Its time for click. This week a crisis sweeping america, a Public Health emergency. Can Technology Help prevent drug overdoses and fight the Opioid Epidemic . Police radio a request for an ambulance at manchester. Its a shell gas station. The patient is in the bathroom, he has overdosed. A 35 year old male, he is not conscious, he is not breathing, overdose. America is facing the worst Public Health crisis in its history. Its a horseman of the apocalypse, and its the one named death. 70,000 of its citizens are dying every year from drug overdoses. Im not doing nothing except sticking a needle in my arm, every day, all day long. Its a waste of everything. Around three quarters of those are the results of opioid addiction. It is the number one killer of americans under 50 and it has reduced the average life expectancy. We go out on these types of crawls over and over and over again, all day long. Can you get up . By the end of this programme, three lives will have been lost due to opioid overdoses. Its a crisis widely blamed on the over prescribing of pain medication. The addictive nature of which has left many of those turning to the street when their prescription dries up. I was 16 years old and got my wisdom teeth out. And they prescribed vicodin, and i was like, what is this miracle . These things are amazing. In the end, i ended up being an everyday user. Now synthetic opiods like fentanyl, 50 times strong than heroin, and carfentanyl, which can be thousands of times stronger, are being imported in bulk from china and cut in with heroin. Its not heroin thats killing our people, its fentanyl. Its an issue affecting every corner of society. Layla, wake up. Again, fentanyl, driving up into new hampshire, to pollute our communities. President trump has declared it a national Public Health emergency. We will end this terrible menace. We will smash the grip of addiction. Last year, the food and Drug Administration and congress pointed the finger at the tech giants for fuelling the epidemic by not removing adverts for the illicit sale of opioids on their platforms. America is in the middle of one of the worst epidemics it has ever experienced, with this drug epidemic, but your platform is still being used to circumvent the law and allow people to buy highly addictive drugs without a prescription. What we need to do was build more ai tools that can proactively. You said before you would take them down, and you havent. The gentlemans time is expired. Well, his questioning was up, but weve got a whole programme. And we have given nick the whole show to investigate this. Ive spent the last few months looking at this hugely pressing issue which is sweeping america, but what is important is it isnt just an american issue. We are beginning to see the full extent of this here in the uk on our shores, where one quarter of us are being prescribed potentially addictive medication. But in the states, i wanted to look at whether Technology Companies are really contributing to the recent rise in opiod overdoses, or, as Technology Companies, if their inherent nimbleness and ability to innovate, could provide a solution to the epidemic. 0k. And nicks first port of call was an online Forensics Lab in the south of the usa. At the university of alabama at birmingham, gary warner and his students monitor for illegal activity online. So, some of these students are investigating terrorism, some are working on financial crimes. Their pioneering expertise in computerforensics has helped the fbi, the secret service and now, facebook, the virtual home of more than half of americans. They realised they have a problem with drugs being sold on the platform. Weve been working to eliminate terrorism from their platform for some time. And i think weve taken the same approach. They said what can you do to help this . They flag thousands of websites to law officials which they believe advertise Illegal Drugs. I browse social media for people who sell drugs on social media. They usually comment on drug users posts. In the comments section there will usually be someone trying to sell them drugs. Just one of us alone would find thousands of accounts every day involved in some way, hundreds of different websites we go through. It is a lot to look at. I look at the worst parts of the internet, like, that is ourjob. We are paid to do that. Research Chemicals is a term they use. Research chemical websites are selling the bulk fentanyl. It is really people looking for an individual doses on social media. What is on your screen there . I have a lethal dose of fentanyl compared to a penny. Its two miligrams is enough to kill a grown man. What we are seeing is a lot of people are buying is a painkiller. They are going to a site that looks like an online pharmacy, not realising that its not a legitimate pharmacy and buying the drugs without a prescription. Theyre having very successful dealings that way. And the problem is when you get it, it isnt a properly regulated drug. You dont know where it came from. When you buy a product online without a proper prescription from an illicit pharmacy, you are really rolling the dice with your own safety. You have been doing this line of work for a few years now. How much of this is work and how much of this is personal . So, yeah. Well. Sighs yeah, well go there. 0k. Um. I lost my daughter to heroin. She was, um. She was a troubled kid and she got involved with heroin and she actually committed suicide when she was high one night. She was 19. Um. If this lab can help. Somebody else not lose their little girl, or their son, that is a worthwhile cause. Wow. Yeah, when i asked gary that question, i didnt actually know how close he was to that issue. Him losing his daughter. But what i found was a lot of people drawn to this line of work are personally connected. They have had families that have gone through that. 0k. Right. So, weve established social media makes it easier for people to find drugs. Im assuming gary warners lab could do more thanjust flag posts to facebook . Users searching for drugs in america now on facebook are redirected automatically to government run support websites. But, as garys team told me, with a lot of these adverts appearing in peoples comment sections or private, closed groups, they are not actively searching for drugs. These links might appear and they may be redirected to websites that sell the drugs. But with up to 500,000 comments being posted to facebook per second, and for people to just create new profiles to oversize drugs and for people to just create new profiles to advertize drugs online once their old ones are shut down, it is kind of an Impossible Task to keep up. Theyjust come up under a different name after being shut down, but im not sure if its one person or a scam or a big organisation. Theyll have about 15 so different accounts. And, run by the same person because they have the same phone numbers. People used to sell viagra on facebook. Get rid of the word viagra and variance of it, and people said oh, i guess i can sell viagra on facebook and they quit. The criminals, drug dealers and users, are all getting very creative with how can i describe my product im seeking or selling in a way that gets around the censors. They have 0s in places of 0s. There has been like a keyword arms race. Whatever terms we put in, they come up with other ones. It keeps going. How many have you got . We have 1,695 keywords. And that is an older list, it needs to be updated. They say they should just hire more content moderators. No, if you had an infinite number of content moderators, you would almost need one for every person on facebook. They have to go for it in an algorithmic way. Garys team are developing software to automatically scour the web for fentanyl, a tool previously used the Homeland Security investigations. We go visit one of these sites, five fentanyl pills between 200 980. We didnt look for that, we found it by the bing magic still giving us a list of sites that scored high for fentanyl keywords. The average user experience, it is harder to find drugs than ever on these online platforms, but it is still possible. And even if we multiply the amount of money we spent, it will still be possible because that is how facebooks scale works. Not only facebook, twitter has also come underfire not removing the posts that advertise Illegal Drugs for sale. We dont need to have our social media promoting the use of Illegal Drugs to our children and family. I agree with you that this is unacceptable and we will act. Lauren culbertson is head of twitters public policy. We have taken down thousands of tweets and that number is growing by the day. As well as deleting tweets, twitter has partnered with the Drug Enforcement administration on takeback days, when americans can safely deposit their unwanted opioid medication. They created a pill emoji and spread the word through hashtags. We are working on a search prompt where people would be directed towards services and we should be there soon. Twitter has championed freedom of speech, and doesnt want to get too heavy handed with censorship. How much has it had to change its policy with regard to the Opioid Crisis . Illegal activity has always been against our terms of service. We enforce that. Content moderation is really tricky and you have to strike the right balance. While we want to enforce against illegal drug sales, we also want to make sure we arent overcorrecting in censoring the people who are talking about the Opioid Crisis. And this is the problem they always hit, isnt it . The idea they might start accidentally censoring useful conversations as well . Google is facing a similarconundrum. Theyve been under pressure by the government to do more here. They could be potentially masking life saving information in the guise of advice or information. But Tech Companies are doing some good things . For the last dea drop day, and the next one is happening next month, google updated its maps project, to include locations where people can safely dispose of unwanted medication or drugs. Amazon has updated alexa so users searching for information about the Opioid Epidemic, the result they received back, because you only get one answer on smart speakers, it provides the best information. More from nick after the latest tech news with lara. Hello, and welcome to the week in tech. It was the week a former Google Engineer who worked with the us military Programme Project maven, calls for laws to ban killer robots from war zones before they cause mass atrocities. American researchers claim an algorithm to spot twitter bullies has 90 accuracy. The tool from Binghampton University could help social media platforms track down abuse. And a robot surgeon is being launched into the nhs before an international rollout. Flexible bots have joints similarto human arms. They will help specialists complete operations using just a few small incisions rather than one big one. The us air force is adding smart gloves to its vr plane maintenance and operations training. The aim is to help staff really get hands on. Made by bebop sensors, these gloves use powerful haptic feedback tech which lets users feel vr interactions with a six milisecond response time. And finally, this slippery underwater robot is actually meant to be rather scary, if youre a mosquito fish, that is. Made to look like a predator, it aims to frighten and tire out the invasive pests which wreak havoc on native wildlife around the world. So far, nick, youve been looking at how social media is basically clearing up its own mess and policing the online sales of opioids on social media platforms. But there are new ways that new technology is able to help with the Opioid Crisis, too. The first thing i wanted to look at was are there any solutions out there that can stop people from dying right now . Like safe consumption sites. Thats places that people can go to inject themselves with drugs they have got hold of elsewhere and use them under the supervision of Healthcare Professionals so that in the event that they do overdose, staff can step in. Theyre not currently open in the us because some question the ethics behind them, they might not want them opening up in their neighbourhoods. But there are ongoing legal battles to start them up there. The one that we visited, in vancouver, canada, called insight, has been open for 15 years and to date, not a Single Person has died there. And that centre has been actually been the Training Ground for a new smartphone system that tries to replicate the human supervisor but using technology. Lets take a look. Over in seattle, researchers are developing an app called Second Chance that utilises the microphone and speaker to automatically detect people on the brink of overdose. The fundamental problem with opioid overdose is that people die alone or they die with bystanders who are unable to recognise and help them. When people experience an overdose, they have dangerous breathing and so the software is able to convert the phone into a breathing monitor. It does that by using the phones microphone and the speaker and it turns it into a sort of a short range sonar. Like a dolphin or a submarine, it is able to send out tones that cannot be here heard by you or i but the reflections of those tones can be heard by the microphone and those can be used to identify breathing pattern. The app will Alert Emergency Services of the users location when it detects dangerously low breathing, so they can report to the scene. How effective is it . It was 97 sensitive for people who had experienced this dangerous type of breathing. We think that using a device that most people already have is a way to reduce stigma. It doesnt identify you as having opioid use disorder because everybody carries a phone. The other thing that people often dont realise is that people with opioid use disorder, its like a disease and they still want to be safe when they are engaging in these high risk behaviours. Well, hopefully this is an app that you never have to use. Hopefully addicts will come off the drugs before that happens. What have you seen that might help in rehab and recovery . One of the problems that people face, once they come out of rehab, it is hard for them to stick to some sort of recovery plan. There is an app out there called we connect which diarises peoples day so they can set routines and goals to achieve them. When they can achieve the goals, they can receive amazon gift vouchers so it incentivises them to keep on track. The app also acts as a monitoring tool for clinicians to keep tabs on their patients. So it lets them know where their patients are, how theyre doing, if they really have checked in to the local clinic, if they really have gone to their therapy sessions and also how likely their patients are to relapse so they can intervene sooner. Another app involves people videoing themselves taking their treatment medication so they dont need to physically go to their doctors for directly observed therapy. They send the recordings through the app and those are then verified by a Healthcare Worker who also monitors their progress. The start up is also looking at rewarding users but with some cash. Over and above all of this, there is a question on whether or not people will actually use these apps. When i spoke to one man in rehab, he thought otherwise. Me being in full swing addiction, pulling out an app and using it, that is probably a pipe dream. I want something that is automatic that i dont have to do on my own and if thats the case, man, thats really cool. If you look at app retention in Health Care Apps and especially Mental Health apps, its abysmal. Youre looking at a retention rate of about 5 at best after 60 days. So whats happening is youre asking people to take effort to do something that theyre already struggling doing, so take effort to engage in something. The centre on addiction has conducted a study with cornell tech, on how the way in which we use our phones can signify how susceptible we are to addiction and how likely we are to relapse. We found that sensation seeking is highly correlated with how often someone touches their mobile phone. Its correlated with the way in which people charge their battery, in terms of the day, whether they plug it in during the day at one time, like at night, or if they charge it randomly throughout the day at different periods. So, understanding these behavioural patterns is going to provide an opportunity for us to intervene with just in time interventions, without someone having to do anything. We know that people disclose way more information to digital platforms than to humans, so people disclose more drug use, hiv status. Women disclose more sexual partners to a digital platform than to a human and men disclose fewer sexual partners to a digital platform than a human. It is a good indication of where we are in terms of how we work with digital platforms. The theory that people open up more to technology has been tested on the outskirts of nashville where a new form of therapy is being developed to make it more effective and accessible. Noah robinson is using Virtual Reality to Better Connect with his patients. Get up here. All right. Can you hear me . By meeting in a Virtual World as digital avatars, noahs found his patients are more receptive. Yeah, what are the feelings . The feelings are a little bit of, um, anger, i guess. Theres some sadness. Ijust feel crazy. Wits abusive relationship with drugs started at a young age, progressively getting worse, up to using opioids. One of the features of vr helping him make sense of his problems is the ability to draw them out virtually, so he can better visualise and remember them. What do you think is the most likely explanation here . This is completely untrue and these and most likely all of these are going to be the ones that are the reasons why. Im always amazed when i get here and step back and look at it all, how ludicrous it sounds in my head. And just to see it laid out, it just all makes sense. Were still in that exploratory phase but what were seeing is that patients are able to leave their current environment which is the context of where automatic thoughts and negative emotions are occurring, and when they come into the virtual environment, they feel more regulated and its kind of like this relief they are able to experience. Itsjust wild, you know . It immediately takes you into. | dont know, it just takes you in a different world right away. So then if i teach them how to handle their automatic negative thoughts or negative emotions when theyre not actually experiencing them, it seems like it sinks in more effectively and when they come out of the vr, they are then able to remember what i taught them and to visualise the model and things like that. When i put the mask on, i immediately calmed down because im in a world thats so distracting, it takes me out of the thought ive been obsessing about for 1. 5 hours. It takes the thought out of my head that is a real belief system at that time and puts it on the board and i can kind of look at it. This is just the beginning of trials. So far its a single effort and noah is yet to scientifically determine the effectiveness of his methods, but these initial sessions have proved promising. It was actually much more therapeutic for me in Virtual Reality than ive been in the classrooms here. Eventually noah would like to roll this out so people in recovery could receive virtual therapy remotely. People going into vr on a daily basis, theyre not becoming desensitised to it, its notjust novelty, theyre forming real social connections and supportive relationships and if we can take that and translate it to the world of Substance Use disorders and addiction, i think we can possibly make a dent in the Opioid Crisis. The men here are only visitors. After a month of rehab, theyre released back into the world. Having Something Like this that they could access from home could possibly help them stay sober. I really hope it works out for them. 0k, nick, thank you so much. Brilliant reporting, really interesting and i hope you found it informative and useful, too. If youve been affected by drug addiction, maybe its you, maybe its someone that you know, help is out there. You can talk to frank which is the nhss confidential Advice Service for drug addicts and their carers. The phone number is 0300 123 6600 and the website is talktofrank. Com. You can contact us through the usual social Media Channels for anything else. Thank you very much for watching and we will see you soon. Hello there. Were in the middle of a run of really unsettled weather with no end in sight, really. Rain at times coming our way over the next few days, with some fairly strong wind around at times as well. Now, looking at the satellite picture, weve got some shower clouds heading our way for today. This area of cloud, just to the north, is going to be bringing some rain across parts of the uk on friday, and then as i spin right the way across towards the other side of the atlantic, well, weve got this juicy looking cloud, quite a deep area of low pressure thats going be bringing some wet and windy weather for some of us as we head into this weekend. So rain will continue to be blown our way. Now at the moment weve got some rain crossing the country. It will tend ease across the west with showers following. The winds continue to pick up as well. So its becoming increasingly blustery, particularly around the coast and hills. Its a mild start of the day, with temperatures around 11 15 degrees. Once the sun is up, the rain still with us initially, will clear away from england and scotland, in the showers really do start to pack in. Now, for Northern Ireland and scotland, the showers will probably tend to merge together to give some lengthier spells of rain at times. And things will begin to get a little bit cooler across the north as well. Therell be some bigger gaps between the showers in southern and eastern parts of england, but no one is immune from seeing an odd heavy downpour. And through thursday night those showers will continue to rattle in as well with those brisk south westerly Winds Continuing to push the showers in, particular into western coast and hills. Temperatures then through thursday night, between around nine and 13 degrees, and then for friday, well, weve got further showers swinging our way. The showers will tend to most together to give some longer spells of rain. And this time its properly most likely across england and wales. But there will be plenty of showers for scotland and Northern Ireland. It will continue to be quite gusty as well, gusts of wind running in at around 30 110 mph across the south of the uk. And the temperatures continue to slowly slump. So highs of around 1a or 15 degrees for scotland and Northern Ireland. Even turning a bit cool across the south east. Now this weekend we do have some heavy rain and some strong winds on the way, thanks to that area of low pressure i showed you a moment ago. But the northward extent of where that lows going could change a little bit before we actually get to the weekend. But here it comes, through the weekend, the heaviest rain and strongest winds will be heading across england and wales. But it could cause localised disruption. The unsettled weather then continues, would you believe it, well into the first part of next week as well. Thats your latest weather. This is bbc news. Welcome if youre watching here in the uk, on pbs in america or around the globe. Im mike embley. Our top stories as the impeachment inquiry against donald trump gathers pace. He again denies pressuring ukraines president to help him smear a rival. Critics say they have damning evidence, accusing him of a classic mob shakedown. Like any mafia boss, the president didnt need to say thats a nice country you have, it would be a shame if something happened to it, because that was clear from the conversation. This prime minister, to talk about morals and morality is a disgrace after the supreme courts historic ruling, Britains Parliament is back and angrier than ever. But borisjohnson rejects calls to resign
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