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Opinion Mining of Erowid’s Experience Reports on LSD and Psilocybin-Containing Mushrooms

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  • Ahmed Al-Imam

    (Poznan University of Medical Sciences
    Poznan University of Medical Sciences
    University of Baghdad)

  • Riccardo Lora

    (University of Verona)

  • Marek A. Motyka

    (University of Rzeszow)

  • Erica Marletta

    (University of Verona)

  • Michele Vezzaro

    (University of Verona)

  • Jerzy Moczko

    (Poznan University of Medical Sciences)

  • Manal Younus

    (Ministry of Health
    The Middle East Chapter, The International Society of Pharmacovigilance (ISoP)
    Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences (CIOMS))

  • Michal Michalak

    (Poznan University of Medical Sciences)

Abstract

Background Psychedelics are gaining attention for their therapeutic potential in modern and personalized medicine. Online forums such as Erowid provide valuable user insights, but analyses of these experiences using natural language processing (NLP) remain scarce. Objective This study aims to utilize NLP, including sentiment and lexicon analysis, to examine user-generated experience reports on psilocybin-containing mushrooms and LSD from the Erowid forum. Methods Data from 2188 Erowid users (1161 psilocybin mushrooms and 1027 LSD) was collected via automated web scraping with XPath, CSS selectors, and Selenium WebDriver. The dataset included report titles, substances, and demographics. Sentiment analysis utilized BERT, RoBERTa, and VADER models. Preprocessing involved tokenization, lemmatization, part-of-speech tagging, and stop-word filtering. Lexicon analysis identified themes through recurring n-grams, visualized using Python. Results User demographics revealed comparable ages for psilocybin mushrooms (23.8 ± 0.9 years) and LSD users (20.0 ± 0.6 years), with a predominance of male users. The BERT model predominantly labeled experiences as negative (unfavorable), particularly for mushroom users (p = 0.001). VADER indicated more positive experiences for mushroom users (p

Suggested Citation

  • Ahmed Al-Imam & Riccardo Lora & Marek A. Motyka & Erica Marletta & Michele Vezzaro & Jerzy Moczko & Manal Younus & Michal Michalak, 2025. "Opinion Mining of Erowid’s Experience Reports on LSD and Psilocybin-Containing Mushrooms," Drug Safety, Springer, vol. 48(5), pages 559-575, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:drugsa:v:48:y:2025:i:5:d:10.1007_s40264-025-01530-z
    DOI: 10.1007/s40264-025-01530-z
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