Writing-up [Worldwide] Help build a better scale to rate new drugs - that acknowledges both positives and negatives!

BrunoUTAS

BrunoUTAS

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Feb 20, 2012
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Hello!

Our names are Raimondo Bruno, Shahni Watts and Stephen Bright – we are from the School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Tasmania and Edith Cowan University. This project is part of Shahni’s Clinical Psychology master’s degree.

We’re trying to make a scale (a questionnaire) for rating new drugs.

New drugs come on to the market pretty rapidly. When they first come out, they typically haven’t had any testing, and sometimes they’re just plain awful (the synthetic cannabinoid that left people too heavily stoned for 72 hours comes to mind). We are hoping to come up with a quick but thorough way for people to record their experiences with a new substance. One of the ways this might be applied is in early warning systems where people who use drugs post reports on their experience with drug batches and new drugs. While this isn’t as good as drug checking (or having a safe supply) it is a good way for the community to help each other.

Getting a questionnaire that is quick but still thorough is really tricky, though – because drugs have different types of effects, and people choose substances for different reasons. Also, we want to record the negative and the positive effects of the substance. Because all of this is important to people!

We’ve put our heads together, coming from a wide range of scientific and lived experience, and have looked at all of the existing scales in the scientific literature, as well as on community enthusiast websites. We’ve tried to boil things down to the smallest number of questions.

Now it is over to the community of people who use drugs for your advice. We want to make sure that we haven’t missed anything that is really important to you when thinking about substances, and also try to work out where we can make the questionnaire shorter and easier.

PARTICIPATION REQUIREMENTS
18 or older, and
Used at least three different illicit substances in the past six months (not including cannabis)
Participation is completely online and open worldwide

Our survey should take about 10-15 minutes to complete. It is open from August (i.e. now!) until December 1.

The survey asks about how important different aspects of drug experiences are to you when thinking about a drug, and to try out our first attempt at some questions by rating your best and worst experience with a drug.

As a way of ‘giving back’, we will donate $500 AUD to one charity (which you can vote for) at the conclusion of the study (one for the whole study, unfortunately, not one for every participant!). We've put together a list of charities that you can vote for that includes drug harm reduction services as well as humanitarian and environmental causes.

If you need to contact us, you can do so by emailing [email protected] This study has been approved by the University of Tasmania Human Research Ethics Committee (Project #H31686).

you can find out more (and take part) in the study here!
 
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I suggest a problem you need to consider is just how widely drugs are being misrepresented.

Last year there was a large police raid in the UK which the journalists typically termed 'a nitazene factory' when in fact clearly no chemistry took place at that location. But they found presses and pills presented as diazepam but containing a nitazine. I believe in the US fake Oxycontin is (or at least was) a big problem. Fentanyl is supposed to have low oral bioavailability but I cannot track down a reliable figure. But some fake Oxycontins contained 15mg of fentanyl.

It's reached the point where most vendors don't actually know for sure what they recieved as when the RC market was controlled, GC-MS and NMR instrumental data was no longer provided and if your model is to retail rather than to make, understanding instrumental analysis isn't a key skillset.
 
The good cause is, be it 500 Aussie Dollar s, what are they worth ?
Look it up just a remark, a good reason to do it. I support good causes,
but only long term s if i support one, and they don t become exposed as cheats.
My donation is till i die, they have little use for single contribution s.
So i have 2 'Save the Children' and 'Greenpeace' who if they don t fuck.
They get money till i die. Get it, a one time funding means nothing.

The money you are offering i give away every 2 year s, by myself, minimum income.
Don t insult with such a low once payment to get people over the line.
They do it for free too. And that 1 time 500,- is nothing. Kakalawaka.

But if i don t do, it you are gonna give it to a good course any way.
So i wonder is my input of any significance ? Why matter.

You could get me over the bridge, to do it.
If you will support the chosen goal yearly with 500 !
Or a clear goal for you inquiry. Imo its not.

Otherwise forget it.
 
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emkee_reinvented said:
The good cause is, be it 500 Aussie Dollar s, what are they worth ?
Look it up just a remark, a good reason to do it. I support good causes,
but only long term s if i support one, and they don t become exposed as cheats.
My donation is till i die, they have little use for single contribution s.
So i have 2 'Save the Children' and 'Greenpeace' who if they don t fuck.
They get money till i die. Get it, a one time funding means nothing.

The money you are offering i give away every 2 year s, by myself, minimum income.
Don t insult with such a low once payment to get people over the line.
They do it for free too. And that 1 time 500,- is nothing. Kakalawaka.

But if i don t do, it you are gonna give it to a good course any way.
So i wonder is my input of any significance ? Why matter.

You could get me over the bridge, to do it.
If you will support the chosen goal yearly with 500 !
Or a clear goal for you inquiry. Imo its not.

Otherwise forget it.
Click to expand...
$500 AUD is currently worth $333 USD.

If Bluelight ends up being the source of recruitment with the highest number of respondents, then we get the $500 AUD donation. That would be very helpful, as the server costs + software and maintenance fees at Bluelight are significant, and the cash will help us continue to provide Bluelight into the future.

These researchers do annually advertise surveys with us, which brings in additional cash. So, my advice is - everyone - please support this survey if you have the time and inclination, and care about the topic. You get to contribute to research and contribute to Bluelight's longevity, too!
 
Tronica said:
$500 AUD is currently worth $333 USD.

If Bluelight ends up being the source of recruitment with the highest number of respondents, then we get the $500 AUD donation. That would be very helpful, as the server costs + software and maintenance fees at Bluelight are significant, and the cash will help us continue to provide Bluelight into the future.

These researchers do annually advertise surveys with us, which brings in additional cash. So, my advice is - everyone - please support this survey if you have the time and inclination, and care about the topic. You get to contribute to research and contribute to Bluelight's longevity, too!
Click to expand...
That s more convincing they should ask you for advertising questionnaire s.
Such info makes a difference, but you agree a yearly donation is essentially better ?
A stable contribution, i do it but "íf i was a rich man'". Which is not the case.

But i get Bluelight is happy with any income.
i ll do it when i have woken up, thanks Tronica, getting Bluelight as one of the choices.
Does mattter if it matter s Bluelight. :sleep: ... 🤙
 
@BrunoUTAS have you reached out to Marc Grifell? He designed a study a few years back that led to this, but parameters of the study itself seemed more broad if memory serves. He might be able to give you a heads up on some of the obstacles that you might run into in advance.
 
Pfafffed said:
@BrunoUTAS have you reached out to Marc Grifell? He designed a study a few years back that led to this, but parameters of the study itself seemed more broad if memory serves. He might be able to give you a heads up on some of the obstacles that you might run into in advance.
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To update on that study which Bluelight supported, I was involved in the investigator group. It was frustrating as our paper was rejected from 1 journal, then another, but this is not uncommon in academic research and you just have to try again (and I was keen to). But the lead investigator, Marc, had other things they wanted to do, and so we never published the paper. Which makes me sad, and I'm still keen to continue with that kind of study and work.
 
Tronica said:
To update on that study which Bluelight supported, I was involved in the investigator group. It was frustrating as our paper was rejected from 1 journal, then another, but this is not uncommon in academic research and you just have to try again (and I was keen to). But the lead investigator, Marc, had other things they wanted to do, and so we never published the paper. Which makes me sad, and I'm still keen to continue with that kind of study and work.
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I'll bet that was really disappointing. I'm kind of surprised that Marc gave up so quickly. I kind of assumed that they expected multiple rounds of rejection from the outset, with what seemed to me to be a pretty daring study design.
 
Pfafffed said:
I'll bet that was really disappointing. I'm kind of surprised that Marc gave up so quickly. I kind of assumed that they expected multiple rounds of rejection from the outset, with what seemed to me to be a pretty daring study design.
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Yeah it was a bit dissappointing. Good news is that I included a version of that study as a component for my 5-year fellowship which got funded (2026-2030), using the existing work as a base. So I hope to help move forward the study idea and design over the coming couple of years.
 
Update: Bluelight was the winner of the popular vote (narrowly pipping Erowid and the Loop), and the donation has been made.

Here's the potted summary of the first round of the study (we're going to do a second round soon).

The aim was to find out the smallest number of questions that still covers what people find important about a drug experience. We started with 19 questions about aspects of the experience during peak (e.g. mood, body, connections with others, sensations, libido, spiritual effects), similar questions about after-effects from the drug, and some general overall questions about the drug experience. Almost 200 people worldwide took part.

Key points:
We were hoping for people to go hard with the red pen and tell us that a lot of questions weren't that important to them. It turned out that mostly, people wanted to keep almost all of them, but were maybe OK with removing the impact of a drug on your libido

Every question was great at differentiating between people's best and worst drug experience, and the biggest differences showed up in the peak effects on mood, body, connections and sensations. The single strongest predictor of whether someone would use a drug again was how beneficial they felt it was to them.

The most important questions for participants, and the ones that did the best job statistically, were the ratings of peak effects on mood and sensations, and ratings of after effects on mood and body. Duration of after effects, and if these impacted on your connections with others were seen as less important and weren't related to whether people wanted to use a substance again. People flagged that some questions aren't useful in all situations or were confusing so they're likely removals.

What's next:
Based on people's feedback, and statistics, we think there's probably 4 or 6 questions, evenly split between peak and after-effects, that cover the most important parts of an experience that are useful for guessing whether a person will use it again and respect the things that people told us were critical. We're going to do some interviews with people who are out with their living experience to make sure we don't misinterpret what's important from these results, and will take their advice on board before we try out a shorter scale. It would be great if this could eventually be used as one part of in community drug reports / experience reports, rather than just flagging drugs with adverse effects.

We'll be back for a final round soon!
 
@BrunoUTAS
We are very grateful for your generous donation and happy that Bluelight managed to (narrowly) win this competition among organisers that we consider to be very useful and successful harm reduction resources and services (hello Erowid and The Loop!).

And such interesting findings. Perhaps at Bluelight we can incorporate this new measure into our Trip Reports section, so people can (optionally) complete the measure alongside their written trip report?
 
Thanks Tronica! Ultimately, it would be great if this was part of the trip reports! Definitely just as an opt-in though. But, we want to get it more finely tuned first, which is what we are aiming to do with the next phase of the study!
 
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