Reframing Bummer Trips: Scientific and Cultural Explanations to Adverse Reactions to Psychedelic Drug Use
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The concept of a bad or bummer trip has been used to capture the imagination of public health advisors and drug regulators, especially for producing warnings against taking drugs that cause physical and psychological harm. Psychedelics emerged in the 1960s public health literature as frequently causing bad trips, with violent and fearful outbursts from users causing harm to themselves and others. The fear and anxiety allegedly generated by a chemical reaction in the body, however, was understood differently by contemporary psychedelic scientists in the 1950s and 1960s. Confronting fear or facing trauma played an important role in psychotherapy, and psychedelic therapists offered an alternative interpretation on the bad trip that imbued it with healthful benefits. This article considers the historical tension surrounding the competing interpretations of bummer trips, probing more deeply into the implications of avoiding fear, trauma, or anxiety in the psychotherapeutic encounter. Ultimately, by considering cases presented at different psychedelic clinics in North America and comparing those with news, personal testimonies, and regulatory outcomes in the United States, we argue that the specter of the bad trip was used strategically to galvanize public support for a prohibition on psychedelics. Moreover, by removing psychedelics from active research, the field of psychotherapy in some jurisdictions moved away from addressing core ideas about fear and trauma through confrontation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".