Introduction to DOPE
DEA
This is a summary of the the drugs on the DEA website. It include drug class (i.e., stimulants, depressants, hallucinogens), categories (i.e., amphetamines, cocaine, barbiturates) and drug synonyms. Synonyms include brand/generic names (Adderall®, Vallium®, clonazepam) and street names (Apache, White Girl). Eventually the ontology needs to be expanded to add a grouping variable for related synonyms. For example, the generic clonazepam, the brand name Klonopin® and the street name k-pin all should be grouped with the general name clonazepam
Web Scrape
Two files, dea_factsheets.rda and dea_brands.rda, were created by scraping the “fact sheets” on the DEA website on September 10th 2020. The fact had 12 records added because the DEA slang file has additional “categories” (e.g., crack cocaine, mushrooms, PCP, etc.). These extra “categories” are problematic for the DEA ontology because they also include a specific brand name (i.e., ritalin) and two benzodiazepines (i.e., alprazolam, clonazepam). Eventually these need to be added as part of a “generic name” level in the ontology.
Fact Sheets
- dea_factsheets.rda (N = 29 records) has 10 drug classes and 29 categories (e.g., amphetamines, barbiturates, etc.). One extra class “benzodiazepine” was added because it is a grouping class in the DEA slang file.
| Class |
|---|
| cannabis |
| depressants |
| designer drugs |
| drugs of concern |
| hallucinogen |
| heroin |
| inhalant |
| narcotics (opioids) |
| steroids |
| stimulants |
Drug Brands
- dea_brands.rda (N = 28 records) has 8 drug categories (e.g., amphetamines, barbiturates, benzodiazepines, etc.) and 28 brands (e.g., Adderall®, Concerta®, etc.)
PDFs
Two pdfs, with slang1 and controlled substances2 were download and processed to make slang.rda and controlled.rda.
Slang
dea_street_names.rda (N = 1731 records) contains 26 drug categories and 3 brands (e.g., Klonopin, Percocet, Xanax).
- Note Percocet® is here as a category but it is not in the scraped files.
- Several extra categories are in the slang file including: Hydrocodone, Crack Cocaine, Marijana Concentrates, PCP and Promethazine with Codeine.
- Discrepancies, relative to the fact sheets, include psilocybin listed as Mushrooms, bath salts listed as Synthetic Cathinones, synthetic marijuana listed as Synthetic Cannabinoids.
- There are dpulicate terms (e.g., Ace, Alice, Azucar)
Controlled Substances
- dea_controlled.rda (N = 732 records) has these variables
substance: Chemical and/or brand namesnumber:schedule: I, II, III, IV or Vnarcotic: Y or Nsynonym: Chemical and/or brand names
Parsing the SUBSTANCES and names variables
will be very difficult because the delimiters between drugs are not at
all consistent.
DEA Summary
Figure 1 shows the DEA website drug ontology. Problematic entries shown with a red callout.
There are several things (in the black box) that need to be placed in the tree. Things with the red call out are inconsistencies.
No Slang
This is a summary of the the drugs on the no slang website.
Web Scrape
One file, noslang_street_names.rda , was created by scraping the Drug Slang Dictionary October 12th 2020.
- noslang_street_names.rda has 3216 drug related terms.
IQVIA
Additional drugs found while processing data from IQVIA. Thanks to Edward Nunes M.D. for providing notes on how to better classify these drugs. This data introduced new classes such as reversal agents and treatment drugs.
drug_stop_words.rda
This is a vector of drug-specific stop words that have been observed
while processing data from the aforementioned data sources. This vector
is primarily used with the parse() function and is used to
remove irrelevant words (i.e., “pills”, “syringe”) or strings such as
units or dosages of drugs (i.e., “mg”).