Background: The complex unfolding of the US opioid epidemic in the last 20 years has been the subject of a large body of medical and pharmacological research, and it has sparked a multidisciplinary discussion on how to implement interventions and policies to effectively control its impact on public health.
Objective: This study leverages Reddit, a social media platform, as the primary data source to investigate the opioid crisis. We aimed to find a large cohort of Reddit users interested in discussing the use of opioids, trace the temporal evolution of their interest, and extensively characterize patterns of the nonmedical consumption of opioids, with a focus on routes of administration and drug tampering.