Why Are Search Trends for Classic Psychedelics Just Kinda Meh?

Not to say people on (in) the internet are any less obsessed with brain-blasting drugs than they already are. Just toggle around this Google Trends chart and you'll see, among things, a noticeable uptick in MDMA-related searches since 2011. But for all today's talk of a so-called psychedelic rennaisance, shouldn't this all be higher?

You might think so. But the Trends data, which pulls four search terms—DMT, LSD, shrooms, and MDMA—from 2004 to the present, tells a much different story. There are a few possible reasons why.

You only need to search once. Or maybe twice, or a handful of times. The point is that for most casual users of psychoactive drugs there simply isn't a real need to look much deeper than cursory search returns, especially if and when that baseline information successfully leads to the end of the rainbow and beyond. As Reddit user itokedaily (of course) puts it, if you've used DMT you don't any longer need to putz around on Chrome because you "learned all the answers to the Universe in 5 minutes."

You don't want to be seen. Which is to say, wizard-level psychonauts are probably not using Chrome. They know better than to use anything but anonymized onion browsers like Tor (though even that sort of encryption, one that's paved the meteoric rise of dark web drug marketplaces lke the Silk Road, isn't completely safe from the law.) And presumably that goes for a lot of the synthesizers and distributors of today's new psychoactive substance boom.

These are not the drugs you're loooking for. And there's good reason to assume you're not alone. Rolling face is alive and well for milllions, though the faces of mind-mellting psychedelic experiences have shattered into the aformentioned new psychoactive substances, commonly known as legal highs, of which there are hundreds. If anything, DMT, LSD, shrooms, and MDMA are now first stops along deeper search queries into into, say, the potential analogues of said substances.

Even if the Trends visualization should be taken down with a grain of salt, it's still a telling pulse-read on the present future of the internet of highs.

@thebanderson