The Current Scenario

Opioids have been a major contributor to deaths and most importantly drug related deaths. What is the current situation opioids? How has it impacted lives? How do people feel about opioids, and what are the current statistics for this issue?

About 4 years ago, a reddit post on opioids gained a lot of attention. The discussion forum provided people to express their views and experiences about Opioids and how the drug(s) played a role or impacted their lives in any given way.

Below is a sentiment analysis for this particular reddit post, subreddits and over 18,000 comments for an issue which is clearly growing at an alarming rate.

The word cloud visualization displays the 200 most frequently occurring words in the reddit comment section. We see words such as "USE", "ADDICT", "HELP", "DOCTOR", "SUBMIT", "NEED", "PROBLEM" ,etc occurring very frequently which speaks volumes about how people feel.

Using the libraries present in R, a sentiment analysis was performed on these comments. We captured 6 major sentiments namely - Trust, Surprise, Sadness, Joy, Fear, Disgust, Anticipation and Anger.

The sentiment analysis captures the the sentiment of each sentence in the comment section.

Although we see that TRUST and ANTICIPATION are the 2 most commonly occurring sentiments. The total occurrence of negative sentiments, i.e, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, Anticipation and Anger trump the occurrence of positive sentiments - Trust and Joy.

Millions of people were driven from OxyContin to Heroin, but the true horror of the opioid crisis happened when fentanyl entered the market in 2014. Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid about 50 times stronger the Heroin. 2mg of this drug could be fatal.

Its Fentanyl and other synthetic opioids that have triggered the astronomical spike in overdose deaths in the United States of America.

Purdue Pharma is being sued by over 200 American cities and counties for its part in creating the crisis. Purdue has agreed to settle in 2019 and filed for bankruptcy. But thats a small conciliation for the victims in the battle of drugs.