To Trip or Not to Trip — That is the ‘Killer’ Question?

A relatively new, or perhaps more accurately, ‘outed’ phenomenon in the drug using sector (particularly those with a penchant for hallucinogens) and have experimented with and subsequently recommended what they believe to be a harm reduction mechanism known colloquially as a trip killer.

In short, it is various medications, sprays or non-pharmaceutical interventions that can ‘bring you back or out’ of a psychedelic drug induced trip that is believed to be going bad.

In a recent article published by SBS they noted a growing number of young people ditching alcohol and going ‘sober’ — but perhaps not sober as we used to know it. This is just one of a growing number of manipulations of nomenclature the pro-drug lobby are now artfully using to hijack language — a discussion for another time, perhaps?

The piece Young Australians Drinking Less and Drugging More! Sober curious young people: Is this the new way of partying? reveals that sobriety as it is traditionally known is evaporating in the fog of this language shift. At times referred to as California Sober, it is simply the replacement of alcohol for an illicit substance. This California Sober phrase has been historically used for those who choose cannabis over alcohol, but it is now being applied to those who use psychedelics to replace alcohol.

It’s important just to digress here and note that education does work; whether formal, direct, passive, or anyway that information that evokes behaviour change is that education. When anecdote, zealous advocacy and sub-cultural peer pressure are relentlessly applied by the pro-drug activist into the classroom of social media, around illicit drug use not only being fun, but ‘safe-ish’, then you’ve almost there.

However, if you can also leverage the simultaneously deployed formal public education projected into the marketplace about the harms of alcohol and the assiduous and vehemently applied antagonistic education against tobacco, then suddenly you have ‘educated’ the culturally anchorless punter into believing the hype that swapping alcohol and nicotine for weed, shrooms or pingers is actually a ‘smarter move’.

We have carried out literally 1000’s of seminars of the last decades and it has been interesting to watch this shift in the secondary school classroom. 20 years ago, in one quiz activity we offered the statement, ‘Tobacco is more harmful than cannabis’. Back then we might have got one student who stood up, and usually from a weed using family. However, in the past 6–10 years that has radically shifted. At times, nearly have the class cohort stand up.

Why the change? Why do they believe tobacco is much more harmful that cannabis. Well as previously alluded too, in Australia (a world anti-smoking leader) we have had a relentless, stigma permitted, campaign against tobacco for over 12 years. Only one message, one focus and one voice in the education, health, and public squares — Tobacco is very nasty, and the only way forward is to QUIT.

However, at the same time we have had very well-funded cannabis activists and their policy-making friends, frame up cannabis as ‘medicine’. Once this got the slightest traction, it was easily leveraged to pitch as a relatively harmless alternative to the long-standing harm causing legal drugs of alcohol and tobacco.

Again, the undiscerning and anchorless student hears and sees both and follows the ‘educators’ lead.

A both fascinating and disturbing emergence of our current generation and even the tail end of the one before is the growing, and now entrenched obsession with substance use, particularly in the culturally anchorless first world west — more on that later.

Of course, there are many commentators on why this is so, and a particular demographic in that commentating arena are the pro-drug activists. These are ones who have doubled down on substance use engagement to the point of believing it a ‘right’ not to be interfered with. So, enamoured, or could we argue, enslaved are these actors that they misuse any and all ‘values and virtue’ languages and framework to justify their obsession.

Now, substance use and addiction aside, the drivers for these narratives whilst can appear well crafted, particularly when framed in ‘gotcha’ and ‘cancel culture’ verbiage, they are breath-takingly superficial. When one applies a good ‘scratch’ to the surface of these interestingly crafted facades, the utterly shallow or simply put, ugly reasons for engagement emerge.

It is important to note at this point, and note these activists are at pains to manipulate, is that a small percentage of substance use engagement demographic is done for the classic and tragic ‘self-medicating’ purposes. According to Australian data prior to 2010 only around 7 percent of people who took up substance use was for this reason. However, even back then, around 44–72 percent of first-time substances users did so out of curiosity, or a friend offering it. Both these motivators have intimate primers for engagement. They have heard and perhaps seen some ‘testimonies’ of the fun and relative harmlessness of drug use — of course, the trusted friend would not deliver me harm, would they?

However, when it comes specifically to psychedelics, the motivations for engagement have another genre of driver. Not new, but any stretch, but for a growing number of anthropologically anchorless young, it is a selection criterion.

The pro-psychedelic punters of today often speak of ‘therapeutic’ value of these unpredictable toxins, but some cultures millennia before had engaged for religious reasons — a fact these punters enjoy harnessing in an attempt go give some sort of further credibility to their use. However, a scratch of the surface of that history shows that these substances were an addendum for now spiritually surpassed practices, and not the central element in them.

There in lies the rub. Supra-cultural (or if you’d prefer ‘spiritual’) factors are inseparable to all past cultures, and the only very recent (past 100 or so years) advent of the atheist/ materialist philosophies has seen that element attempted to be erased from the cultural discourse.

Not unsurprisingly though, this historically and it would seem, indispensable element of culture cannot just be amputated. So, what does a psyche that needs the supra-cultural to be more complete do? I need, or even want the transcendent, but want to short cut to the affect and experience, not the principle or the essence, so I engage with a psychedelic.

Thus, the origin of the phrase getting high — trying for the transcendent but falling way short. Dare I compare this as mere metaphysical masturbation over true spiritual encounter?

As a juxtapose to the authentic spiritual exercise, this is at the very best, counterfeit. At its worst; short lived, unfulfilling, and psycho-biologically damaging.

Again, I digress…

What has also been in play for some years now, and pretty much standard fare for the Harm Reduction tool kit is the opioid poisoning reversal drug naloxone. I won’t use the misnomer ‘overdose’ (unless of course, the opioid poisoning was done by an individual using a prescribed opiate in an unprescribed manner, if the opioid is not a prescribed drug, then every dose is an overdose).

Anyway, this important life-saving intervention was broadly deployed to assist when heroin et al addicts poisoned themselves and consequently shut down their respiratory system. Naloxone is applied and reverses this condition, and more often than not to the disgust of the drug user.

The unethical use of this harm reduction intervention was misrepresented by Narcan or ‘Lazarus Party’ Myths, but whilst this extreme behaviour is not common at all, the easy access to this now damage management tool has seen it popularized in a small party sub-set.

A 2021 article in the Guardian didn’t hide this fact ‘We’re making harm reduction cool’: overdose reversal Narcan becomes a rave essential . The inclusion of naloxone (NARCAN ®) in your party tool kit now equips you to better engage in illicit drug taking and all it’s attending harms. Of course, we could go into how this not only undermines Demand and Supply Reduction drug policy strategies, but it empowers greater risk taking and undermining of protective factors against not just short, but more importantly long-term harms of now perceived ‘safer’ drug use.

So now, Harm Reduction becomes normal — a way of life — Damage not only expected, but courted, with the belief it can all be managed — The price of ‘buzz’ is worth it?

This phenomenon, in part, has also caught the attention of researchers with a 2018 National Library of Medicine published paper ‘I have it just in case’ — Naloxone access and changes in opioid use behaviours noting that a theme of use being to manage negative outcomes of recreational events rather than protect the self-destructive behaviours of a chronically addicted opioid user. This research is not stand alone, with a 2021 research paper looking at the Naloxone access laws impact on opioid use and crime.

So, we see this more recent phenomenon of ‘Trip Killers’, had a prefacing enterprise. As unintentional as these dubious outcomes of misuse may be, it remains imperative to ask the question of the mechanism… Is this intervention reducing, remediating, or facilitating recovery from substance use? Or is it enabling, equipping, empowering, or endorsing ongoing drug use?

Years of life lost, along with productivity lost is not the only casualty of this careless hedonic phenomenon, public health and those who fund it — the taxpayer — are front line casualties too.

And this is ‘progress’?

Shane Varcoe, ‘No Brainer’ — Dalgarno Institute