LA Weekly 
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/23/features-davis.php
APRIL 30 - MAY 6, 2004 


Don't Get High Without It
The Vaults of Erowid supplies the ultimate trip buddy: information
by Erik Davis

(Illustration by Daniel Chang)


Early last February, a 19-year-old sophomore dragged himself into the psychiatric
emergency ward at a large American university hospital, complaining that his friends
and family were plotting against him. Though the fellow knew his thoughts were
irrational, he could not shake his bout of paranoia. He also told the receiving
staff that six weeks earlier he had swallowed an unknown amount of 2C-I, a
recreational drug that, in his case, produced bright colors and swirling patterns
and a suffocating onslaught of cosmic dread. The bad vibes had recurred with
increasing ferocity in the intervening weeks, until he finally decided to check
himself in.

When a third-year medical student named Jack Ludlow showed up for his shift, the
receiving staff were asking themselves the same question that probably just crossed
your own mind: What the hell is 2C-I? Luckily, Ludlow knew something about the
esoteric world of substance use and abuse among young adults, and identified 2C-I as
a rare hallucinogenic phenethylamine. But his search of the usual medical databases
for more detailed information turned up zilch. Then he aimed his Web browser toward
The Vaults of Erowid (www.erowid.org), where he found data about the chemical
structure of 2C-I and a link to the EU's recent scientific review of the substance.
"This information helped us to treat this patient's symptoms", Ludlow wrote in a letter
thanking Erowid. "We expect that his symptoms will resolve completely".

Ludlow's tale is a conventional enough story of medicine in the age of the Internet,
except that Erowid is not your conventional medical database. It is an independent
Web site run by a couple of neo-hippie data geeks without Ph.D.s, institutional
backup or government funding. Two longtime partners who go by the names Earth and
Fire (she's the Fire), they've built the most comprehensive encyclopedia of
psychoactive substances online. Erowid holds 4,500 archived images and over 25,000
individual documents, including dosage charts, indexes of research articles, FAQs
and legal briefs. You can feast your eyes on detailed pharmacological charts, JPEG's
of freebase pipes and mushroom spores, a vibrant vault of psychedelic art, and
thousands of links to everything from the Salvia Divinorum Research and Information
Center to the DEA. But Erowid is more than a vast library of documents concerning
those plants, powders and poisons that continue to bedevil and enchant the human
nervous system. The Web site is also an example of online culture jamming at its
most rigorous and mature.

The topic of psychoactive drugs is a many-headed beast, encompassing pharmacology
and federal law, dirty needles and God. The structure of Erowid reflects this
multidimensional approach: You open the vault for a single substance, like AMT or
heroin, and from there branch out into chemistry, health, history, legal issues and
personal testimonies. By far the most entertaining vault contains thousands of
"experience reports" logged by psychonauts flying high (and taking notes) on exotic
cacti, prescription pharmaceuticals, and newfangled phenethylamines like 2C-I. At
once formulaic and bizarre, these reports provide details about dosage, timing and
body load largely lacking in the hazy trip tales of yore. An individual going by the
name of Fu, for example, reports that s/he consumed one gram of Harmala extract,
followed 40 minutes later by 60 grams of fresh psilocybe cubensis mushrooms:

<blockquote>
From 7:00-7:45 I began to progressively watch my ego disintegrate itself into the
aethyr. This process of ego dissolution started out as a delicate web-like
structure that appeared to be made of silver illuminating threads of silk
emanating from the center of my field of vision. This web continued to increase
in detail and otherworldliness as multi-colored translucent tentacles began to
spiral around each silver thread of this "web".
</blockquote

Strange and sometimes hilarious, these mad-science micro-memoirs recall nothing so
much as 19th-century toxicology, when scientists routinely tested poisons and
psychoactive compounds on themselves while systematically recording subjective
effects.

Though Earth and Fire post many pieces themselves, Erowid is basically a collection
of other people's documents, many of which contradict one another. Psychoactives are
a deeply confounding dimension of the human experience, and the site lets these
loose ends dangle in plain sight, avoiding pat generalizations and absolute claims.
They do not attempt to vet every wild and wacky claim, though they strive to
maintain an overall tone of caution, pragmatism and healthy skepticism. Warnings of
known dangers are prominently posted, but moralizing is abandoned in favor of fact
and reasonable conjecture. The site will not tell you, for example, whether MDMA
will damage your brain. What you will learn is that a guy named BJ Logan didn't
detect any neurotoxicity in randomly bred albino rats injected with 25 mg/kg MDMA,
while another researcher found that Dark Agouti rats showed serotonin depletions at
doses as low as 4 mg/kg. The rest, as they say, is up to you.

Erowid is an enormous hit. The site serves an average 400,000 page views to over
30,000 unique visitors a day, and recently logged more than half a million page hits
in one 24-hour period. Surfers view an average of 13 pages each, which significantly
outpaces most Web sites. Based on Erowid's own surveys, its visitors include
teachers, cops, chemists and pediatricians. By far the largest chunk are students, 3
million or so in 2003, the bulk of whom are undergrads. That's why Erowid's server
traffic dips noticeably during summer and December vacations.

"Erowid is the trusted source for young people who want to get information that's as
uncontaminated by hidden agendas as possible", says Rick Doblin, president of the
Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), which maintains close
ties to the site. As an example, Doblin compares Erowid to Freevibe, a sassy
anti-drug Web site created by Disney and the Office of National Drug Control Policy
(ONDCP). "Freevibe is designed to attract young people, but their MDMA page is
bullshit. By providing misinformation or inaccurate information, you destroy your
credibility. Kids go elsewhere." Doblin believes that Erowid is performing a public
service by providing information that citizens can use to make good choices. "Erowid
shouldnt have to do what it's doing. In an ideal world, it wouldn't exist. This work
would be done by the government."

Inside the psychedelic, rave and harm-reduction communities, Earth and Fire are
considered leaders, even heroes. But they insist they're just a pair of librarians
archivists and "Internet dorks" who believe that better access to better information
just makes for better decisions in the long run. "Basically, we act as if there isn't
prohibition," says Earth. "We are trying to publish this information as if the world
were already making rational choices around this complicated area."

Rationality, however, rarely claws its way into the public discussion of drug use in 
this country. Despite widespread disgust with the war on drugs, the dominant 
American narrative hasn’t budged much since <i>Reefer Madness</i>, which assumed that 
people are defenseless lemmings unable to withstand the seductive and all-consuming 
call of horribly damaging drugs and their demonic proponents. After years working 
under the radar, Erowid is now being painted into this patronizing, B-movie tableau. 
A year ago, CBS News ran an “Eye on America” that focused on the Web site, which 
they faintly praised as “the encyclopedia of altered states.” Their flash case was a 
17-year-old who fell unconscious after taking a combination of 5-MeO-DMT, a mighty 
psychedelic tryptamine, and Syrian rue, a plant rich in a monoamine-oxidase 
inhibitor, or MAOI, called harmaline. By temporarily squelching enzymes that 
metabolize organic amines such as DMT, MAOIs significantly extend the tryptamine’s 
flight time. The fellow learned about this rather risky combo from Erowid, which CBS 
claimed had given the fellow “a brand-new way to flirt with death.” Later that year, 
Fox News ran a predictably hysterical piece about online drug information that 
showed screen shots of Erowid, although the site’s name had been blurred out. Perhaps 
Fox knew that CBS’s earlier spot had doubled Erowid’s server traffic for days.

These reports cast Erowid as little more than cheerleaders proffering recipes for 
gray-matter mischief. “Erowid are presented as somehow opposite the government, as 
totally positive rather than constantly negative,” says MAPS’s Doblin. “But that’s 
just wrong. They’re not pro-drug. They’re pro-choice, and the choice should lie with 
the individual who has access to good information.” Doblin points out that only an 
idiot could mistake the 5-MeO-DMT vault for a pusher’s hard sell. Tales of 
crystalline entities and the implosion of space-time abound — and these are the 
positive reports. Add this to the prominent list of contraindications (which 
includes MAOIs), and most reasonably responsible people would think very hard before 
embarking on the good ship 5-MeO-DMT.

But that’s the rub: How many of Erowid’s users can be said to be reasonably 
responsible? Leaving aside the fact that many people turn to drugs to escape the 
world of reason and responsibility, Doblin’s pro-choice argument requires that users 
are already capable of critical thinking — not to mention navigating the basics of 
pharmacology. “Most people who get on Erowid are bright and well educated,” says 
Edward Boyer, the toxicologist and emergency-room physician who treated the young 
man in the CBS story. “But not everyone is. I mean, how many people know what 
‘contraindication’ means? When I started medical school, I didn’t know what it was.”

Boyer first started tracking online drug sites in 1996, after treating two fellows 
who poisoned themselves with a batch of GHB they had whipped up after discovering a 
recipe online. In 2001, the <i>New England Journal of Medicine</i> published his 
letter accusing Erowid and other “partisan” Web sites of providing dangerous 
misinformation. (Unfortunately, the research and methodology Boyer used were not 
included in his letter, nor did the Journal deign to print Erowid’s rebuttal.) 
Though Boyer has since come to cautiously admire Earth and Fire, and no longer refers 
to their site as “partisan,” he still argues that Erowid minimizes adverse effects 
and includes too much dodgy — and potentially harmful — data in its quest to present 
all sides. “Erowid is so comprehensive, and so much of the information is correct, 
that unless you’re an expert in medical toxicology you may miss the dangerous 
information that’s close to the surface.”

Boyer wants the assurances provided by the professional system of peer review and 
expertise. The problem is that, when it comes to recreational drugs in America, 
politics have largely hijacked these noble mechanisms. Last year, for example, the 
Johns Hopkins neuroscientist George Ricaurte, a prominent and tireless critic of 
MDMA, issued a retraction of a controversial and widely hyped paper published the 
previous year in the prestigious journal <i>Science</i>. Ricaurte’s original study 
reported that monkeys shot up with only moderately strong doses of MDMA experienced 
“severe” damage to their dopamine systems, leading to Parkinson’s-like symptoms and 
some deaths. Embarrassingly, it turned out that Ricaurte’s grad students had 
actually been shooting up the animals with methamphetamine. Though some interpreted 
the retraction as evidence of the self-correcting nature of science, the real 
question — posed by the prominent British medical researchers Colin Blakemore and 
Les Iversen, among others — was why Ricaurte’s report was published in the first 
place, given that its results were so out of whack with what we know about the very 
real neurotoxicity of MDMA. If Ricaurte’s study were true, then ravers would 
routinely be forced to dance over the corpses of their triple-dosing peers.

The unspoken reality is that, in today’s America, politics overwhelms the scientific 
investigation of recreational drugs. Ricaurte, for example, receives the bulk of his 
large research funds from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), while 
researchers interested in exploring the positive aspect of drugs like MDMA not only 
face a lack of funding or federal approval, but professional suicide. As Earth 
explains, “The people who know the most about this subject don’t talk about it 
publicly, because they are legitimately afraid for their careers.”

By creating an anonymous and evolving space of discussion, debate and trust, Erowid 
has not abandoned peer review, but precariously extended its boundaries. Published 
research findings cohabit with postings from anonymous research scientists and the 
interpenetrating comments of freelance alchemists, wackos and all manner of drug 
nerds. Earth calls it “grassroots peer review,” a process that involves self-
selecting contributors whose collective intelligence increases through the dynamics 
of a highly networked and committed community.

Though it largely ignores policy debates, Erowid is a striking example of guerrilla 
information war. Millions of people, particularly young people, regularly access a 
repository of data whose very accessibility erodes the coercive exaggerations, 
hysteria and outright lies common to government and mainstream-media discussion of 
drugs. In addition, the very form of Erowid, which presents a model of an honest and 
open-minded psychoactive culture, encourages intelligent decision making. Earth and 
Fire don’t take up guns in the drug war; they blanket the battleground with leaflets.




I met Earth and Fire a few years ago through a rave collective that held its parties 
in an Episcopal church in San Francisco before the hedonic glee broke the limits of 
divine tolerance. Now in their mid-30s, the couple have been together since they 
were teenagers. Both are recognizably Midwestern: Fire’s Björk-ish moon face is 
framed by straight brown hair, while Earth has a towering Nordic frame, shoulder-
length blond hair and a firm, determined jaw decorated with a wispy goatee. She 
speaks with a clipped, fiercely intelligent directness that might come off as oddly 
masculine were it not for Earth’s equally fierce, if more verbose, ray-gun patter. 
In both their dress and their self-possessed manner, they seem uncannily symbiotic. 
In person and even on the phone, they often finish each other’s sentences.

This conviviality is a good thing, since they spend nearly all their time together, 
slumped side by side before their monitors, cranking away at their Web site for up 
to 80 hours a week. They work out of a rambling ranch house in the foothills of the 
Sierras, with two cats named Circe and Pan and a growing library of drug books. 
Their mind-altering substance of choice is not mushrooms or pot but caffeine, which 
they consume in rather enormous quantities. Erowid, they joke, is fueled by Mountain 
Dew.

Erowid accepts no advertising, and Earth and Fire’s shoestring budget is based 
solely on contributions. Though their site receives outside donations, Earth and Fire 
have no institutional support, and no trust funds to draw from. For the last few 
years, nearly half of their costs were floated by Bob Wallace, employee number nine 
at Microsoft and a strong supporter of psychedelic research. But Wallace died 
unexpectedly in his San Rafael home in the fall of 2002, and Erowid’s coffers are 
now basically empty. The couple are trying to motivate themselves to fund-raise. “One 
of the positive things about being broke is that we don’t feel comfortable asking 
for money until we don’t have any,” Earth jokes.

Earth and Fire first met in high school near Minneapolis. Fire prefers not to talk 
on record about her family, but Earth explains that his father was an engineer who 
filled their house with computers way back in the 1970s. His dad was committed to 
lifelong learning and believed that people should hang out with folks of widely 
different ages. He also believed that Coca-Cola makes you smarter. He encouraged the 
neighborhood kids to hang out with him at their house, and calmed their somewhat 
puzzled parents with the promise that the kids’ grades would go up — but only if 
they were allowed to drink as much Coke as they desired. He was usually right.

From the get-go, Earth developed a logical and fiercely independent turn of mind. 
But he was not a rebel, and in junior high, he was actively critical of drug use. The 
only stoner in his class was a jerk, and that kid’s older brother had stolen Earth’s 
bicycle. “So the model I had was that people who did drugs were losers and thieves.” 
This view was confirmed by the Reagan-era “Just Say No” messages saturating the 
educational system. Then one day, Earth’s health teacher claimed that human beings 
were the only animals stupid enough to use drugs. This contradicted a <i>Science 
News</i> story Earth had recently read about belligerent African elephants tearing 
through large structures in order to get their snouts into booze. “I started to 
realize that the information I was getting was . . .”

“Tangential to the truth,” says Fire.

During senior year, Earth was asked by his fellow student-council members to help 
man the door at the freshman dance. To spice up the evening, the council president 
suggested they smoke pot together. Earth was shocked. Asking around, he soon 
discovered that most of the top students in his class had experimented with cannabis 
but didn’t want him to know about their delectation because of his hard-ass stance 
on the issue. Earth had pierced through one of the many falsehoods presented by 
prohibitionist propaganda, which is that balanced and successful people don’t use 
illicit psychoactives.

Earth and Fire started going out after high school, when both of them attended a 
small university in Florida where they majored in humanities. (Earth, who later 
designed scientific databases, had no interest in doing computer science; the 
computers he had at home were much better than those at school.) It wasn’t until 
after they graduated that the couple took acid — or, in Earth’s typically more 
exacting description, “a random piece of paper that I was given and told was LSD.” 
They briefly returned to Minnesota, where they felt self-consciously freaky in their 
embroidered jeans and long hair. So they decided to move to the Bay Area, where they 
could be, as Earth puts it, “somewhat conservative normal people.”

It was 1994, and the Bay Area was riding high on the combined energies of the 
Internet boom, the rave scene and an increasingly self-conscious psychedelic revival.
 Earth and Fire met large numbers of psychedelic users who broke the usual 
stereotypes. Earth once again confronted the lesson of his student-council year. “I 
encountered people who were dynamic, interesting and creative intellectuals — 
successful people who told me that I should try taking these things. This was 
dissonant with the government’s information.” (This, by the way, is how Earth talks.
)

In order to resolve that dissonance, Earth and Fire started researching, and soon 
found themselves hooked — not on the drugs, but on the work. “The world is full of 
psychoactives,” says Fire. “When you see that it’s not just LSD and heroin and 
cocaine, that there are plants everywhere, you start to realize how deep the field 
is, and how much information there is to keep track of. You also realize how lacking 
the government information is. Not only was the minimal data we were getting on the 
Web contradictory to government sources, but it was contradictory to itself.”

Their desire to organize and provide access to such a vast and multifaceted field of 
data led them to found Erowid in 1995. “Each person on the planet has something that 
fits them,” says Fire, who serves as Erowid’s designer and information architect and 
writes many of the site’s basic pages. “Very quickly after starting this project, it 
became clear that it fit me. In college I found it difficult to get excited about 
focusing on one discipline for the rest of my life. Erowid is extremely 
interdisciplinary, so it has allowed me to follow my interests in chemistry, botany, 
history, anthropology and law.”

Earth explains that Erowid satisfied an archival urge he traces back to Dungeons & 
Dragons, which he once played religiously. The role-playing game exploits the fetish 
for mapping and collecting stuff and presents, like drug lore, a curious balance of 
the fantastic and the technical. Fire also used to write stories with her friends 
and draw detailed pictures of the floor plans of the characters’ homes. “It was very 
D&D but from a different angle.”

“From a girlie angle,” Earth adds.

“It wasn’t that girlie.”

But it was geeky. Earth calls the commonality “an idle-ish, paperwork, detail-
oriented kind of systems thinking — a kind of externalization of memory. That’s a 
huge part of what Erowid is. There is no way to keep track of that amount of 
information without a robot assistant.” In other words, arranging and programming a 
good database actually makes the information more intelligent.

Initially, the Erowid robot had the modest goal of supplementing Hyperreal, then the 
largest purveyor of drug data online. The couple were particularly drawn to obscure 
and highly technical information about extraction techniques, alkaloid contents and 
improvements in psilocybin cultivation. In 1996, the administrators for Hyperreal 
ceased maintaining the site, and within two years, Erowid moved onto the Hyperreal 
server and absorbed the older site, instantly doubling its traffic. Though another 
site, called the Lycaeum, also provides a healthy, if wilder, brew of data (at 
<i>www.lycaeum.org</i>), and scores of sites devote themselves to individual 
compounds, Erowid comes closest to a comprehensive archive of contemporary 
psychoactive-drug information.

It’s not an easy place to be. The couple are perpetually overwhelmed by the need to 
manage, update and publish a torrent of information. “It doesn’t take an informed 
person five minutes to find huge gaps,” says Earth. Their tobacco and caffeine 
vaults are tiny, and the MDMA FAQ is horribly out of date. Large tracts of their site 
lie fallow. “Areas like ‘Ask Erowid,’ where visitors can ask questions that aren’t 
addressed on the site, are a source of unending suffering,” says Fire. “Months go by 
without a question being answered. If I think about that, I start to feel sick.”

But Erowid now has more-pressing demands. E-mails from emergency medical technicians 
and physicians attest that Erowid has saved lives, and scores of health 
professionals have made the site their primary online source when dealing with 
unfamiliar drug problems. And young adults are turning to it in droves. “When we 
first started, we were interested in documenting the cutting edge of information 
about psychoactives,” says Fire. “That had to change as it became clear that people 
were using Erowid in a way we had not originally intended. Not having the basic 
background information seemed dangerous in some ways.” The flip side of this public 
service is a mountain of responsibility — pressure that makes for the sort of high-
minded workaholism that, combined with empty coffers, can easily lead to burnout. 
Paranoia also waits in the wings. Though the couple keep the site free from the sort 
of tasty bits useful to law enforcement, and will literally turn away from 
conversations that tell them more than they want to know about individuals involved 
in manufacture and supply, Earth and Fire sometimes fear they will get harassed 
simply out of spite.



Along with mistaking Earth and Fire for ravenous drug fiends, people often assume 
that they’re radical libertarians on the issue of drug legalization. “No controls?” 
counters Earth. “That seems crazed to me. I like government controls in a lot of 
ways. I think stop signs at four-way intersections are fantastic.” What concerns the 
couple is how prohibition distorts the understanding of our world’s psychoactive 
reality. “Consciousness is a chemically mediated process,” says Earth. “The pretense 
of the drug war is that, if we could just get rid of all these crazy chemicals, 
people wouldn’t be faced with the choice of whether to take strong psychoactives. In 
fact, today I can buy all manner of antidepressants, anxiolytics and stimulants. 
From a very early age, we are faced with caffeine, which our society only pretends 
isn’t a powerful psychoactive.”

And we ain’t seen nothing yet. According to Earth, we are now witnessing the early 
stages of what will be an explosion of more or less approved mind-altering 
technologies — not just drugs, but powerful digital technologies as well. “In the 
next 20 years, we will be faced with some very sticky issues. By oversimplifying the 
complicated moral, ethical and medical questions surrounding such technologies, the 
authorities infantilize the general public. They don’t provide tools for people to 
make rational choices. Instead they manipulate emotion through fear. They present a 
model where there is only a single answer.”

Earth and Fire are the first to admit that Erowid’s philosophy is a gamble. “There 
isn’t anything that I don’t question about our work,” Earth admits. “Every piece of 
information that we put up is potentially misusable.” Dangerous recipes and “pseudo-
facts” permeate the site. But Earth and Fire argue that important discussions should 
not be limited by the specter of what an uncorked or foolish person might do in its 
vicinity. “People do stupid things no matter what,” says Fire. “The drug war started 
long before the Internet, and there’s no reason to believe that people’s actions 
have become more stupid due to the online availability of information about 
psychoactives.”

Still, Earth readily admits that one of Erowid’s major problems is that crackpot or 
out-of-date documents, included for the sake of diversity or historical interest, 
could easily be misinterpreted by a naive user as gospel writ. One of the main goals 
of Erowid 3.0, a massive upgrade that the couple are coding this summer, is to 
provide users with quick in-house ratings of documents as well as a way to track 
their history and origin. But the real issue is not the quality of Erowid’s data, 
which is largely published elsewhere and which even critics like Boyer acknowledge 
is pretty high. The real issue concerns the cultural consequences of creating a 
handy, one-stop online database of such tantalizing lore. The experience reports, for 
example, are a veritable <i>Penthouse Forum</i> of psychoactive escapades — a 
“virtual peer group” in Boyer’s terms, and one that certainly encourages use.

But prohibition eggs people on, too. David Franklin, a counselor at a private high 
school in Richmond, California, who works with at-risk kids, tells the story of two 
boys who decided to try pot simply because they knew they were getting a fish story. 
“A lot of kids realize that they’ve been given false information about drugs,” says 
Franklin. “They don’t know what’s a lie or what’s a truth. They think everything is 
false.” Unlike the government, Franklin believes that, when presented with real 
options and solid information, kids are generally able to make good decisions. He 
was once faced with a depressed 15-year-old girl who wanted to try LSD. Along with 
explaining the potential dark side of acid, he sent her to Erowid to read about 
other people’s experiences. After poring through the material, she decided that her 
visit to electric ladyland could wait.

Even Boyer admits that online information may turn off as many potential partiers as 
it turns on. At NIDA’s behest, he is currently studying the relationship between the 
Internet and illicit drug use among at-risk kids. So far, the results are ambiguous. 
“We’ve had people who are not drug users read about <i>Salvia divinorum</i> and 
thought it was cool and started using it. By the same token, we’ve had people who 
used to snort Ritalin get on the Web, find out that it was bad, and quit.”

The role the Internet plays in psychoactive use is also complicated by the steady 
trickle of new designer drugs, or “research chemicals” as Erowid calls them, many of 
which, like 2C-I, modify known psychoactive molecules. Because of this close 
resemblance, most of these substances are, arguably, restricted under the Analogue 
Act of 1986, which prohibits drugs that are “substantially similar” to scheduled 
compounds. Given the vagueness of this language, though, a steady stream of quasi-
legal powders provide highs that stay one step ahead of the DEA’s scheduling process.
 Often based on the chemist Alexander Shulgin’s magisterial research work with his 
wife, Ann, in their catalogs of firsthand experiences, <i>PiHKAL</i> and 
<i>TiHKAL</i>, these chemicals begin their life circulating through “boutique 
markets” or what Fire calls “family networks” of dedicated psychonauts. Some of the 
more fun ones then move into a larger gray market, where they overlap or supplement 
established club drugs. As with the well-known (and loved) 2C-B, synthesized by 
Shulgin in 1974 but not marketed until the late 1980s, these more popular compounds 
often become controlled substances themselves. In 2002, 2C-T-7, 5-MeO-DiPT (a.k.a. 
“Foxy”) and the obscure but venerable AMT all wound up scheduled alongside acid and 
heroin.

The role that information plays in this cycle is, as Earth might say, nontrivial. 
Early on, potential users need to know that such substances exist, and are 
reportedly interesting, before they face the task of buying them online or getting a 
chemist friend to synthesize them. By providing information about these compounds, 
especially in the pivotal matter of dosage, Erowid inevitably drives the culture. A 
few years ago, the couple decided to label new research chemicals with a fat yellow 
biohazard symbol to indicate to potential psychonauts that, given the paucity of 
data, they were taking their brains in their own hands. To Erowid’s considerable 
chagrin, some gray-market vendors began using the very same symbol to hype their 
latest wares.

Clearly, online drug information is another one of those escaped genies that are now 
ravaging consensus reality. The best hope — and the one that motivates Earth and 
Fire — is to force the evolution of intelligence through good data, an ethos of 
responsibility and courage, and a seductive culture of critical thinking. “The 
belief that got us started and carried us forward is that everybody should have 
access to the same information,” says Fire. “Then we can actually discuss what’s true 
and not, the problems and benefits. But if law is working off one set of data, and 
users on their lore, and physicians on journals that no one can afford to subscribe 
to, then there’s no way to integrate the data and make better decisions.”

In any case, prohibition will never be the same. Erowid has already forced 
government sources like NIDA and ONDCP to become more sophisticated as they face a 
widening credibility gap with young people. In 2002, Earth and Fire were 
flabbergasted to receive an invitation to speak at a small NIDA conference on 
“Drugs, Youth, and the Internet.” The couple felt that the meetings, though surreal, 
went well. During one discussion about possible collaborations between NIDA and 
Erowid, one NIDA researcher argued strongly that the two groups should not work 
together. Such collaboration, he said, might ruin Erowid’s reputation.