Xenophon's ten thousand Greeks flat on their backs in a Turkish mountain village in 401 BCE. That is a trip report.
Albert Hofmann's laboratory journal breaking off mid-sentence in 1943. Trip report.
Aldous Huxley looking at three flowers in a glass vase in 1953 and writing sixty pages about it. Trip report.
R. G. Wasson sitting in a dark room in Oaxaca in 1955 listening to María Sabina sing. Trip report, and one that went out to the masses.
The archive nobody planned
When formal research shut down in 1970, the questions did not. People kept having experiences and kept writing them down. Add Reddit, Bluelight, DMT-Nexus and a dozen others and the total now runs into the hundreds of thousands. All trip reports.
That archive is a gift. It is also a minefield, and knowing how to walk through it is a real skill.
Shulgin saw the problem first
During testing, scientist Alexander Shulgin understood immediately that “it was intense” and “it was really something” are worthless scientifically. So he built a scale.
| Rating | What it means |
|---|---|
| MINUS (−) | No effect at all. |
| PLUS/MINUS (±) | Something may be happening, or it may be your imagination. |
| PLUS ONE (+1) | Definitely active, but no sensory change. |
| PLUS TWO (+2) | Clear effects on perception and thought, still controllable. |
| PLUS THREE (+3) | Fully engaged, impossible to do anything else. |
| PLUS FOUR (+4) | A rare and separate category reserved for the genuinely transcendent. He was clear that it could not be reached by increasing the dose. |
Every single compound was rated this way, in the same conditions, with the same small group, over decades. That is what turns anecdote into data.
Seven critical things impacting every report
- Did they actually know what they took? Almost nobody tests. A report titled “LSD” may describe something that was never LSD at all. See the NBOMe warning, because this is exactly where that danger lives.
- Did they know how much? Eyeballed doses are the norm. A gram of mushrooms from one batch can be several times stronger than a gram from another.
- Was anything else involved? Alcohol, cannabis and prescription medication appear in a great many reports and are mentioned as impactful variables in far fewer.
- What were the set and setting? These drive outcomes enormously and are rarely mentioned. Somebody's state of mind going in, who they were with, and where they were can tell you more about what happened than the drug.
- Timing? Most reports are written days or weeks later, and by then the story has been told a few times. Memory reshapes itself with each telling.
- Who is not writing about their experience? A big one. Extraordinary experiences get posted and ordinary ones do not. The person who had a pleasant, unremarkable afternoon rarely sits down to compose two thousand words about it.
- Is the language description or metaphor? These experiences resist ordinary words, so people reach for images. “The walls were breathing.” “I became the music.” Those are honest attempts at the impossible, not literal reports.
And here is the part that matters most
Poorly written or not, the reports over the last fifteen years have changed history.
For decades, people writing about their trip experiences kept saying the same things. That they had stopped wanting to drink alcohol. That cigarettes had simply lost their hold. That a fear they had carried their whole lives had vanished.
Formal science could not investigate any of it, so it sat in the archive, waiting patiently for the light to shine. Behold the light!
Smoking
A Johns Hopkins pilot study of psilocybin combined with cognitive behavioral therapy found that sixty-seven percent of participants were still not smoking twelve months after their quit date. A subsequent randomized trial found fifty-nine percent verified abstinence at twelve months against twenty-three percent for nicotine replacement. Standard treatments do not even come close to those numbers.
Alcohol
A randomized controlled trial published in JAMA Psychiatry in 2022 found that two doses of psilocybin alongside psychotherapy significantly reduced heavy drinking days in people with alcohol use disorder, compared against an active placebo. Just the beginning.
Opioids
The ibogaine work described in Chapter Three began with one nineteen-year-old in 1962 who noticed his craving was gone and spent thirty years asking somebody to look into it.
And the oldest fear of all, finally put to bed
The 1960s claim that these substances cause lasting mental illness has not survived scrutiny. A population study of 130,152 adults published in 2013 found no association between lifetime psychedelic use and mental health problems.
That does not mean no risk, and Chapter Nine is honest about who these treatments are not for. It does mean the specific alarm that closed the door in 1970 was not supported by the evidence.
Every one of those findings started as somebody typing up what happened to them and posting it where a stranger might read it.
The reports were never proof. But over and over, they were the ones pointing at the door, patiently, for years, until science finally came along with a key.
Facts first. And curiosity always.
This is just one section. How the World Gets High has ten more chapters in front of it.