Psychedelic pleasures: An affective understanding of the joys of tripping
This qualitative study (n=100) examined the pleasurable aspects of recreational psychedelics (LSD, psilocybin mushrooms) use reported on the Erowid trip database. The author argues that although pleasurable experiences are regarded as irrelevant within therapeutic contexts, it is a key reason why most people use psychedelics, to facilitate a mode of ‘purposeless play’ that transgresses rules, meanings, and boundaries of the normalized everyday.
Authors
- Bøhling, F.
Published
Abstract
Background
This paper considers the pleasures of psychedelic drugs and proposes a Deleuzian understanding of drugged pleasures as affects. In spite of a large body of work on psychedelics, not least on their therapeutic potentials, the literature is almost completely devoid of discussions of the recreational practices and pleasures of entheogenic drugs. Yet, most people do not use psychedelics because of their curative powers, but because they are fun and enjoyable ways to alter the experience of reality.
Methods
In the analytical part of the paper, I examine 100 trip reports from an internet forum in order to explore the pleasures of tripping.
Results
The analyses map out how drugs such as LSD and mushrooms - in combination with contextual factors such as other people, music and nature - give rise to a set of affective modifications of the drug user’s capacities to feel, sense and act.
Conclusion
In conclusion it is argued that taking seriously the large group of recreational users of hallucinogens is important not only because it broadens our understanding of how entheogenic drugs work in different bodies and settings, but also because it may enable a more productive and harm reductive transmission of knowledge between the scientific and recreational psychedelic communities.
Research Summary of 'Psychedelic pleasures: An affective understanding of the joys of tripping'
Introduction
Bøhling situates the paper within the recent ‘psychedelic renaissance’, noting renewed clinical and neuroscientific interest in substances such as LSD, psilocybin and ayahuasca alongside growing recreational use. He argues that despite extensive work on therapeutic potentials and the neurophysiology and phenomenology of psychedelics, there is a striking absence of empirical attention to recreational practices and the pleasures that motivate most non-clinical users. This gap leaves large portions of psychedelic experience—particularly how context and social practices shape pleasurable effects—underexplored. The study sets out to begin filling that gap by analysing 100 online trip reports to map the pleasures of tripping. Using a theoretical frame drawn from Deleuze’s notion of affect and assemblage, Bøhling aims to conceptualise psychedelic pleasures as transformations in users’ capacities to feel, sense and act, and to show how these affective modifications are shaped by contextual elements such as music, nature and social company. The paper therefore offers both an empirical reading of recreational trip narratives and a conceptual proposal for treating drugged pleasures as situational, emergent affects.
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Study Details
- Study Typeindividual
- Journal
- Compound
- APA Citation
Bøhling, F. (2017). Psychedelic pleasures: An affective understanding of the joys of tripping. International Journal of Drug Policy, 49, 133-143. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2017.07.017
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Golden, T. L., Magsamen, S., Sandu, C. C. et al. · Current Topics in Behavioral Neurosciences (2022)
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