In the interview study, 29 current or past users of entheogenic drugs were interviewed about their experiences in two phases of study during the years 2015–2016 and 2019. Participants were recruited from a broad range of Internet communities, including norshroom.org, psychonaut.com, norcan.org, www.dmt-nexus.me, various Reddit groups, and actualized.org, either via general recruitment threads that explained the purpose of the study and invited people to participate, or via private messages to individual users who had previously posted to threads comparing cannabis and psychedelics. Criteria for selection were adulthood (18+) and current or past psychedelic use in self-identified spiritual contexts; these criteria were stated clearly in initial invitations, and no individuals expressing a wish to participate in the study were in fact excluded. Interviews were asynchronous and Internet-mediated, and participants were encouraged to interact with the interviewer via anonymized email or messaging that protected their identity from the researcher. Most interviews lasted from two to four weeks. In communications with interviewees, the term ‘spiritual’ was left undefined to avoid imposing limits on its content. This approach, inspired by Ammerman (2014), allowed for subsequent analysis of participants’ usage of the term, and such an analysis of entheogen users’ presentation of their spirituality is available in Johnstad (2018).
The study was designed in conformity with Norwegian Social Science Data Services ethical guidelines. Ethical approval for the first phase of the interview study was obtained from the Norwegian Social Science Data Services (NSSDS, reference 40,281/3/KH). Because privacy criteria were fulfilled, NSSDS waived ethical approval for the second part of the interview study, as well as for the survey. The study emphasized the preservation of participant anonymity, and aimed to ensure that no participant would be identifiable either to the researcher or to readers of published material. A few narratives have been translated from Norwegian, and statements have been edited for brevity and relevance. Insignificant details have sometimes been altered to preserve anonymity. Participants gave their informed consent to be included in the study, and were asked to read through and verify the use of their narratives. As interviews took the form of written communication (email or private messages at the forum), transcription was unnecessary. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2006) and Kvale and Brinkmann’s (2015) procedure for meaning condensation, and themes were constructed in an open-ended, exploratory, and data-driven comparative analysis of participant narratives. The interview process allowed for the resolution of ambiguities through follow-up questions.
The Cannabis and Psychedelics User Survey was constructed on the basis of these interviews, with questions and the range of possible survey responses being based on themes identified in the interview analysis. In particular, the motivations for cannabis and psychedelics use and the characteristics of resulting experiences were based on information obtained from interviews. Before the survey was deployed, it went through a round of asynchronous testing on 18 volunteers recruited online, although this resulted only in minor revisions. The survey was made generally available online via SurveyXact from April to September 2019 for self-selected participation. It was fully anonymous and recorded no identifying participant information, including IP addresses. Several articles based on the Cannabis and Psychedelics User Survey are currently in preparation (Johnstad 2020a, 2020b; Johnstad PG: The psychedelic personality: personality structure and associations in a sample of psychedelics users, forthcoming). The survey text and the dataset are available as online attachments.
Participants for the survey were obtained from seven communities: www.shroomery.org, www.dmt-nexus.me, www.bluelight.org, the Facebook page for Portland Psychedelic Society, the Reddit group r/Psychedelics, the Norwegian Association for Safer Drug Policy, and an informal group of psychedelics users in Bergen, Norway. Participants were recruited either via invitation threads started at each forum or via a snowballing email invitation. Women were especially invited to participate in the survey. The only inclusion criteria were adulthood (18 years or older), the ability to understand English well, and having experience with a commonly used psychedelic drug. Individuals who did not meet the inclusion criteria were linked to a shorter version of the survey, and their data were not used in the analyses. Respondents reported using between 10 and 30 min to complete the survey.
Measures
The Cannabis and Psychedelics User Survey included basic demographic questions relating to age, gender, education, work status, and relationship status. Gender was measured with three categories (female, male, and other), but when the gender variable was used as a control in statistical analyses, seven participants who indicated an “other” gender were excluded from the analysis. Education was quantified from 1 = “Have not completed high school” to 6 = “PhD”. Participants were also asked about their religious or spiritual background and their present religious or spiritual affiliations, as well as their current spiritual practice. Further questions examined their usage history and/or present use of cannabis and the psychedelic drugs of the 2C family (2C-B [2,5-dimethoxy-4-bromophenethylamine] etc.), 5-MeO-DMT (5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine), Ayahuasca (or analogues), smoked DMT (N,N-Dimethyltryptamine), LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide), MDMA (3,4-Methylenedioxy-methamphetamine), Mescaline/Peyote, Psilocybin/Magic mushrooms, and Salvia divinorum. The survey asked participants to choose one psychedelic drug from this list that they had experience with, and they were queried about their motivations for the use of this drug and asked to characterize emotional, cognitive and relational aspects of their most meaningful experience with the drug, of a typical experience, and of their worst experience. This included an assessment of the meaningfulness of the experience taken from Griffiths et al. (2006), where participants rated the experience on a six-level scale (from 1 = “Most meaningful experience of your life” to 6 = “An everyday experience”). Finally, they were asked to characterize the consequences of their use of this drug for their physical health, psychological health, personal happiness, ability to get along with other people, and spiritual practice, each of which was measured on a five-level Likert scale (from 1 = “Serious worsening” or similar to 5 = “Serious improvement” or similar). The same range of questions were asked about cannabis for participants who had experience with this drug (95% of the sample). In addition, participants were asked to rate their current use of a range of non-psychedelic drugs quantified as 1 = “Daily”, 2 = “A few times per week”, 3 = “A few times per month”, 4 = “A few times per year”, and 5 = “Never”.
In order to measure the personality of the participants, the survey included a version of Gosling et al.'s (2003) Ten-Item Personality Inventory (TIPI), measured on a five-level Likert scale from “disagree strongly” to “agree strongly”. The TIPI is a concise measurement tool with only two items for each Big Five trait, but has been shown to have adequate construct validity, test–retest reliability, and patterns of external correlates (Gosling et al. 2003). TIPI scores were normalized for comparisons with available norms based on a seven-level scale according to the following formula: TIPI_normalized = ((TIPI_original – 1) * 6/4) + 1.
The survey also included a version of Nicholson et al. (2005) Risk Taking Index (RTI), measured on a five-level scale from “never” to “very often”. The original RTI contained an item for health risk that related to substance use, and to adapt the scale to a sample of cannabis and psychedelics users this item was removed. Thus, the modified RTI used for this survey included only five items: recreational risk, career risk, financial risk, safety risk, and social risk. To compensate for the removal of health risk in this population of psychedelics users, the combined overall RTI score was multiplied by 6/5. The original RTI asked participants to assess their risk taking both now and in the past, combining the two assessments into an overall score, while the modified RTI used in this survey, in order to preserve participants’ time, asked for only one assessment. Individual RTI scores for each risk domain were normalized for comparisons with available norms by multiplying the score by 2, thus in effect equalizing scores for the past and the present. As Nicholson et al. (2005) found that risk-taking decreases with age, the substitution of past scores with present scores in the modified RTI should serve to reduce risk taking scores as compared to the original RTI. As detailed in Johnstad PG: The psychedelic personality: personality structure and associations in a sample of psychedelics users, forthcoming, risk taking scores in the present study were, nevertheless, uniformly higher than the scores presented by Nicholson et al. (2005).
Statistical analysis
In order to explore differences in motivations for drug use, characteristics of drug experiences, and self-assessed consequences of drug use, multivariate regression was used to assess the impact of spiritual motivation while controlling for commonly used demographic covariates (Hendricks et al. 2015; Nour et al. 2017) as well as the Big Five personality traits, the overall risk taking score (RTI), and the usage frequency of cannabis, psychedelics, and a range of non-psychedelic drugs. Separate multivariate logistic regression analyses were used to identify the independent variables that predicted dependent variables related to motivations for drug use and characteristics of drug experiences, and multivariate linear regression analyses were used to identify the independent variables that predicted dependent variables related to consequences of drug use. For each multivariate regression, independent variables were gender (coded as female = 0, male = 1), age, education, the six personality traits, five general drug use variables (coded from 1 = “Daily” to 5 = “Never”), two variables for cannabis and psychedelics use occasions the last 12 months (coded from 1 = “Zero” to 5 = “101+”), a variable for the duration of cannabis experience (coded from 1 = “Less than a year” to 5 = “10+ years”), and a dichotomous variable for whether or not the participant endorsed having a spiritual motivation for cannabis use (yes = 1). The multivariate linear regression analyses added a dichotomous variable for whether or not the participant endorsed having an escapist motivation for cannabis use (yes = 1). In all these analyses, ordinal variables were treated as continuous. Data was analyzed with IBM SPSS Statistics 25.