The travel firm thomas cook has the travel firm thomas cook has approached the government approached the government for emergency funding, as it tries to avoid for emergency funding as it tries to avoid going into Administration Iran reacts defiantly in response to the us sending troops and Missile Defence systems to saudi arabia and the uae, after last weeks attack on saudi oil facilities. Click is next on the bbc news channel and this week nick kwek heads across the atlantic to investigate whether Technology Companies bear responsibility for the opiod crisis in the us. And just a warning to viewers this programme contains people affected by drug abuse. This week a crisis sweeping america, a Public Health emergency. Can Technology Help prevent drug overdoses and fight the Opioid Epidemic . Theme music police radio a request for an ambulance at manchester. Its a shell gas station. The patient 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 an 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 is 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 year 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 mobility 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 officials which they believe sell Illegal Drugs. 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 out. 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. 0r or they themselves 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 than just 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 actively searching for drugs. These links might appear and they may be redirected to websites that sell the drugs. But with 500,000 comments being posted to facebook per second, and for people to just create new profiles to oversize drugs online once their old ones are shut down, it is kind to advertise a drugs online once their old ones are shut down, it is kind ofan their old ones are shut down, it is kind of an Impossible Task to keep up. The platform so shut them down, but they will 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. Now 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. Oh, i guess i cannot sell viagra on facebook and they quit. The criminals, drug dealers and users, all getting very creative with how can i describe my product im seeking or selling in a way that getting around the censors. They have 0s in places of 0s. Whatever terms we put in, they come up with other ones. We have 1,695 keywords. That is an odourless, we probably have more than that and it needs to be updated. That is an older list. 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, itll previously used the Homeland Security investigations. A2 previously used for 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 big magic still giving us a list of sites that scored high for fentanyl keywords. Tool 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 under fire for advertising Illegal Drugs for sale. For not removing public posts which 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, head of twitters public policy. We have ta ken we have taken down 17,000 tweets since we had done that work and that 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 worked through hashtags. We are working on a Search Programme where people would be directed towards services and we should be there soon. Officially twitter has championed freedom of speech, he doesnt want to get too heavy handed with censorship. How much has twitter had to change its policy with regards 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 over correcting 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 dart accidentally censoring useful smack they might actually start 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 unwonted medication or drugs. 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 Hampton University could help social media platforms track down abuse. Crack down on abuse. And a robot surgeon is being launched into the nhs before an international rollout. Cm are surgical ports have flexible joints are similar to human arms. They will have specialists complete operations using just a few small incisions rather than one big one. The us air force is adding smart glass to its vr plane maintenance smart gloves. And operations training. The aim is to help staff really get hands on. Made by bebop sensors, these gloves use powerful haptic feedback tags 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. Need to look like a predator, it aims 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 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 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 to 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 a man in rehab, he thought otherwise. Maybe 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 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 opportunit