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AbstractCannabis-related tweets were collected between January and April 2022 to estimate the availability and characteristics of cannabis products advertised on Twitter amid the legalization of recreational cannabis in Thailand. The Twitter API was called using the tweepy Python library to collect cannabis-related tweets in the Thai language. A total of 185,558 unique tweets were collected over the duration of the data collection period based on 83 search terms. Twenty thousand random tweets were manually coded by four Thai native speakers to assess the volume and characteristics of tweets proposing cannabis. 72.6% of collected tweets from the 20,000 random samples were coded as relevant to the study. 54.6% of relevant tweets were advertising cannabis products, 29.8% were personal communications, and 15.6% were related to news or media content. Among the tweets that advertised cannabis products, 94.4% proposed cannabis flower, 2.4% cannabis edibles and 1.8% cannabis concentrates. Consumption of potent forms of cannabis such as cannabis edibles and concentrates increase the risk of harmful side-effects, especially in a population with limited knowledge about these products. Our findings call for additional monitoring efforts and for increasing the public awareness on potent cannabis products emerging in Thailand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 2018 to 2021, seizures of counterfeit oxycodone pills containing non-pharmaceutical fentanyl or other novel synthetic opioids increased significantly contributing to continuing increases in overdose mortality in Northern America. Evidence suggests that counterfeit pills are distributed through cryptomarkets. This article presents data regarding the availability and characteristics of oxycodone pills advertised on one major cryptomarket between January and March 2022. Collected data were processed using a dedicated Named Entity Recognition algorithm to identify oxycodone listings and categorized them as either counterfeit or pharmaceutical. Frequency of listings, average number of pills advertised, average prices per milligram, number of sales, and geographic indicators of shipment origin and destination were analyzed. In total, 2,665 listings were identified as oxycodone. 48.2% (1,285/2,665) of these listings were categorized as counterfeit oxycodone, advertising a total of 652,699 pills (93,242.7 pills per datapoint) offered at a lower price than pharmaceutical pills. Our data indicate the presence of a large volume of counterfeit oxycodone pills both in retail- and wholesale-level amounts mostly targeting US and Canadian customers. These exploratory findings call for more research to develop epidemiological surveillance systems to track counterfeit pill and other drug availability on the Dark web environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Domestic secondhand smoke endangers the health of children. Nevertheless, this behavior persists in Indonesia, where up to 72% of men smoke in homes despite national intervention efforts to reduce such behavior. This qualitative exploratory research focused on why young Indonesian fathers continue to smoke cigarettes at home despite knowing about the dangers of secondhand smoke by investigating the influence of masculinity on their choices. Thirty young fathers, all active smokers, were recruited for semi-structured in-depth qualitative interviews. The process of coding data from grounded theory was used to interpret collected data, although grounded theory itself was not the theoretical framework used by this research. Findings indicate that smoking is essential to Indonesia's socially constructed image of masculinity. Toxic masculinity was observed throughout the participants' smoking trajectory, expressing itself through the stigmatization of non-smokers, display of financial success through expensive cigarettes, and health risk-taking. Low trust in official health messages and the use of neutralization techniques to justify their smoking behavior drive young fathers to continue smoking. Participants appear to have adopted a variation of toxic masculinity by creating strategies to conciliate the role of a caring father and the part of a man who smokes cigarettes. By being able to legitimize their smoking continuation, participants unintentionally maintain the cycle of male smoking in which children witness older men smoking and link tobacco smoking with masculinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: "Rosin tech" is an emerging solventless method consisting in applying moderate heat and constant pressure on marijuana flowers to prepare marijuana concentrates referred to as "rosin." This paper explores rosin concentrate-related Twitter data to describe tweet content and analyze differences in rosin-related tweeting across states with varying cannabis legal statuses.Method: English language tweets were collected between March 15, 2015 and April 17, 2017, using Twitter API. U.S. geolocated unique (no retweets) tweets were manually coded to evaluate the content of rosin-related tweets. Adjusted proportions of Twitter users and personal communication tweets per state related to rosin concentrates were calculated. A permutation test was used to analyze differences in normalized proportions between U.S. states with different cannabis legal statuses.Results: eDrugTrends collected 8389 tweets mentioning rosin concentrates/technique. 4164 tweets (49.6% of total sample) posted by 1264 unique users had identifiable state-level geolocation. Content analysis of 2010 non-retweeted tweets revealed a high proportion of media-related tweets (44.2%) promoting rosin as a safer and solventless production method. Tweet-volume-adjusted percentages of geolocated Twitter users and personal communication tweets about rosin were respectively up to seven and sixteen times higher between states allowing recreational use of cannabis and states where cannabis is illegal.Conclusion: Our results indicate that there are higher proportions of personal communication tweets and Twitter users tweeting about rosin in U.S. states where cannabis is legalized. Rosin concentrates are advertised as a safer, more natural form of concentrates, but more research on this emerging form of marijuana concentrate is needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Twitter data offer new possibilities for tracking health-related communications. This study is among the first to apply advanced information processing to identify geographic and content features of cannabis-related tweeting in the United States.Method: Tweets were collected using streaming Application Programming Interface (March-May 2016) and were processed by eDrugTrends to identify geolocation and classify content by source (personal communication, media, retail) and sentiment (positive, negative, neutral). States were grouped by cannabis legalization policies into "recreational," "medical, less restrictive," "medical, more restrictive," and "illegal." Permutation tests were performed to analyze differences among four groups in adjusted percentages of all tweets, unique users, personal communications only, and positive-to-negative sentiment ratios.Results: About 30% of all 13,233,837 cannabis-related tweets had identifiable state-level geo-information. Among geolocated tweets, 76.2% were personal communications, 21.1% media, and 2.7% retail. About 71% of personal communication tweets expressed positive sentiment toward cannabis; 16% expressed negative sentiment. States in the recreational group had significantly greater average adjusted percentage of cannabis tweets (3.01%) compared with other groups. For personal communication tweets only, the recreational group (2.47%) was significantly greater than the medical, more restrictive (1.84%) and illegal (1.85%) groups. Similarly, the recreational group had significantly greater average positive-to-negative sentiment ratio (4.64) compared with the medical, more restrictive (4.15) and illegal (4.19) groups. Average adjusted percentages of unique users showed similar differences between recreational and other groups.Conclusions: States with less restrictive policies displayed greater cannabis-related tweeting and conveyed more positive sentiment. The study demonstrates the potential of Twitter data to become a valuable indicator of drug-related communications in the context of varying policy environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Novel synthetic opioids are fueling the overdose deaths epidemic in North America.Recently, non-fentanyl novel synthetic opioids have emerged in forensic toxicological results. Cryptomarkets have become important platforms of distribution for illicit substances. This article presents the data concerning the availability trends of novel non-fentanyl synthetic opioids listed on one cryptomarket.Methods: Listings from the EmpireMarket cryptomarket "Opiates" section were collected between June 2020 and August 2020. Collected data were processed using eDarkTrends Named Entity Recognition algorithm to identify novel synthetic opioids, and to analyze their availability trends in terms of frequency of listings, available average weights, average prices, quantity sold, and geographic indicators of shipment origin and destination information.Results: 35,196 opioid-related listings were collected through 12 crawling sessions. 17 nonfentanyl novel synthetic opioids were identified in 2.9 % of the collected listings for an average of 9.2 kg of substance available at each data point. 587 items advertised as non-fentanyl novel synthetic opioids were sold on EmpireMarket for a total weight of between 858 g and 2.7 kg during the study period. 45.5 % of these listings were advertised as shipped from China.Conclusions: Fourteen of the 17 non-fentanyl novel synthetic opioids were identified for the first time on one large cryptomarket suggesting a shift in terms of novel non-fentanyl synthetic opioids availability. This increased heterogeneity of available novel synthetic opioids could reduce the efficiency of existing overdose prevention strategies. Identification of new opioids underpins the value of cryptomarket data for early warning systems of emerging substance use trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims: The purpose of this paper is to analyze characteristics of marijuana concentrate users, describe patterns and reasons of use, and identify factors associated with daily use of concentrates among U.S.-based cannabis users recruited via a Twitter-based online survey.Methods: An anonymous Web-based survey was conducted in June 2017 with 687 U.S.-based cannabis users recruited via Twitter-based ads. The survey included questions about state of residence, socio-demographic characteristics, and cannabis use including marijuana concentrates. Multiple logistic regression analyses were conducted to identify characteristics associated with lifetime and daily use of marijuana concentrates.Results: Almost 60% of respondents were male, 86% were white, and the mean age was 43.0 years. About 48% reported marijuana concentrate use. After adjusting for multiple testing, significant predictors of concentrate use included: living in "recreational" (AOR = 2.04; adj. p = .042) or "medical, less restrictive" (AOR = 1.74; adj. p = .030) states, being younger (AOR = 0.97, adj. p = .008), and daily herbal cannabis use (AOR = 2.57, adj. p = .008). Out of 329 marijuana concentrate users, about 13% (n = 44) reported daily/near daily use. Significant predictors of daily concentrate use included: living in recreational states (AOR = 3.59, adj. p = .020) and using concentrates for therapeutic purposes (AOR = 4.34, adj. p = .020).Conclusions: Living in states with more liberal marijuana policies is associated with greater likelihood of marijuana concentrate use and with more frequent use. Characteristics of daily users, in particular, patterns of therapeutic use warrant further research with community-recruited samples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims: Media reports suggest increasing popularity of marijuana concentrates ("dabs"; "earwax"; "budder"; "shatter; "butane hash oil") that are typically vaporized and inhaled via a bong, vaporizer or electronic cigarette. However, data on the epidemiology of marijuana concentrate use remain limited. This study aims to explore Twitter data on marijuana concentrate use in the U.S. and identify differences across regions of the country with varying cannabis legalization policies.Methods: Tweets were collected between October 20 and December 20, 2014, using Twitter's streaming API. Twitter data filtering framework was available through the eDrugTrends platform. Raw and adjusted percentages of dabs-related tweets per state were calculated. A permutation test was used to examine differences in the adjusted percentages of dabs-related tweets among U.S. states with different cannabis legalization policies.Results: eDrugTrends collected a total of 125,255 tweets. Almost 22% (n=27,018) of these tweets contained identifiable state-level geolocation information. Dabs-related tweet volume for each state was adjusted using a general sample of tweets to account for different levels of overall tweeting activity for each state. Adjusted percentages of dabs-related tweets were highest in states that allowed recreational and/or medicinal cannabis use and lowest in states that have not passed medical cannabis use laws. The differences were statistically significant.Conclusions: Twitter data suggest greater popularity of dabs in the states that legalized recreational and/or medical use of cannabis. The study provides new information on the epidemiology of marijuana concentrate use and contributes to the emerging field of social media analysis for drug abuse research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]