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The newest edition of Pharos magazine from the Institute of Natural Philosophy is available now and it's absolutely gorgeous! 😍 Link below 👇🏻 institutefornaturalphilosoph…

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The Fireside Database science.org/doi/10.1126/scia… Most of what science and medicine officially know about psychedelics still comes from carefully controlled clinical trials. This study looks at the far larger number of experiences that happen outside those rooms. The data comes from a call-in peer support line people contacted for help after using psychedelics recreationally, and from the people who answered those calls when things got difficult. A team led by Felix Schoeller and colleagues has released the Fireside Database, published this week in Science Advances. It draws on 25,419 interactions with the Fireside Project’s Psychedelic Support Line, handled by 220 trained peer supporters between April 2021 and February 2026, plus 2,777 follow-up satisfaction surveys. To the authors’ knowledge, it is the largest dataset of real-world psychedelic support interactions ever assembled. Notably, larger, by an order of magnitude, than the combined sample sizes of all published clinical trials. Psilocybin was the most commonly reported substance, appearing in about 60 percent of the interactions where a substance was coded. LSD, cannabis, ketamine, and MDMA followed. Interestingly, cannabis produced the highest overall distress rate, at 47.2 percent. The researchers note that this difference largely disappears once you account for timing: people who had used cannabis were far more likely to call while still under the influence, at the point when anxiety is often highest. Within similar call types, distress rates did not differ significantly across the major substances. In other words, the moment in the experience mattered more than the specific molecule. The data suggest that acute anxiety during the come-up or peak is a bigger driver of people reaching for help than any one compound on its own. Roughly 40 percent of the interactions happened while the person was actively experiencing the substance. About 32 percent were calls for integration support after the fact, meaning people who had already come down and were trying to make sense of what they had gone through. The rest were informational calls, such as requests for preparation advice, or calls from people sitting with someone else. Nearly 40 percent of callers said they were alone when they used the substance. About 27 percent mentioned an underlying psychiatric condition. Together these numbers sketch a picture of who is actually reaching out: a substantial share are navigating the experience by themselves, and a notable portion already carry some history of mental-health difficulty into the session. The dataset also includes 43 reports the authors classified as concerning possible facilitator abuse. These were disproportionately linked to ceremonial or plant-medicine settings. The researchers present this as a signal worth tracking, not as a measure of how common such problems are overall. Because the line is anonymous and voluntary, the figure cannot tell us the true rate of harm in those spaces, but it does show that people who feel something has gone wrong in a facilitated setting are finding their way to peer support and are willing to report where the experience is happening. On the support side, caller satisfaction in the follow-up surveys tracked strongly with how empathetic the volunteer was perceived to be. The nested structure of the data (many supporters each handling multiple surveyed interactions) lets researchers look at whether individual supporter differences affect outcomes, something smaller studies cannot easily do. The authors are clear that this is observational data from people who chose to call a support line. It does not represent every psychedelic experience, and it cannot prove what causes better or worse outcomes. What it does provide is the first large, systematic look at who reaches out for help, under what conditions, and what kinds of peer support they receive outside clinical settings. As policy frameworks expand to allow more non-clinical use, that information has been almost entirely missing. The paper is titled “The Fireside Database: Large-scale evidence from 25,419 psychedelic support interactions,” by Felix Schoeller et al., published in Science Advances on 30 October 2026 (DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aeg4737). A related write-up is here: eurekalert.org/news-releases… The data and analysis code are openly available for other researchers.

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