JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Opioid use disorder presents a public health issue afflicting millions across the globe. There is a pressing need to understand the opioid supply chain to gain new insights into the mitigation of opioid use and effectively combat the opioid crisis. The role of anonymous online marketplaces and forums that resemble eBay or Amazon, where anyone can post, browse, and purchase opioid commodities, has become more and more important in opioid trading. Therefore, a greater understanding of anonymous markets and forums may enable public health officials and other stakeholders to comprehend the scope of the crisis.

Objective:

The objective of this work is to profile the opioid supply chain in anonymous markets and forums via a large-scale, longitudinal measurement study on anonymous market listings and posts. Toward this, we propose a series of techniques to collect data, to identify opioid jargon terms used in the anonymous marketplaces and forums, and to profile the opioid commodities, suppliers, and transactions.

Methods:

We first conducted a whole-site crawl of anonymous online marketplaces and forums to solicit data. Then, we developed a suite of opioid domain-specific text mining techniques (e.g., opioid jargon detection, opioid trading information retrieval) to recognize information relevant to opioid trading activities (e.g., commodities, price, shipping information, suppliers, etc.). After that, we conducted a comprehensive, large-scale, longitudinal study to demystify opioid trading activities in anonymous markets and forums.

Results:

A total of 248,359 listings from 10 anonymous online marketplaces and 1,138,961 traces (i.e., threads of posts) from 6 underground forums were collected. Among them, we identified 28,106 opioid product listings and 13,508 opioid-related promotional and review forum traces from 5147 unique opioid suppliers’ IDs and 2778 unique opioid buyers’ IDs. Our study characterized opioid suppliers (e.g., activeness and cross-market activities), commodities (e.g., popular items and their evolution), and transactions (e.g., origins and shipping destination) in anonymous marketplaces and forums, which enabled a greater understanding of the underground trading activities involved in international opioid supply and demand.

Conclusions:

The results provide insight into opioid trading in the anonymous markets and forums, and may prove an effective mitigation data point for illuminating the opioid supply chain.