This is your Twitter on drugs: Any questions?

Cody Buntain, Jennifer Golbeck

Abstract: Twitter can be a rich source of information when one wants to monitor trends related to a given topic. In this paper, we look at how tweets can augment a public health program that studies emerging patterns of illicit drug use. We describe the architecture necessary to collect vast numbers of tweets over time based on a large number of search terms and the challenges that come with finding relevant information in the collected tweets. We then show several examples of early analysis we have done on this data, examining temporal and geospatial trends.