'I am melting, help me': The 30-year-old drug website that transformed psychedelic research
Serenity StrullThirty 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.
"I am melting, help me." This is not only an unusual plea for assistance. It's also the title of a "trip report": one person's experience with the powerful dissociative drug phencyclidine (known as PCP). And it's just one of many thousands of mind-bending anecdotes filed to Erowid, a website that, since the early days of the internet, has built one of the world's most influential records of drug use and its effects.
This year marks the 30th anniversary of the scrappy, grassroots project, which hosts data on everything from caffeine to cannabis to paracetamol (also known as Tylenol) to heroin, like a Wikipedia on all things pharmaceutical. Users post information about purifying street drugs, rolling joints and the health implications of drug misuse. Visitors to the site can find information about drug toxicology and interactions between chemicals. They can even wade through the archives of Albert Hoffman, the Swiss chemist who first synthesised lysergic acid diethylamide – or LSD.
But perhaps most intriguing of all are the 45,000-plus trip reports in the "Experience Vault". These hallucinatory tales, with titles such as "Tripping Alone on 1.5 Grams From Hell", "The Weekend At The Edge Of The Universe" and "The Thumbprint", where an unfortunate soul loses their mind on a drug related to LSD called AL-LAD, do not just make for idle internet fodder. They have become vital for academic research, especially for esoteric and illegal substances where clinical data does not exist or is challenging to obtain.
"People publishing their personal experiences and experimenting outside of the legal and academic bubble has led to the science, in many ways," says David Luke, associate professor of psychology at the University of Greenwich in the UK who studies psychedelics and has conducted clinical trials using microdoses of LSD. "There was so little published academic research and so few resources for exploring the use of psychoactive drugs that Erowid was invaluable for research, and to understand issues around safety and experiences."
Today, the social stigma around some types of drug use has softened to the point that Ayahuasca ceremonies, mushrooms and ketamine have even become a fixture in some corners of the business world. While these substances are still illegal in many countries, a growing number of places are choosing to decriminalise drugs that were previously subject to extensive crack downs. In recent years, psychedelics have also gathered renewed interest from the scientific community as a potential approach for treating conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder. Their use, however, remains controversial and in some places unregulated therapeutic use of these drugs has led to tragedy.
Back in 1995, when Erowid was founded, psychedelics were very much of the underground. This was a hostile time for drug reform, just over a decade since US president Ronald Reagan had expanded the war on drugs.
AlamyPsychedelics were mostly of interest to the countercultural community of self-styled "psychonauts" – willing human guinea pigs who, with chemical aids, dived into their own psyches and reported the results. Aside from a handful of in-person conferences here and there, organised research slowed to a halt, largely due to the tight regulation that made getting approval for studies involving controlled substances difficult.
It was around this time that Earth and Fire, the pseudonyms of two recent graduates of New College of Florida, a liberal arts college in Sarasota, US, noticed a huge information gap: there was simply no trusted central repository where researchers, amateur or professional, could find reliable data on psychoactive substances. The internet offered an opportunity to change that and, starting as a hobby project until its founders went full-time a few years later, Erowid was born. (Earth and Fire declined to comment for this story.)
"Erowid was this computer literate, web-literate group that wanted to mine the enormous amount of information that was being gathered in the underground about old drugs and new drugs that had just been invented," says Rick Doblin, the founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a non-profit based in the US that advocates for legal pathways to psychadelics.
Earth and Fire wanted to make this information public and shareable – a novel thing in that era, adds Doblin, who also attended the New College while Erowid's co-founders were students. "It was really revolutionary and courageous," he says.
"They used digital technology and the early internet to create a space for something that didn't exist before – and the space itself changed psychedelic culture dramatically," adds Erik Davis, an author who has written extensively about psychedelic counterculture, and friend to the founders. "Erowid created an environment for people to connect and share information, but also one for younger people, experimenting for the first time, to meet the equivalent of the older brother who's already into the scene."
Overtime, Davis says the website had a significant impact on shifting psychedelics from vilified, mind-altering drugs to potential therapeutics that could transform the field of mental health. While there were some other spots on the early web where drug discussions took place, Erowid "rapidly became the most predominant", says Davis. Differentiating Erowid from the others was a "respect for information, which really did change the psychedelic subculture, remarkably, in the '90s and 2000s".
Like other subcultures, the early internet allowed people with previously niche interests to find one another for the first time. Now, the Experience Vaults are a "fascinating record of human experience, and that's incredibly valuable", Davis adds.
Davis and others say Erowid's large-scale data-led approach made the website a useful repository for all sorts of information that would find their way into official assessments on toxicology, interactions between drugs or even just molecular breakdowns of chemical compounds.
"Erowid really represents the spirit of a devoted data nerd, a librarian with a love of dry, organised, clear information on the one hand – [but also] this sense of courage and [creating] an inventive space for culture generation," Davis says. It laid out a new model that demonstrated how respecting data and providing trustworthy sources could serve a role in harm reduction and "support a community that can be very non-technical, crazy and wild", he says.
Yet Erowid was, at first, a small, isolated community predominantly for data geeks and drug nerds. To the surprise of its founders, wrote Earth and Fire in a 10-year retrospective in 2005, the daily visits to the website skyrocketed into the thousands after they submitted Erowid for search engine listing.
And the visits only snowballed from there. In a few short years, no longer were psychedelic enthusiasts Erowid's main audience – it seemed anyone with a web connection and a micro-dose of curiosity was a potential visitor too.
By becoming one of the most predominant sources of drug information and experiences online, in only five years after its launch, Erowid reached 100,000 page views per day. By the early 2000s, it was being cited peer-reviewed journals. By 2014, 16 million people visited Erowid each year.
Getty ImagesNow, Erowid has more than 5,000 citations on Google Scholar, a repository for academic research – with government agencies, law enforcement, medics, data scientists, anthropologists, chemists, historians and scholars of digital culture all taking a keen interest.
Among Erowid's many citations are studies into the effects of new "research chemicals", the grey-area-legal "designer drugs" that number in their thousands.
Others investigate which drugs might elicit the closest experience to a dream-like state or how to recreate the "chemical induction of synaesthesia", the neurological condition where our senses get mixed up and we can see noises or taste sounds. Earth and Fire are even cited as co-authors on some of the research papers.
Common to all these papers are those user-submitted reports in the Experience Vault. Unlike later internet fixtures such as social media, web forums or Reddit, Erowid says these experiences are carefully curated by trained volunteers to comb through submissions, and researchers cite the platform's quality control as a key factor for its usefulness.
Researchers say that this process means Erowid's Vaults are more stringently reviewed when compared to other websites and, although all are anecdotal, they provide a solid baseline reference for researchers.
This makes it a rich seam to mine for "phenomenological" research, the investigation of experience, according to Luke.
"I've massively utilised Erowid in my own research," says Luke. "And I've found it invaluable, especially at a time when there were no resources other than the underground. That's enabled a lot of science."
Erowid's enormous collection of psychoactive experiences helped it become a point of reference for professions of all stripes, not only academics. Physicians and doctors use Erowid, especially in treating patients who may have used novel psychoactive substances – so-called research chemicals that are yet to be regulated and can mystify due to their absence of literature. But some also worry about the kind of information available on Erowid, as it includes details on preparing and using drugs that could prove to be harmful.
With the growth of the online drug market, new entrants to the psychoactive pantheon are being created all the time. That means there is very little literature available on these compounds, so user experiences on Erowid can provide a helpful steer for medical professionals.
"Erowid is one of the few websites where emergency workers or doctors can find information on new substances," says Nicolas Langlitz, a professor of anthropologist at the New School for Social Research in New York City. "Erowid serves as a substitute for scientific research," he says, adding that some scraps of toxicology data may be available elsewhere but, as far as effects on humans go, Erowid's a goldmine.
This usefulness hasn't escaped authorities either. Policy-makers, such as the US federal government's National Institute on Drug Abuse, have tapped into Erowid as a data stream for spotting trends or patterns about the emergence of new drugs.
The World Health Organisation reads Erowid, as does the UK government, which has cited the Vaults on the harms of methoxetamine and zopiclone. The US Drug Enforcement Administration keeps an eye on Erowid as well, and has cited the Experience Vault in proposals to regulate new substances. A UK House of Lords committee report even cites an essay, hosted on Erowid, about the psychoactive properties of nutmeg.
Earth and Fire, says Davis, always had harm reduction in mind. He recalls Earth saying: "In a weird way, we've wound up with the responsibility of doing something that, in an ideal society, the government would do." "They take their responsibility really seriously," says Davis.
Today, the psychedelic science industry is reportedly worth $3bn (£2.25bn) and only growing. A clinical research renaissance is currently underway into the effects of powerful hallucinogens like ketamine, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), "magic" mushrooms and MDMA (also known as molly or ecstasy), exploring their potential to treat afflictions like depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction.
Really, says Leor Roseman, senior lecturer and psychedelic researcher at Exeter University in the UK, it's this "medicalisation" of psychedelics that has allowed substances to become "a conversation in every household and not just a taboo".
But before this medicalisation could occur, Erowid was the "beginning of the fringe having a voice", says Roseman.
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"And that voice had an impact on education, so Erowid has been extremely valuable – it's when the psychedelic community started finding one another," he says.
And so this small, Web 1.0 side project that predated Wikipedia – with its stubbornly retro aesthetics unchanged for decades and tiny coterie of full-time staff – brought psychonauts together to create a whole new space. In doing so, it shifted the culture, played its part in legitimising psychedelics in the eyes of the broader public, and has an outsized impact to this day.
"The courage that Earth and Fire had to move in public at a time of fear and suspicion in the dominant culture, really went a major way towards destigmatising the field of psychedelics," says Doblin. "They had an incredible impact."
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