Glowing Experience or Bad Trip? A Quantitative Analysis of User Reported Drug Experiences on Erowid.org

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 between addiction experiences and dextromethorphan, a substance with largely unknown withdrawal effects. Our research can help to gain a deeper sociological understanding of drug consumption and to identify relationships which may have clinical relevance. Moreover, it can show how non-mainstream social media platforms can be utilized to study characteristics of human behavior and how this can be done in an ethical way in collaboration with the platform providers.