ANALYSIS AND REVIEW OF RELIABLE AND UNRELIABLE WEBSITES ON PSYCHOACTIVE DRUGS
Comer (2003) defines "psychoactive drugs" as medication that alters brain function for the purposes of altering perception, mood, consciousness, or human behavior. Comer reports that psychoactive drugs are used to treat neurological and psychological illnesses but that people often use and abuse these drugs for recreational or spiritual reasons. The purpose of this paper is to examine three websites related to psychoactive drugs and discuss whether they are or are not reliable. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the consequences of unreliable websites and makes some recommendations.
The first website examined is Erowid Psychoactive Vaults which can be found at the following URL: www.erowid.org/psychoactives/psychoactives.shtml. The website itself is complex with many threads on over 30 substances, some of which are psychoactive. It takes a while to get the hang of navigating the website as each link can lead to three or four or five or more other links related to the original topic, and each of these links in turn can have yet more links associated with it.
There are two main problems with the psychoactive drug sections. The first problem is that while lots of information is provided, not all of it is referenced in terms of where it was obtained. Some of it is just said to come from those who are friends of the owner of the website. Second, most of the information provided appears to be strongly tailored to the recreational/spiritual user and this means that its focus is on what to do to maximize one's 'high' rather than to make those using it maximally safe. Often information that runs contrary to positive effects occurring from the use of these substances is labeled "misinformation" with few, if any, efforts made to provide any research justifying the claim that the information is, in fact, wrong.
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