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Note that we should not overestimate the number of suppliers and buyers given the number of IDs found in this research, but we regarded it as the upper-bounded number of the opioid suppliers and buyers. This is because the same user could have different IDs, and the same ID in different marketplaces can point to different users. Owing to the anonymity of the underground marketplaces and forums, there exists no ground truth to link users with their IDs. The Drug Hub editorial team is made up of people who use(d) drugs, students, researchers, and healthcare professionals who work with marginalized and criminalized communities.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
We aimed 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; identify opioid jargon terms used in the anonymous marketplaces and forums; and profile the opioid commodities, suppliers, and transactions. We first conducted a whole-site crawl of anonymous online marketplaces and forums to solicit data. Our study used opioid keywords and jargons to recognize listings and forum traces related to underground opioid trading activities. Our opioid jargon identification procedure implemented a modified semantic comparison model [19].<\/p>\n<\/p>\n