Leveraging Large Language Models for Multi-Class and Multi-Label Detection of Drug Use and Overdose Symptoms on Social Media

Abstract

Drug overdose remains a critical global health issue, often driven by misuse of opioids, painkillers, and psychiatric medications. Traditional research methods face limitations, whereas social media offers real-time insights into self-reported substance use and overdose symptoms. This study proposes an AI-driven NLP framework trained on annotated social media data to detect commonly used drugs and associated overdose symptoms. Using a hybrid annotation strategy with LLMs and human annotators, we applied traditional ML models, neural networks, and advanced transformer-based models. Our framework achieved 98% accuracy in multi-class and 97% in multi-label classification, outperforming baseline models by up to 8%. These findings highlight the potential of AI for supporting public health surveillance and personalized intervention strategies.