Are “Legal Highs” Users Satisfied? Evidence from Online Customer Comments

Abstract

This article describes the results of a clustering analysis of more than 2,100 comments posted by online purchasers of “Legal Highs” on five websites in 2012. The aim is to investigate the reasons for satisfaction/dissatisfaction on the part of legal highs users. Our results show that the reasons for satisfaction depend on the price/quality ratio and the real effects of the product (compared to illicit drugs). Dissatisfaction seems to stem from the disparity between the advertising of the product and its real quality. We conclude that online purchasers are certainly illicit drug users who consider legal highs as substitution products.

Keywords :

• legal highs
• herbal highs
• Internet
• online shop
• user satisfaction

THE AUTHORS

Christophe-Alain Bruneel Christophe-Alain Bruneel is studying economics in third year at the Toulouse School of Economics. He previously studied at the Catholic University of Lille where he worked two years with the research team on topics like consumer satisfaction and formation of opinion. Apart economics, he is particularly interested in computing, statistics and big data treatment.

Christian BEN Lakhdar, Ph.D. in economics, he worked several years at the French Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction. Actually, he is professor at the Catholic University of Lille. His main topics of research deal with illicit and licit drug economy, health economics, harm reduction, and more generally all themes surrounding licit and illicit drugs public policies. As member of several French institutes for public health, he frequently advises politics and intervenes often in the media.

Nicolas G. Vaillant Nicolas VAILLANT is full professor of economics and deputy vice-chancellor of the Catholic University of Lille. He is also the director of the Research Center of Human Capital (FLSEG) and the research director of ISTC –Strategies & Communication. His work deals with applied microeconomics in the areas of information cascades, individual and collective judgment, and opinion-forming.

GLOSSARY

• Corpus: A corpus is a set of documents gathered in a clear perspective. The branch of linguistics dealing with corpus is logically called corpus linguistics. It is linked to the development of computer systems, in particular, the creation of textual databases. Corpuses are essential and valuable in automatic natural language processing tools. They make it possible to extract a set of useful information for statistical processing. On an informational point of view, they can extract trends including building sets. From a methodological point of view, they provide a necessary objectivity for scientific validation thanks to automatic processing of natural language. The information is not only empirical; it is checked by the corpus. It is possible to rely on corpus to formulate and test scientific hypotheses.

• Internet: The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that interchange data by packet switching using the standardized Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP). It is a “network of networks” that consists of millions of private and public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope that are linked by copper wires, fiber-optic cables, wireless connections, and other technologies.

• Legal/herbal highs: Psychoactive “alternatives” to controlled drugs such as LSD, ecstasy, cannabis, and opiates. These psychoactive substances are generally referred to as “legal highs” or “herbal highs.” They are herbal, semisynthetic, or synthetic drugs.

• Online drug retailers: They buy legal psychoactive substances from manufacturers or importers, either directly or through a wholesaler, and then sell smaller quantities to the end-user via the Internet.

• Online shop: An online shop, e-shop, e-store, Internet shop, Web shop, Web Store, online store, or virtual store evokes the physical analogy of buying products from a retailer or in a shopping mall.

Notes

1 While agree with our choice of topics of interest, a referee notes that the choice of topics could also be on the effects of the products (kick, energy, speed) and the feeling of being part of a community (love, people, amazing). We thank the referee for this research issue.