Mining Twitter to Assess the Perceptions of the Opioid Crisis

Opioid addiction has become one of the largest and deadliest epidemics in the United States. Opioids are a group of drugs that include illegal heroin and strong pain relievers by legal prescription, such as morphine and oxycodone. In this research, we plan to study opioids’ epidemic by analyzing online social media communities. Understanding the public perceptions and the addicted users’ experience of opioid addiction and misuse can help get insights to provide better opioids prevention, treatment, and recovery strategies. In this research, we plan to study opioids’ epidemic by analyzing recent tweets data for users who are addicted or non-addicted to opioid prescriptions. The goals of this study can be described along two general objectives that lead to the main contribution of the study. First, this study aims to help in facing the recent deadly opioids’ epidemic in the U.S. Second, this study aims to help in addressing the important question of how the daily posts and activities of online social media users can provide better opioids prevention, treatment, and recovery strategies; and strengthen the public health data reporting and collection for opioids epidemic. The main contribution of this study aims is to gain a better understanding of content related to opioids epidemic as represented on social media to inform the strategies and other public health efforts