Police seized ketamine hidden inside life-size Transformer robots in Thailand. A woman who was previously caught trying to ship meth hidden in a food processing machine was trying to send the robots to Taiwan. Cambodian authorities on Friday destroyed more than seven tons of illicit drugs and the ingredients for them, as a drug-fighting official said educating people about their danger is the best way of combating the illegal trade. Some 4.1 tons of the destroyed items were drugs including heroin, marijuana, methamphetamine, ecstasy and ketamine that had been confiscated from traffickers across the country, the National Authority for Combating Drugs said. The remaining 3.2 tons were various chemicals and other ingredients used to produce illegal drugs, it said.

Opioid and substance misuse is rampant in the United States today, with the phenomenon known as the opioid crisis. The relationship between substance use and mental health has been extensively studied, with one possible relationship being substance misuse causes poor mental health. However, the lack of evidence on the relationship has resulted in opioids being largely inaccessible through legal means. This study analyzes the substance misuse posts on social media with the opioids being sold through crypto market listings. We use the Drug Abuse Ontology, state-of-the-art deep learning, and BERT-based models to generate sentiment and emotion for the social media posts to understand user perception on social media by investigating questions such as, which synthetic opioids people are optimistic, neutral, or negative about or what kind of drugs induced fear and sorrow or what kind of drugs people love or thankful about or which drug people think negatively about or which opioids cause little to no sentimental reaction. We also perform topic analysis associated with the generated sentiments and emotions to understand which topics correlate with people's responses to various drugs. Our findings can help shape policy to help isolate opioid use cases where timely intervention may be required to prevent adverse consequences, prevent overdose-related deaths, and worsen the epidemic.

Simi Valley police arrested a man who they say was operating a drone with a bag of heroin onboard. John Piani, 51, was taken into custody Friday in the 900 block of Enchanted Way on suspicion of selling heroin and methamphetamine, the police department said in a news release. During his arrest, investigators recovered a drone he was operating and found attached to it a bag of what is believed to be heroin, police said. The investigation is continuing to determine whether Piani was using the drone to sell drugs, police said. Piani was being held at the Ventura County Jail in lieu of $125,000 bail on suspicion of two counts of possessing a controlled substance for sale and one count of controlled substance possession, jail records state.

We describe two recently proposed machine learning approaches for discovering emerging trends in fatal accidental drug overdoses. The Gaussian Process Subset Scan enables early detection of emerging patterns in spatio-temporal data, accounting for both the non-iid nature of the data and the fact that detecting subtle patterns requires integration of information across multiple spatial areas and multiple time steps. We apply this approach to 17 years of county-aggregated data for monthly opioid overdose deaths in the New York City metropolitan area, showing clear advantages in the utility of discovered patterns as compared to typical anomaly detection approaches. To detect and characterize emerging overdose patterns that differentially affect a subpopulation of the data, including geographic, demographic, and behavioral patterns (e.g., which combinations of drugs are involved), we apply the Multidimensional Tensor Scan to 8 years of case-level overdose data from Allegheny County, PA. We discover previously unidentified overdose patterns which reveal unusual demographic clusters, show impacts of drug legislation, and demonstrate potential for early detection and targeted intervention. These approaches to early detection of overdose patterns can inform prevention and response efforts, as well as understanding the effects of policy changes.

San Diego Brayan Valle was looking to buy some marijuana. When he reached out to a business associate of his uncle's, a drug connection, Valle became involved in a much more serious -- and novel -- offense. Rather than sell him the marijuana, the associate asked for Valle's help to smuggle drugs over the U.S.-Mexico border by drone. The case signals the first drone drug-smuggling seizure along the Southwest border. On Thursday, Valle, now 21, was sentenced to three years in prison for his role in operating the drone remote control and loading up 30 pounds of heroin dropped into a Calexico-area field on April 28.