have died. More recently, synthetic marijuana, known as Spice, K2, and Mojo, has been linked to a handful of teen deaths and more than 10,000 hospitalizations in the United States alone. Experts contend that as many as one novel unidentified drug a week enters the global marketplace.<\/p>\n

Conventional data-collection surveys\u2014which rely largely on honest self-reporting and sometimes take up to a year to conduct\u2014 are proving ineffective at providing health workers with a quick, clear picture of who is using what, and where. \u201cIt\u2019s a major problem,\u201d says Mark Dredze<\/a>, an assistant research professor in Hopkins\u2019 Department of Computer Science<\/a>. \u201cA person comes into the emergency room overdosing, and you have no idea what they are taking. They don\u2019t know what they are taking.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what happened to 16-year-old Emily Bauer of Cypress, Texas, who bought \u201cpotpourri,\u201d or synthetic marijuana, from a local gas station and smoked it at a party. She ended up on a breathing tube and nearly died. Chase Burnett, a 16-year-old from Georgia, wasn\u2019t as fortunate. He drowned in the family hot tub after smoking \u201cMojo Diamond EXTREME.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s been a complete and utter mess trying to figure out what is going on,\u201d Dredze says.<\/p>\n

Dredze and PhD researcher Michael J. Paul, MS \u201912, who have pioneered the use of sophisticated computer algorithms to mine social media sites for infectious diseases such as the flu, are close to filling gaps in much needed knowledge.<\/p>\n

The team has developed a computer algorithm that ferrets out valuable information about illicit drug use. Using sophisticated natural language processing and machine learning, it crawls public posts in discussion forums to find associations between words that represent new drugs, uptake methods (such as snorting, sniffing, or smoking), and other aspects such as health impacts.<\/p>\n

The goal: to provide doctors, policymakers, drug enforcement officials, and even drug users themselves with valuable, real-time information about the dangers of new chemical concoctions.<\/p>\n

Their recent conference paper analyzed more than 400,000 public posts on drugforum.com about 22 new drugs, focusing on five emerging drugs that included bath salts and salvia. Some findings: Bath salts were linked to dehydration, teeth grinding, sweating, hot flashes, anxiety and paranoia, elevated heart rates and blood pressure, chest pain, and itchy rashes. Salvia, on the other hand, was linked to intense hallucinatory effects\u2014including weird thoughts, feelings of unreality, bizarre non- Euclidian dimensions\/geometrics, and feelings of floating.<\/p>\n

A federal law, passed quickly in July 2012, is trying to curb use of these dangerous substances, but drug enforcement officials report continued use.<\/p>\n

Next up: The team is working with addiction research faculty in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the School of Medicine to track new drugs in real time. Dredze says: \u201cThe pie-in-the-sky hope is that we will be able to identify a new drug within a month of its being introduced, identify what it is, who is taking it, and what the health hazards are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hopkins engineers have developed a computer algorithm to provide doctors, policymakers, and law enforcement, real-time information about the dangers of new chemical concoctions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-ideas","issue-summer-2013"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nFerreting Out Illicit Drug Data - JHU Engineering Magazine<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/2013\/07\/ferreting-illicit-drug-data\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Ferreting Out Illicit Drug Data - 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