#this seems like its comng out of the blue but i feel like with quite a few people in the rpc have characters

[magioffire]

(cw for discussions of drugs/drug use)

@ crime/detective fiction writers, urban fantasy writers, writers who want to put fancy made up sci-fi or fantasy drugs into their homebrew world, writers who write characters who use drugs, and people who just need a good resource for  learning about altered states of consciousness, ive got you.

 i recently remembered two sites i used to frequent for researching psychoactive substances, and they continue to be useful, thorough resources to this day. i also have had a few people come to me over the past few months asking for such resources to help with their writing. i feel like i should share them with everyone! most people might not even find these websites in an average google search.

its hard enough being a writer and having a search history full of ....questionable google searches, all for the sake of research of course. the more taboo or specific the information, the harder it is to find reliable and non-biased sources of research. drugs are likely among the most difficult topc to find information on.  where does a person need to go to learn about such things?  make a deal wth an evil dark web wizard in exchange for forbidden drug knowledge???

wouldn't it be nice if you just already knew some free, safe, surface web websites to go to that would take you directly to the information you're looking for, saving you tons of time of scouring search engines for little crumbs of info?. well, your prayers you didnt even know you had have been answered. here you go:

erowid.org

ive used erowid as my go to for reading other peoples personal experiences with pyschoactive substances since i was a teenager. its not just a drug experience archive though, it also hosts plenty of scientific and historical articles (some very old and rare that would be pressed to find freely available in many other places on the internet) about pyschoactive substances and altered states of consciousness of all varieties. another great thing about erowid: it lists the LEGALITY of each substance it catalogues in many dfferent countres. erowid uses legal, academic and community sources  to provide a much more well rounded view of the topics it hosts.

erowid catalogues personal experiences of real life people who have published their experiences to the site (located in erowid’s psychoactive experience vault). people have recorded their experiences using everything from coffee, to lsd, to cocaine, to 5-meo-dmt, to alcohol, to mad honey, to cough syrup.

it is a go to source if you need some insight into the mind of someone recalling the most intense mushrooom trip of their life, or if you are curious if anyone has actually even *tried* that one obscure drug you heard about in a movie once, or you need to know the hour-by-hour subjective effects of a certain drug. theres good experiences, bad experiences, spiritual experience, mundane experences.  i highly recommend erowid for anyone looking for a more organic, personal, and much less clinical AND less criminalized view at the effects of psychoactive substances on minds and cultures.

https://psychonautwiki.org

pyschonautwiki will give you pretty much everything you need to know about every single psychoactive, ever, and its always being updated.

on any given page you will find information like: historical and cultural use of the drug, what drug class it belongs to, the pharmacological make up, common routes of administration, subjective and physiological effects ranked in terms of how frequently they occur and at what doses, what is considered a threshold dose, an average dose, a heavy dose, an overdose, and a lethal dose (all lethal doses are overdoses, but not all overdoses of every drug out there are lethal), and lots of safety info. this site goes very deep into recording the cognitive, sensory, psychological, emotional and physical effects of drugs.

its a super clean, easy to navigate site. i believe its most useful as a resource to writers who want to know how to portray a drug trip or drug abuse accurately down to the last detail -- as every drug creates a unique and entirely subjective effect.  like erowid, this site’s collection of information expands beyond just substances: it also has information on other states of consciousness not induced by substances, including lucid dreaming, meditation, and near-death-experiences.

long gone are the days of portraying your character’s fever dreams or  sci-f space drug trp as a parade of pink dancing elephants (unless, of course, thats exactly what your’e gong for. then by all means). now you dont have to do nearly as much guess work  as to how a specific substance generally effects people, and get more creative ideas for how you can rattle your character’s psyche.

hopefully, these resources might prove helpful to find a no-bullshit attached  resource with minimal anti-drug propaganda, and most importantly credible information about drugs and drug use. so people can research these things without ever actually getting involved in anything dangerous. they are also, obviously, good harm reduction resources, which is the original intention of these sites.

i will continue to add if i find more good safe websites!

disclaimer: these sites are intended to be used for educational and research purposes. do not try anything illegal or dangerous that may be recorded on these websites.