
Visualizing Erowid: data-driven anthropological research on drugs - jboynyc
http://chemicalyouth.org/visualising-erowid/
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Alex3917
> The results that we present on this website provide both a glimpse into
> practices of reporting drug use, into actual patterns of drug consumption,
> and into the possibilities of a digitally literate anthropology.

Erowid only publishes about a third of submitted trip reports, and tries to
publish ones they feel are representative of some aspect of the range of
possible experiences. (E.g. if there are 100 possible effects of a drug,
they're only going to publish 3 or 4 trip reports that are primarily about
effect X.)

So while casually interesting, the authors are pretty irresponsible for not
explaining the limitations of the dataset.

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klenwell
First heard about Erowid in this recent New Yorker article:

[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/23/the-trip-
planne...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/23/the-trip-planners)

I found this article and the testimonials from the website itself a bit more
interesting than the visualizations here.

The New Yorker article describes Erowid's role as a reference source for the
medical and research community. I get the impression from the writeup here
that this project, associated with the University of Amsterdam, scraped Erowid
to collect the data. I hope, as researchers, they'll make the data open for
others to explore and extend.

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beloch
As somebody who has never even experimented with this stuff, I have a pretty
fundamental question:

How do the people who submit these reports know what they're using, and how
much?

The stuff you're after might be cut with other stuff. What you call X might be
completely different from what somebody else calls X, or maybe your seller
didn't have any X, gave you Y, and told you it was X.

Even if you know _what_ you're using, how do you figure out the purity so you
can determine the dose? Even relatively unprocessed drugs, like cannabis, vary
wildly in THC content.

It seems to me like there's a veneer of rigor here that's probably deceiving.

~~~
Alex3917
> How do the people who submit these reports know what they're using, and how
> much?

MDMA, cocaine, and heroin are frequently cut with other substances. But that's
less of an issue with the other 500+ drugs on the site, especially since many
of them are legal to begin with. The moderators also triage out questionable
reports that seem suspiciously atypical.

The ambiguity actually arguably makes the site more rigorous though rather
than less, given that the goal is present a bunch of different scenarios that
may or may not happen to any individual.

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placeybordeaux
Kind of wish that some of this was done with crossfilter.

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PaulHoule
It has been painful to see Erowid go downhill.

Back when I was young you would read articles like "I smoked pot. I had fun."

Now you get articles that somebody mixed 5 different things they got from
china and then took a fistfull of downers and had a beer and then they are
laying on the ground incapacitated, roll slightly and the baggie of pills
falls out, and the EMS people go from concerned and friendly to mean and
vindictive and the cop gives them a little kick and then at the hospital they
get a talking out.

Nancy Reagan couldn't make a better site to make people "just say no"

Then there was the guy who took datura and thought people were stealing his
car and he went in to get his dad and when his dad was out there he saw the
car with all the doors open and lights on and engine running and he's like
WTF.

~~~
pierrec
Seems like you read the Cannabis vault when you were young.

Now you're reading the Datura vault. (read: one of the most traumatizing drugs
to ever grace the surface of the earth)

Therefore, Erowid has been going painfully downhill?

I assure you, there have _always_ been experience reports of people doing
crazy, dangerous shit. Anyways, additional reports can only increase the
quality and usefulness of the site. The moderation is the same as before. The
old reports are still as valid as ever (from a clinical POV) and the new ones
add more data points; in the case of mixes, these data points are all the more
unique and valuable.

~~~
PaulHoule
I think there is a self-selection towards people for whom getting f _ked up is
a full time job. I wouldn 't want to write anything about an experience I had
there because I don't want to rub shoulders with those others.

Even the cannabis group is leaning toward stories along the lines of "I threw
a joint at the propane tank and boy..."

I see the same thing on medical support groups of all kind. When I had
patellofemoral syndrome and was trying to heal I found I'd get shouted down by
people who said that they saw the best orthopedic surgeon in the country and
this guy told them his knees were the most f_ked up he'd ever seen and he was
so inspired he wanted to be an orthopedic surgeon when he grows up.

Somebody like that wants to revel in being sick and has nothing to offer to
anybody who wants to heal.

