Psychonauts' psychedelics: A systematic, multilingual, web-crawling exercise

Area of Science:

• Pharmacology
• Forensic Chemistry
• Computational Chemistry

Background:

• Psychedelics, including phenethylamines, tryptamines, and lysergamides, interact with the 2A serotoninergic receptor.
• These substances constitute a significant portion of the new psychoactive substances (NPS) landscape.
• Official databases from UNODC and EMCDDA may not fully capture the rapidly evolving online NPS market.

Purpose of the Study:

• To identify and categorize psychedelic molecules from psychonaut websites and online NPS resources.
• To compare the findings with existing data from the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
• To assess the online availability and trends of psychedelic NPS.

Main Methods:

• Development and deployment of a 24/7 crawling software, NPSfinder®, to scan URLs for psychedelic compounds.
• Extraction of chemical and street names, and chemical formulae of detected substances.
• Manual analysis and comparison of collected data with EMCDDA and UNODC databases.

Main Results:

• NPSfinder® detected 1344 psychedelic NPS between November 2017 and February 2020.
• This number is nearly ten times higher than the combined total reported by UNODC and EMCDDA.
• 994 previously unknown molecules were identified as potential novel psychedelics, indicating a significant gap between online and official records.

Conclusions:

• There is a substantial discrepancy between the number of psychedelic NPS identified online and those documented by major international drug monitoring agencies.
• The findings suggest a strong interest in psychedelics among psychonauts and recreational drug users.
• Monitoring online platforms is crucial for understanding emerging drug trends and predicting future scenarios in the psychedelic NPS market.