"420 Friendly": Revealing Marijuana Use via Craigslist Rental Ads

Recent studies have shown that information mined from Craigslist can be used for informing public health policy or monitoring risk behavior. This paper presents a text-mining method for conducting public health surveillance of marijuana use concerns in the U.S. using online classified ads in Craigslist. We scraped more than 200 thousands of rental ads in the housing categories in Craigslist and devised text-mining methods for efficiently and accurately extract rental ads associated with concerns about the uses of marijuana in different states across the U.S. We linked the extracted ads to their geographic locations and computed summary statistics of the ads having marijuana use concerns. Our data is then compared with the State Marijuana Laws Map published by the U.S. government and marijuana related keywords search in Google to verify our collected data with respect to the demographics of marijuana use concerns. Our data not only indicates strong correlations between Craigslist ads, Google search and the State Marijuana Laws Map in states where marijuana uses are legal, but also reveals some hidden world of marijuana use concerns in other states where marijuana use is illegal. Our approach can be utilized as a marijuana surveillance tool for policy makers to develop public health policy and regulations.