19 Nov THE TRIP PLANNERS | THE NEW YORKER
The New Yorker magazine offers a detailed and insightful examination of Erowid, the online clearing house for information about psychoactive substances. Writer Emily Witt visits the rural California home of Earth and Fire Erowid, the couple behind the hugely successful web site that attracts a broad following of “drug geeks” and medical professionals.
“The average age of Erowid’s thirty thousand Twitter followers is twenty-six. The most frequently looked-at profiles are those of LSD, MDMA, and mushrooms. For years, Erowid’s traffic has declined during school breaks—a gauge of its popularity among eighteen-to-twenty-five-year-olds, the demographic most given to experimenting with drugs. Earth and Fire have spoken before the American Academy of Clinical Toxicology and the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and in 2011 the reform-minded Drug Policy Alliance gave them the Dr. Andrew Weil Award for Achievement in the Field of Drug Education. They have also co-authored several papers in peer-reviewed journals (for example, ‘Use Patterns and Self-Reported Effects of Salvia Divinorum,’ in Drug and Alcohol Dependence) and have collaborated on projects related to such drugs as hallucinogens and opiates with researchers at various institutions, including N.Y.U. and Johns Hopkins.”