Can Google searches predict the popularity and harm of psychoactive agents?

Background: predicting the popularity of and harm caused by psychoactive agents is a serious problem that would be difficult to do by a single simple method. however,because of the growing number of drugs it is very important to provide a simple and fast tool for predicting some characteristics of these substances. we were inspired by the google flu trends study on the activity of the influenza virus,which showed that influenza virus activity worldwide can be monitored based on queries entered into the google search engine. objective: our aim was to propose a fast method for ranking the most popular and most harmful drugs based on easily available data gathered from the internet. methods: we used the google search engine to acquire data for the ranking lists. subsequently,using the resulting list and the frequency of hits for the respective psychoactive drugs combined with the word harm or harmful