


At 22, he tried to quit opioids using other drugs, although three years later, after a family intervention, he entered a formal methadone program, which uses a lower grade narcotic to wean users off harder drugs. “We wanted to unearth the things the doctors didn’t even know about,” said Chancellor.Ĭhancellor was surprised, but the approach is common on the forums, though sometimes discouraged by moderators and other users: People may use alcohol, cannabis, and heavier drugs to quell withdrawal symptoms. The researchers say that drug forums on the dark net-a catch-all for internet hubs that are often encrypted or unavailable through regular search engines-along with more mainstream counterparts like Bluelight and drug-related threads on the website Reddit, might be a medical or research tool in their own right.įor instance, in research published this past spring, Stevie Chancellor, a postdoctoral fellow in computer science at Northwestern University, used computational linguistics and machine learning-a subset of artificial intelligence-to find how forum-goers on Reddit attempt to get sober. As the opioid epidemic worsens, claiming about 130 lives a day in 2018 in the United States alone, a cadre of researchers is looking for solutions to addiction and overdoses in the sprawl of drug forums. Today, these threads aren’t just of interest to the site’s users.
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He read post after post-innumerable lines of text and images about the substances he was taking, how to take them safely, and how to quit. As a teenager, Le Blanc came across, a drug forum now more than 20 years old.
