Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2022 Nov 29;32(6):939-941.
doi: 10.1093/eurpub/ckac161.

Evidence of the emergence of illicit benzodiazepines from online drug forums

Abeed Sarker  1 , Mohammed Ali Al-Garadi  1   2 , Yao Ge  1 , Nisha Nataraj  3 , Londell McGlone  3 , Christopher M Jones  3 , Steven A Sumner  3
Affiliations

Evidence of the emergence of illicit benzodiazepines from online drug forums

Abeed Sarker et al. Eur J Public Health. .

Abstract

Illicit or 'designer' benzodiazepines are a growing contributor to overdose deaths. We employed natural language processing (NLP) to study benzodiazepine mentions over 10 years on 270 online drug forums (subreddits) on Reddit. Using NLP, we automatically detected mentions of illicit and prescription benzodiazepines, including their misspellings and non-standard names, grouping relative mentions by quarter. On a collection of 17 861 755 posts between 2012 and 2021, we searched for 26 benzodiazepines (8 prescription; 18 illicit), detecting 173 275 mentions. The rate of posts about both prescription and illicit benzodiazepines increased consistently with increases in deaths involving both drug classes, illustrating the utility of surveillance via Reddit.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
(a) Quarterly rates of mentions for prescription and illicit benzodiazepines. (b) Percentage of illicit benzodiazepines among all benzodiazepine mentions by quarter
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

References

    1. Votaw VR, Geyer R, Rieselbach MM, McHugh RK.. The epidemiology of benzodiazepine misuse: systematic review. Drug Alcohol Depend 2019;200:95–114. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Maust DT, Lin LA, Blow FC.. Benzodiazepine use and misuse among adults in the United States. Psychiatr Serv 2019;70:97–106. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Runnstrom M, Kalra SS, Lascano J, Patel DC.. Overdose from designer benzodiazepine diclazepam. QJM 2020;113:122–4. - PubMed
    1. Liu S, O'Donnell J, Gladden RM, et al.Trends in nonfatal and fatal overdoses involving benzodiazepines—38 states and the District of Columbia, 2019–2020. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep 2021;70:1136–41. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Ha HH, Mata DC.. Flualprazolam distribution in postmortem samples. J Forensic Sci 2022;67:297–308. - PubMed

Publication types

Substances

Grants and funding