The best psychedelic (survey results)

Depends on what you value

The ayahuasca oneshotting meme inspired me. I did a big drug survey, where I asked people which drugs they’d done, and then asked them questions about those drugs. I now have a pretty cool dataset full of drug rankings, and I’ll be doing a series of posts breaking down how different drugs compare to each other, what this correlates with, etc.

(If you wanna catch those when I publish them, feel free to subscribe. It’s free!)

But anyway - I wanted to figure out which drug was the best. But best drugs are relative - some people might really want infinite fractal pleasure, while others might want something that’ll tidy up their motivation to finish their PhD.

So I did another survey where I had people (around 400-500) rate how much they wanted drugs to do various things for them. I then ran factor analysis on this dataset, and found four big clusters in the ways people valued drugs.

If you’ve done rarer drugs and would like to take the survey, please do it now, before you read the results and get primed!

YOLO

The strongest factor was the way people answered questions around risk, stability, and harm. On the yolo side, they preferred higher intensity drugs, and didn’t mind radical alterations to their life, bad trips, or causing people around them to express concern. On the risk-averse side, people preferred drugs that were milder, didn’t cause delusions, didn’t result in periods of altered reality, no contact with other spiritual beings, etc.

So here’s drugs ranked according to the YOLO spectrum, starting with highest YOLO and continuing downwards into risk aversion.

1. Ayahuasca (0.69)

2. 5MeODMT (0.64)

3. DMT (0.59)

4. Salvia (0.56)

5. LSD (0.56)

6. Psilocybin (0.51)

7. 2CI (0.50)

8. DXM (0.47)

9. Marijuana (0.46)

10. Mescaline (0.43)

11. 2CE (0.42)

12. 4AcODMT (0.42)

13. Alcohol (0.42)

14. 4MMC (0.41)

15. MDMA (0.40)

16. Ecstasy (0.40)

17. Ketamine (0.39)

18. MDA (0.38)

19. Nitrous (0.37)

20. 2cB (0.35)

21. GHB (0.32)

To clarify, I didn’t ask people to rank these drugs according to a yolo-riskaversion spectrum. What I did was ask people who’d taken e.g. ayahuasca, “did you radically change your life after ayahuasca?” And if they said yes, ayahuasca got a high ‘radical life change’ score. This then weighted it towards the YOLO side of the spectrum, which was created off a different survey.

Thus, you can read these list of drugs as drugs where the user reports of that drug, line up the best with this series of values.

So if you’re very risk averse, GHB, 2cB, and Nitrous seem like some of the best drugs to do. In general, they’re the lowest anxiety, lowest belief-altering, lowest life-shaking-up drugs on the list.

On the other end, if you wanna turbopunch your life to the face or don’t mind a little internal screaming, Ayahuasca, 5MeODMT, DMT, and salvia would be the way to go.

Spiritual Thrivery

The second strongest spectrum seemed to be about a drug’s impacts to general life wellbeing. Empathy, purpose, spirituality, trauma healing, and “endorsing having done the drug in hindsight” were the biggest predicters here.

So, among the cluster of values promoting this type of inner work - what drugs got the best ratings along these axes?

1. Ayahuasca (0.85)

2. 5MeODMT (0.70)

3. Psilocybin (0.66)

4. LSD (0.64)

5. DMT (0.57)

6. MDMA (0.57)

7. Ecstasy (0.50)

8. 4AcODMT (0.48)

9. Mescaline (0.46)

10. MDA (0.43)

11. Ketamine (0.41)

12. Marijuana (0.39)

13. 4MMC (0.38)

14. 2CE (0.37)

15. 2cB (0.35)

16. 2CI (0.34)

17. Salvia (0.32)

18. DXM (0.32)

19. GHB (0.31)

20. Nitrous (0.25)

21. Alcohol (0.25)

Ayahuasca, the highest-YOLO drug, also wins for highest spiritual thrivery drug. The top of the list looks pretty similar, but with a few shifts. I enjoy salvia’s drop from high yolo to low therapeutic benefit.

Out of curiosity, I combined the list. What if you want to know the most spiritually healing drugs, but wanted to weight this by risk? What good drugs are still worth it?

The “risk score minus spiritual healing score” results in this ranking:

1. MDMA
2. Ayahuasca
3. Psilocybin
4. Ecstasy
5. LSD
6. 5MeODMT
7. 4AcODMT
8. MDA
9. Mescaline
10. Ketamine
11. 2cB
12. GHB
13. DMT
14. 4MMC
15. 2CE
16. Marijuana
17. Nitrous
18. DXM
19. 2CI
20. Alcohol
21. Salvia

You might notice I have MDMA and ecstasy listed separately, despite supposedly being the same drug. I did this cause I wanted to know if people would rate these drugs differently. Ecstasy, the rumor mill has it, is often mixed with other things, such as stimulants, while MDMA itself is supposed to be the pure thing.

Ecstasy, in my data, got rated extremely similarly to MDMA, but slightly worse, among almost all dimensions. It’s unclear to what degree this is from ecstasy in fact being mixed with other stuff, vs. people in cultures that call the drug ‘ecstasy’, are more likely to do it while partying than people in cultures that call it ‘mdma’, and are more likely to do it therapeutically. Who knows!

Anyway, onto the third factor:

Functionality

This value system orbits around function. Items ranked high in this cluster were stuff like positive impact on motivation, cognition, or good to get work done on, or being more physically skilled, or creative.

Drugs that scored highest along these axis were:

1. 4AcODMT (0.36)
2. LSD (0.32)
3. Psilocybin (0.32)
4. Ayahuasca (0.30)
5. MDMA (0.28)
6. Marijuana (0.27)
7. 5MeODMT (0.25)
8. MDA (0.24)
9. Ecstasy (0.24)
10. 2CE (0.23)
11. 4MMC (.22)
12. Mescaline (0.21)
13. Alcohol (0.20)
14. DMT (0.19)
15. GHB (0.18)
16. Ketamine (0.18)
17. 2cB (0.17)
18. 2CI (0.17)
19. DXM (0.15)
20. Salvia (0.11)
21. Nitrous (0.11)

I should probably talk about sample size.

In the drug survey, I asked people to check drugs off a list if they’d done the drug before. I then gave them the same set of questions for each drug, and it was randomized, so that if people got bored halfway through the quits would be evenly distributed.

Sample size varied a lot per drug, and were as follows, ranked from highest to lowest sample: Marijuana 1,431, Psilocybin 1,219, LSD 1,056, MDMA 747, Ecstasy 630, Ketamine 522, Nitrous 497, Alcohol 384, DMT 295, 2cB 280, Salvia 262, GHB 141, DXM 141, Mescaline 110, MDA 89, 5MeODMT 78, Ayahuasca 77, 4AcODMT 52, 2CI 50, 2CE 42, 4MMC 37.00

Alcohol is unusually low because I added it late. I deliberately stayed away from common ‘party’ drugs, mostly because it would have inflated the survey a lot and shifting questions to include party drugs would have been a level of complicated I wasn’t ready for. But belatedly I was like, shit, I should probably include something like a control, where almost everybody is pretty familiar with what it’s like, to help compare against other drugs we might have less experience with.

I didn’t include drugs below a sample cutoff of n=30. The highest rated drug along this axis is 4AcODMT, which only 52 people in my sample reported doing. Not a huge sample!

Pleasure

What if you’re in the cohort of people who prioritize pleasure, parties, and having a good time? This value cluster wanted drugs that felt good - are good for recreation, being in your body, for sex, for your sense of sexuality. One item higher in this list was drugs people do often - so you’re looking for something that you can use on a regular basis.

1. MDMA (0.73)

2. 4MMC (0.72)

3. Ecstasy (0.70)

4. MDA (0.63)

5. Alcohol (0.58)

6. 2cB (0.57)

7. Marijuana (0.56)

8. 2CE (0.55)

9. GHB (0.54)

10. 4AcODMT (0.51)

11. LSD (0.50)

12. Psilocybin (0.49)

13. Ketamine (0.47)

14. Mescaline (0.46)

15. 2CI (0.46)

16. Nitrous (0.45)

17. 5MeODMT (0.39)

18. DMT (0.36)

19. DXM (0.34)

20. Ayahuasca (0.33)

21. Salvia (0.25)

What? Nobody’s doing salvia to party? How shocking.

4MMC is interesting. I’ve never done it, nor do I know anybody who has, but brief sleuthing online suggests it’s a more buzzy, sexy version of MDMA. It did get the worst score for ‘impact to cognition’, below nitrous (2nd worst), alcohol (3rd worst), and GHB (4th worst). So there’s that.

This is also the list on which alcohol has the most winning.

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The Ultimate Psychedelic Tier List

So: Is there such a thing as an overall tier list? It depends on what you value!

But I’ll try averaging the scores for all of them, and flipping the YOLO scale. This is assuming we’re prioritizing risk aversion. Maybe this isn’t the right way to go about it, but my guess is most people who are reading a substack post based on survey data in order to help them decide which drug to do are the sort to avoid anxiety and very serious changes to their psyche.

So: low yolo, high spiritual healing, functionality, and pleasure Ultimate Tier List:

1. MDMA (0.29)

2. Ecstasy (0.25)

3. Psilocybin (0.23)

4. 4AcODMT (0.23)

5. MDA (0.22)

6. 4MMC (0.22)

7. LSD (0.22)

8. Ayahuasca (0.19)

9. Marijuana (0.19)

10. 2cB (0.18)

11. 2CE (0.18)

12. GHB (0.17)

13. 5MeODMT (0.17)

14. Mescaline (0.17)

15. Ketamine (0.16)

16. Alcohol (0.15)

17. DMT (0.13)

18. 2CI (0.11)

19. Nitrous (0.11)

20. DXM (0.08)

21. Salvia (0.03)

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There’s a lot more nuanced differences between drugs here, this is mostly a general overview of which kinds of drugs are good for what.

Raw result avg scores are here, if you wanna get into the weeds.

I got responses for the survey from my own social media following - twitter, fetlife, and facebook. This isn’t ideal, but probably the topic is a bit more resilient than my usual topics, here - my guess is the people who follow me aren’t particularly more selected to have specific opinions about drugs that are meaningfully different from the rest of the population, beyond being more into drugs overall.

The verbatim questions in the drug survey were as follows:

*question: How many times have you done [drug]?
*question: How long ago was your *most* significant experience on [drug]?
*question: How strong was your *strongest* experience on [drug]?
*question: Before doing [drug], how much research did you do about it (e.g. safety, how to have good outcomes, dosage, etc.)?
*question:Overall, doing [drug] has had a ___ impact on your life - your sense of wellbeing, purpose, fulfillment, etc.
*question:Overall, doing [drug] has had a ___ impact on your cognition - your memory, reasoning abilities, rationality
*question:Overall, doing [drug] has had a ___ impact on your motivation - your drive, work ethic, motivation
*question:Overall, doing [drug] has had a ___ impact on your empathy - your compassion, connection, communication
*question:Overall, doing [drug] has had a ___ impact on your sexuality - your sexual satisfaction, sexual shame, sense of gender, etc.
*question:Overall, doing [drug] has had a ___ impact on your creativity - your originality, artistic ability, expression
*question:"People have expressed *concern* about changes in me that were caused by my [drug] use"
*question:"People have expressed *approval* about changes in me that were caused by my [drug] use"
*question: Out of your [drug] trips, what % were significantly pleasurable? Doesn't have to be meaningful or deep - just raw good feeling, fun, happy, etc.
*question: Imagine you had the power to go back in time and stop yourself from doing [drug]. What percentage of total times you've done [drug], would you stop yourself?
*question: Out of your [drug] trips, what % did you experience delusions?
*question: Out of your [drug] trips, what % did you experience paranoia, panic attacks, or acute anxiety?
*question: "Out of your [drug] trips, what % did you have the sensation of contacting other beings (like spirits, higher dimensional beings, aliens, etc.?)
*question:"Experiences on [drug] have permanently changed concrete, testable beliefs that I hold about the physical world around me"
*question:"Experiences on [drug] have made me more spiritual"
*question: "Doing [drug] has increased the probability I place on the existence of spirits, higher dimensional beings, or aliens"
*question: "Experiences on [drug] have resulted in me making radical changes to my life, such as shifts in relationships, job, or overall life path"
*question: "I've had shifts or realizations from [drug] that I thought were meaningful for some time afterwards, but eventually wore of or turned out to be false or bad for me"
*question: "After doing [drug], there was a period of time where my reality was still altered in some ways (e.g. flashbacks, hallucinations, disorientation)"
*question: "After doing [drug], there was an "integration period" where I had to process what I experienced - as though I'd gone on a long journey and now had to integrate the meaning of that experience into my normal life"
*question: "[drug] has damaged my physical health"
*question: "[drug] seems like a good drug to enhance sex"
*question: "[drug] would be good for me to use while at work"
*question: "[drug] would be good for me to use while partying"
*question: "[drug] would be good for me to use while doing things that require physical skill (e.g. working out, dancing, rock climbing, etc)"
*question: "[drug] has helped me heal from trauma"

I collected the list of drugs from erowid and from asking some particularly druggy friends of mine. I sent the questions through a few iterations among these friends to make sure there wasn’t any obvious issues with the wording, and to make sure it covered a decent spectrum.

One difficult element in survey design for this topic is that people often have a wide variety of experiences within a drug, not just between drugs. If you’ve had two fantastic trips and one trip that was an anxious hellscape, how do you answer a question about “average levels of anxiety”? I settled for some questions in a “what percentage of the trips crossed a certain threshold”, and other questions in a “in general, this drug has had x impact” to try to get at it from both sides. Not ideal, but it’s hard to capture it all accurately without drastically inflating the number of questions.

As I mentioned above, the order in which people got the drugs was randomized. The survey was also long, which means a lot of people quit. This means people who’ve done a higher amount of drugs, were more likely to quit, which means probably that rarer drugs are to some degree artificially downflated.

I tried pretty hard to get bigger samples here, and had much more difficulty than normal. I really wanted to know about iboga, for example, but only got seven people reporting doing it.

Anyway, I’ll likely be doing more blog posts that more deeply explore differences between drugs, and deep dives into individual drugs. For example, did you know men and women rated drugs differently - and there’s one drug that women rated much worse than men? Subscribers (it’s free!) will get these new posts straight to your inbox once I publish them.