image by: Energy Control

HWN Suggests

How the Most Extreme Trips on Erowid Transformed Modern Drug Culture

Erowid is not a site that people often name-check as a bastion of internet culture, but it’s been around longer than Reddit, longer than MySpace, and longer than Wikipedia. In 1995, around about the time of Netscape’s IPO, one of the greatest single sources of online information about intoxicating substances was launched by a couple, who go by Fire and Earth Erowid. The site is still crafted in basic HTML, and seeks a task no greater than to be “an online library about psychoactive plants, chemicals, and related topics.” In doing so, it has become the hallowed halls of a unique virtual research institution—influential and mainstream enough to warrant a New Yorker profile—where the self-exploration…

read full article

Featured

 'I am melting, help me': The 30-year-old drug website that transformed psychedelic research

Thirty years ago, drug users flocked to a website called Erowid to describe experiences on everything from Advil to LSD. Today it's become a goldmine for researchers and governments.

 The Great Psychedelic Experiment

Researchers mined an old drug forum and fed the entries to an AI. The result could augur a new class of psychedelic-based antidepressants.

Articles of Interest

Explaining what causes different psychedelic experiences is a trip. This study shows why

The researchers’ approach pushes the boundaries of drug research in necessary ways—but their datasets could be unreliable. To start, Roth says that Erowid doesn’t verify the chemical makeup of the drugs described in each narrative. “In a large number of cases, the drugs that are purchased from the street are not the drugs that the person thought they bought, particularly when it comes to psychedelic compounds and hallucinogens,” he explains. As an example, Roth points to how two US Military Academy cadets recently overdosed on cocaine that was actually laced with fentanyl.

How Psychedelics Changed My Life

Seeing as we just passed the two major psychedelic holidays of the year, (Bicycle Day, which celebrates the anniversary of the world’s first ever acid trip on April 19th, and 4/20 on the following day, celebrated by stoners everywhere), I wanted to share with you about my first psychedelic trip. When I was 18 years old, I had my first experience with magic mushrooms, and it changed my life.

Opinion Mining of Erowid's Experience Reports on LSD and Psilocybin-Containing Mushrooms

Psychedelics are gaining attention for their therapeutic potential in modern and personalized medicine. Online forums such as Erowid provide valuable user insights, but analyses of these experiences using natural language processing (NLP) remain scarce.

Remembering Sasha Shulgin with His Psychonaut Friends at Erowid

Erowid, an organization that compiles information about psychoactive chemicals, had spent days tweeting prolifically about Shulgin after news broke that his health was in decline. Erowid is among the groups that have been most active in championing and disseminating Shulgin’s research. They have been heavily involved in archiving his life’s work, and their team had appeared with him publicly a number of times. Not only did Erowid grieve on Twitter, but they also altered the front page of their site in tribute. Then they issued a tweet to announce Shulgin’s death to the world and they in a line from the Buddhist text Heart Sutra.

The Trip Planners

People who are interested in psychoactive cacti, ketamine, and LSD are generally unfazed by strangeness. Any such person will likely know of Erowid, as will most toxicologists and many E.R. doctors. When the site launched, in 1995, it served as a repository of drug-culture esoterica, drawing just a few hits a day. Today, Erowid contains highly detailed profiles of more than three hundred and fifty psychoactive substances, from caffeine to methamphetamine. Last year, the site had at least seventeen million unique visitors.

Visualising Erowid

For this analysis, we looked at the reported amount of the consumed substance. We were interested to discover whether the knowledge available online concerning dosage recommendations had an impact on actual dosage behavior. We expected a decrease in dosage variability over the years. From the present analysis, however, we could not verify this assumption. For each year, all users are divided in four equal groups, according to the reported dosage. Users reporting a very unusual dosage are not grouped and represented as outliers. The visualization shows if and to which extent the average dosage for a substance changes over time.

Resources

Erowid

Erowid is a member-supported organization providing access to reliable, non-judgmental information about psychoactive plants, chemicals, and related issues. We work with academic, medical, and experiential experts to develop and publish new resources, as well as to improve and increase access to already existing resources. We also strive to ensure that these resources are maintained and preserved as a historical record for the future.