This Is the Drug That Triggers the Most Panic Among Psychedelic Hotline Callers
· Vice
Turns out, you can learn a lot about what people experience when they go on psychedelic trips if you set up a hotline that trippers can call if their experience is going a little haywire and they need someone to calm them down.
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Detailed in a study published in Science Advances, researchers analyzed 25,119 anonymous calls and texts from the Fireside Project’s Psychedelic Support Line, which gives people on psychedelic trips a place to call so they can get more information on psychedelics or to be coached through a bad trip. Researchers from Paris, Geneva, and the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies collected the largest dataset of drug trips in human history, stretching from 2021 to 2026.
The advantage here is that the participants weren’t in a stuffy lab as a researcher with a clipboard closely examined the readings from the diodes attached to their heads. This is all real humans taking psychedelics at home, at music festivals, or in the woods somewhere. The vast majority of the callers — 9,300 — were on psilocybin, a.k.a. magic mushrooms, the data found something incredibly odd: callers most likely to freak out during a trip weren’t on psychedelics. They were smoking run-of-the-mill marijuana.
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Nearly half of all cannabis callers—47.2 percent—reached out to the hotline in an active state of pure panic. 70 percent of cannabis calls happened right in the middle of a bad high, where people taking MDMA or ketamine mostly called after the high wore off, asking a volunteer for “integration support” to help them make sense of what they were experiencing.
There’s a logic to it. Psychedelic users are often more experienced drug users. This isn’t their first rodeo. Marijuana is legal to some degree in much of the United States, and there are likely plenty of people trying it for the first time and maybe are unprepared for how preposterously potent it can be nowadays.
There are also 43 documented reports of “facilitator abuse,” where callers reported being dosed without consent in sketchy ayahuasca ceremonies.
Post-call surveys revealed that the single biggest factor determining whether a panicked caller got calmed down wasn’t medical intervention; it was whether the volunteer showed genuine, human empathy. Sometimes all you need when your brain is melting is a friendly voice reminding you that you aren’t going to die.
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