Glowing Experience or Bad Trip? A Quantitative Analysis of User Reported Drug Experiences on Erowid.org
International Conference on Web and Social Media January 31, 2022 Angelina Mooseder, M. Malik, Hemank Lamba et al. 3 citations
A website hosting over 36,000 user-submitted drug experience reports offers a resource for studying characteristic experiences with psychoactive substances. Quantitative analysis examined how experiences such as addiction or bad trips relate to specific substances and user variables. Classifying positive and negative experiences and reported addiction using consumer, substance, context, and location information showed that objective characteristics alone poorly predict subjective experiences, but subjective reports can reveal new patterns. A positive association emerged between addiction experiences and dextromethorphan, a substance with largely unknown withdrawal effects. This research aids sociological understanding of drug consumption and demonstrates ethical use of non-mainstream social media for studying human behavior.