The Callers Most Likely to Phone a Psychedelic Hotline Mid-Trip Weren’t on Psychedelics

Ever since the Fireside Project launched its Psychedelic Support Line in 2021, the nonprofit has hoped to provide “non-clinical emotional support” from trained volunteers who “understand what you’re going through because they’ve been there themselves.” But sometime within the five years that this hotline has been live, the project’s founder and research partners realized something: They were sitting on a vast trove of anonymized data detailing how real people actually use these drugs in their everyday lives. Now psychiatric researchers and scientists collaborating with Fireside from institutions in Paris and Geneva have compiled information from 25,419 of these support calls into a rare (and sorely needed) database for what they’re calling “psychedelic epidemiology.” Conducted between April 2021 and February 2026, the calls showed that—while the majority of callers to the hotline (60%) wanted to talk through their experiences with “magic mushrooms,” or psilocybin—the callers most likely to reach out mid-trip weren’t even on a psychedelic. They were weed smokers and other cannabis users, nearly half of whom (47%) had called the hotline in a state of panic or concern over their marijuana use, past or present. “Cannabis merits particular attention because it occupies a unique policy position,” Fireside’s founder Joshua White and his coauthors, including Swiss-based psychiatrist Mickael Eskinazi, wrote in their new study published Friday in Science Advances. Cannabis, they noted, is “the most widely legalized psychoactive substance in the U.S.” and yet “largely excluded from both psychedelic harm reduction frameworks and mental health crisis infrastructure.” Flying too high Cannabis users were distinct in several important ways, based on the data recorded by the Fireside hotline’s 220 volunteers. For one thing, they were much more likely to call for help in “active-trip” distress, with 70% seeking out support while using cannabis compared to 25% calling for what Fireside describes as “integration support.” As the phrase might imply, that latter group was simply seeking out a good listener who could help them process the ramifications of their past psychoactive experiences—be they emotional, intellectual, physiological, scary, or merely concerning. For comparison, callers looking for support regarding their use of MDMA or ketamine were much more likely to call, post-trip, for integration assistance: an estimated 66% of MDMA distress calls were for integration, as were roughly 59% of ketamine calls. Crucially, however, the researchers noted that this finding was no reason to demonize weed, Reefer Madness-style, given that active-trip calls across all psychoactive drugs tended to lean toward distress calls in general. Slicing the data by just calls made while actively high narrowed the range of distress rates from 46% for psilocybin to practically half for cannabis. The point, according to White, Eskinazi, and their coauthors, was that the mere call volume of weed-induced panics—2,004 calls in total—“indicates that cannabis-related psychological distress is a real and recurring phenomenon.” In other words, there’s real evidence that people are sometimes getting a bit too high for their own good these days, unsupervised, out in the real world, “regardless of whether the per-interaction distress rate differs reliably from that of other substances.” Trip advisors Along with the good it’s assuredly done, the ongoing experiment of cannabis legalization in the U.S. has brought with it something of a Wild West atmosphere, with more potent strains, novelty products, and an uptick in unusual medical episodes. Fireside’s team made a point of distinguishing what their findings actually show versus lumping these distress calls into a potential moral panic alongside the drug’s recent associations with bizarre cases of uncontrollable vomiting or a notable rise in heart attacks in some U.S. states. “Cannabis, as the most widely used psychoactive substance in the U.S., draws from a far larger user population than psilocybin or LSD,” the researchers noted. “A higher volume of cannabis crisis calls could reflect higher population prevalence rather than a higher intrinsic risk profile.” Beyond the more obvious takeaways (i.e., Be safe!), Fireside hopes its database helps policymakers develop better guidelines by offering real epidemiological data “about the kinds of support people actually seek and the circumstances under which distress occurs.”