Erowid's Experience Vaults are an attempt to collect, catalog, and publish the wide variety of experiences people have with psychoactive plants and chemicals, as well as experiences with endogenous (non-drug) mystical experiences, drug testing, police interactions, meditation, mind machines, etc.

It has become extremely clear over Erowid's 25+ years of researching psychoactives that the variation in individual experience with any specific chemical is dramatic and unexpected. Huge differences occur in intensity and character of reactions even within a single individual at consistent dosages. Within a large population containing many different biochemistries, psychologies, personal histories, pharmacological baselines, varying dosages, quality of materials, and idiosyncratic reactions, the picture becomes extraordinarily complex.

Our intention is to help illuminate this complex picture by documenting how and why people are using psychoactives and what people report their experiences to be. We are working to create a comprehensive system that simplifies the submission of reports, incorporates reviews of reports by trusted members with expertise in the field, and makes sorting, searching and accessing of reports as easy as possible.

The Experience Vaults include a system for reviewing, categorizing, and then re-reviewing each experience that is entered with trained and knowledgeable staff and volunteers reading reports and evaluating each one for interest, quality, credibility, and focus on effects or outcomes. Each report is then organized by substance (or non-substance category), primary category, and a number of secondary categories by which they can be sorted and filtered for viewing.

We have had an incredible response to the Experience Vaults, with more than 117,000 reports having been submitted in the past 22 years. We believe these reports are an important part of documenting humanity's use of psychoactives, and we do our best to keep reviewing and processing reports in a timely manner, but it can take more than a year for some reports to be reviewed. Please be patient.


The reports in Erowid's Experience Vaults are copyrighted by Erowid Center. Authors have permission to use their own reports as they wish. Researchers and authors may NOT "mine", distill, or use aggregate data from Experience Vaults without prior written permission. Publishing data analysis (in journals, books, or articles) without the prior permission of Erowid Center is a violation of the usage agreement of this website. Please contact us at copyrights@erowid.org to discuss projects and crediting requirements. We generally agree to such use, but misinterpretation of experience report data and improper citation and credit of Erowid in most peer-reviewed articles that use our data has led us to take this step. Explicit permission is required before conducting or publishing data analysis of Erowid's experience report collection.