Glowing Experience or Bad Trip? A Quantitative Analysis of User Reported Drug Experiences on Erowid.org
Angelina Mooseder (1), Momin M. Malik (2), Hemank Lamba (3), Earth, Erowid (4), Sylvia Thyssen (4), Juergen Pfeffer (1) ((1) Bavarian School, of Public Policy, Technical University of Munich, (2) Berkman Klein Center, for Internet & Society at Harvard University

TL;DR
This study analyzes over 36,000 user-submitted drug experience reports from Erowid.org to identify patterns and factors influencing subjective drug experiences, with implications for sociological understanding and clinical relevance.
Contribution
It demonstrates how user reports can be used to uncover new insights into drug experiences and their predictors, highlighting the potential of social media data for behavioral research.
Findings
Positive association between addiction reports and dextromethorphan
Objective variables poorly predict subjective experiences
User reports reveal new patterns and impact factors
Abstract
Erowid.org is a website dedicated to documenting information about psychoactive substances, with over 36,000 user-submitted drug Experience Reports. We study the potential of these reports to provide information about characteristic experiences with drugs. First, we assess different kinds of drug experiences, such as 'addiction' or 'bad trips'. We quantitatively analyze how such experiences are related to substances and user variables. Furthermore, we classify positive and negative experiences as well as reported addiction using information about the consumer, substance, context and location of the drug experience. While variables based only on objective characteristics yield poor predictive performance for subjective experiences, we find subjective user reports can help to identify new patterns and impact factors on drug experiences. In particular, we found a positive association…
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Taxonomy
TopicsComplex Network Analysis Techniques · Spam and Phishing Detection · Impact of Technology on Adolescents
