Drugs and Spirituality Poll Series

I'm here to announce the unveiling of a project I've been working on for some time now. I've been toying with a way to poll Bluelight.ru on the subject of spiritual beliefs and drugs of choice, but was unable to design a single poll within the parameters of this forum's software, which would not be long cumbersome. Instead, I've decided to run a series of polls, each one of them centering around the use of one class of drugs. Each poll will contain the same choices with regards to spirituality:


For the purposes of this poll, Item 1 is to be chosen by religious people, who are defined as people who see themselves as affiliated with an organized religion of any kind, with a name and an established group identity among fellow believers, which is fairly stable through time. Choosing this item implies belief in at least some of a religion's core tenets, regardless of the voter's current or past level of active group participation.

Item 2 is to be chosen by people who do not claim an affiliation with any organized religion, and do not necessarily believe in any core tenet of any organized religion, yet feel personally spiritual. For the purposes of this poll, to feel spiritual means that one subjectively feels, and trusts one's feeling of, a connection to a transcendent and far greater reality than themselves.

Item 3 is to be chosen by people who fit neither of the definitions of 'religious' nor 'spiritual', above. If you are a person who tends to have skepticism toward all claims supernatural, or a person who believes science always has the last word in any philosophical discussion, this is probably the item for you.

In addition, each poll will have another trifold dimension, dealing with past or present use of the drug in question:


Item A is to be chosen by people who have tried the drug in question, and whose subjective experience of the drug's effects, regardless of frequency and duration of use, has been generally more pleasant than not. If you could probably be persuaded to use the drug again under the right circumstances, or would overall give the drug a good review, pick Item A.

Item B is to be chosen by people who have used the drug, but based on all their uses of it would give it an overall bad review, and are likely to pass up any future opportunities to use it.

Item C is to be chosen by people who have not tried the drug in question, whether they plan to or not.

So each poll will have 9 items, numbered 1A, 1B, 1C, 2A, 2B, 2C, 3A, 3B, and 3C, from which each voter can choose one.

The polls I plan to make include:


To my knowledge, this list includes all the major classes of known psychoactive drugs used for recreation, and the vast majority of drugs used by BLers are likely to fall indisputably into one of these categories. The classification I propose is based on similarity of subjective effect, rather than chemical or pharmacodynamic similarity. So with that in mind:

*Phenyl-ethyl-amine and tryptamine backbone drugs will be considered 'Psychedelics' if their effects include sensory and/or thought distortions. They will be considered 'Ecstasy family drugs' if their effects include increased empathy but few if any frank sensory or thought distortions. They will be considered 'Amphetamines' if their effects include stimulation, but neither psychedelia nor empathy. Vote based on what effects YOU PERSONALLY found the drug in question to have.

*Class methylphenidate, MDPV, and related drugs as 'Amphetamines', even though this is not correct from a chemist's perspective.

I plan to release each poll in the series a month apart.

My aim, at the end of it all, will be to locate any patterns of correlation between people's drugs of choice, and their worldviews overall. I'll need some help with the statistical analysis, if it comes to that, as I'm not savvy to that sort of thing, I'm sad to say.

Any suggestions for how to improve this project would be greatly appreciated.

At a month apart, this will take almost a year. I would have thought most BLers would be active at least once every two weeks.

Good point. I'm also thinking I have too many polls. I think I'm going to tailor one to each of the drug forums we have, and no more.

Deleriants may be a catergory that some may wish to include.

^ Perhaps.

I think I'm going to start with Ecstasy as my pilot poll, because this class of drugs is foundational to Bluelight. I'm going to tailor any future changes to this project based on how this initial poll goes.

So is this going to be strictly a P&S thing, or is this going to be broken up between the different respective forums? It would be cooler to just P&S, but you'll get a larger range of people if done throughout the forums, as most people only post in certain forums.

Either way, this is a great idea. I'd volunteer to help in any way possible, and can't wait for the results of this, as I'm sure they'll be very interesting.

MyDoorsAreOpen said:

^ Perhaps.

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From my recollection some pagan style "religions" most certainly did use some deleriants for ceremonial/spiritual purposes.

^ Good point. I think the 'hinge drug' in this case will probably be Salvia divinorum, which is hard to classify chemically, pharmacologically, or in terms of its subjective effects. It's technically closest to an opiate at the chemical level, but many people staunchly consider it a dissociative or deliriant. Like cannabis, it may just be unique enough to warrant its own poll.

I decided to word the poll items for the drug options a bit differently:


'I have [not] enjoyed' can be interpreted too many different ways. What I want to avoid are a slew of responses like, 'Oh, I sure enjoyed it all right, and still do, but it's caused me a lot of problems, and that's really sucked, so which should I pick?' All I want to know is whether, at the present time, your view of this [class of] drug is overall positive or negative, based on your own history of use.

Must admit I stalled briefly while considering MDMA - it's been great at times & at times of great abuse - fucking awful

^ Indeed!

capstone said:

So is this going to be strictly a P&S thing, or is this going to be broken up between the different respective forums? It would be cooler to just P&S, but you'll get a larger range of people if done throughout the forums, as most people only post in certain forums.

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You know, that's an interesting idea. I'll talk to the other moderators about this. I bet I'd maximize site-wide participation in these polls if I rotated each one through its appropriate focus forum, before returning it to P&S. Because you're right: P&S is not a high traffic forum, and I'm a minor king.

I'd only do this, though, if I had the unanimous permission of all focus forum mods and s-mods. It would skew the results, and create methodological problems, if some forum leaders were cooperative and others not so much.

Are these polls asking whether or not the particular drug magnified a spiritual experience? Or rather simply whether or not the drug was enjoyable? If it is the latter, I don't see the connection pending on whether the person is spiritual and/or religious and did/did not enjoy the substance.

I am a spiritual yet non-religious person who loves the effects of opioids, but never found them to strengthen my spirituality, in fact they are spiritually draining & detrimental. So on what basis would I give opioids a review? My view is that opioids are absolutely great for recreational use. I loved the feeling, and still would if I were to start using them again (excluding my daily dose of Suboxone). However they are spiritually, physically, and psychologically destructive.

No, I'm surveying the spiritual viewpoints and the use of a drug as two independent variables. They need not be linked in any practical sense. I'm just trying to see if people who are willing to use (and enjoy) certain drugs are more, or less, likely to be spiritual than people who haven't.

O think its an excellent idea and done right would allow you to base premises or assumptions based on the data. I'm sure there are better statisticians than I but neutral question-phrasing is essential, particularly in straight correlative studies.

Another approach would be to ask for a 1 to 10 mark (I agree, disagree with this statement) which would allow for finer analysis at the end. And maybe add a pseuco-control question, so that it is not immediately obvious to the respondent what the study is about. There's a whole jumble of cognitive biases which are best ironed out at the study concept stage rather than after the fact.

Spiritual is an ambiguous term, though you could overcome this by showing your definitions as cited in your post. I think you would need to add 'I am agnostic' as regards the question - i.e. - For those who simply don't have a fixed view, or don't value thinking about such matters. In theory everyone should feel that at least one of the statements reflects their beliefs.

I think this is an excellent project, if I can help in any way let me know (not altruism here, I would have good use for the resulting data. I'll add further thoughts when I have time.

Excellent idea (I wish it were mine!

To run that kind of study would require more intricate software than vBuletin's built-in poll, I'm afraid. Unless you have a server set up somewhere we can host such a poll on?

Edit:

Hmm, it seems there are at least a couple of open-source survey suites available, maybe I should look into setting one up? I would love to see this done as a full-scale study. I'd even be happy to host it myself, as I have decent experience writing and managing web-based software. Pythagoras, do you think you could come up with a relatively-good series of questions?

If we can get this off the ground, it would be absolutely fantastic.

This is MDAO's idea so you would need to liase with him, that said I am happy to help in the survey design stage in any way I can (though note I am no expert in these matters, just have some experience in survey design and some of the factors to be thought through at the outset)

regards

Pythagoras

Hope you don't mind MDAO, ima post your PM here in the interest of being able to discuss this without having to paraphrase

MDAO said:

Thanks for your interest. What exactly did you have in mind?

In any case, I really would prefer to work within the confines of this page and the vBulletin software, since we'll get more votes that way.

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Personally, I'm of the opinion that if we were able to set up an externally-visible (as in, open to non-BLers) survey, that we would be able to get more results, rather than less - statistics have shown that having to sign up with an email address (eg, to a forum) is prohibitively discouraging to randoms from the intarwebz (even if the survey takes over ten times longer than the signup process). I don't think many BLers would be discouraged from using an external survey - especially if we reminded them that we had set it up in the first place

As well as this, it allows us to get a much more detailed set of information. For example, whether there is a correlation between people who take a drug "for spiritual use" and "for recreational use", or whether these are typically exclusive of each other. My guess is that there's a strong correlation, but without the data it's kind of difficult to tell

Some time in the next few days I'm going to try and set up something as a proof-of-concept (and possibly gain +100 Geek XP for figuring out how to set up Apache) and see how it goes

Hells yeah! I got an Apache site set up on a Linux machine, and have LimeSurvey up and running. Here's an example survey which uses a few of the question types available. There are many more than what is in that demo, but creating the actual surveys takes time (because you have to enter them through a less-than-fun web interface) and I was lazy.

The complete list of available types is available from the LimeSurvey documentation which I have so kindly linked.

So, of course, now all we need to do is work out exactly what information we want to get, and I will happily grind my way through said web interface to create awesomeness.

Okay! I've developed the following structure as a starting point:

Demographic

• Age / age range
• Gender
• Anything else?

Spiritual views

• TBC (gonna need help here, or a lot of time lol)

General drug use

• Which drugs have you taken? (can filter later questions based on this answer)

Per-drug:

• At what age did you first use <drug>?
• (1-5) How well, on average, do you enjoy the effects of <drug>? 1 = entirely unpleasant, 5 = entirely pleasant
• (0-5) How, if at all, has <drug> affected your insight or offered spiritual gain? 0 = not at all, 1 = always negatively, 5 = always positively
• (0-5) How has your use of <drug> affected your life, in general? 0 = not at all, 1 = always negatively, 5 = always positively
• For what purpose do you take <drug>?
  1. I no longer take <drug>
  2. Strictly for spiritual use - I would never take <drug> for pure recreational purposes
  3. I have only ever used <drug> spiritually, but am open to recreational use
  4. Both spiritually and recreationally, usually spiritually
  5. Both spiritually and recreationally, with no great favour towards either use
  6. Both spiritually and recreationally, usually recreationally
  7. I have only ever used <drug> recreationally, but am open to spiritual use
  8. Strictly for recreational use - I would never take <drug> for pure spiritual purposes

Clearly this is incomplete, and thus I would like any suggestions anyone could offer, such that we can get as much value out of this survey as possible.

Also, @MDAO, I hope this doesn't appear as me trying to upstage you from this research! I only want to see a little more detail than is capable through vBulletin's inbuilt polling. If there's anything specific that you want to include, as far as I'm concerned, it's still your baby - so please don't think I've simply tried to overtake you!

Wow Raw Evil, that's pretty awesome work! You rock. More comments from me later.

bump....

So, put any thought into the "spiritual views" section yet? I'm going to try and set aside some time tomorrow evening to working out how to structure it.