Do undergraduates’ views of psychedelics relate to the context for psychedelic use?

Background. Psychedelic drug policy is beginning to change, both in the U.S. and internationally. However, psychedelic use is not homogeneous, as there are multiple unique contexts for use, including clinical therapies, naturalistic use, and microdosing. There are notable differences between these contexts regarding emerging evidence for therapeutic efficacy, user safety, likely future legality, and other important characteristics. We compared psychedelic-naïve undergraduates’ views (expectancies, perceptions of benefits, and perceptions of harms) of psilocybin and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) across each context, assessed via multiple item pools. Methods. Item-level data were analyzed using non-parametric methods, correcting for multiple comparisons. Participants were 277 psychedelic-naïve undergraduates (75.81% female; 81.95% White; 76.17% non-Hispanic), with a mean age of approximately 19.50 years (SD = 2.01). Results. Only 19 out of 79 omnibus tests assessing views of psychedelics across contexts were statistically significant; when participants’ views of psychedelics were context dependent, they generally had the most positive views of clinical contexts, then microdosing, and, lastly, naturalistic contexts. Conclusion. This indicates that psychedelic-naïve undergraduates make limited distinctions between contexts for psychedelic use, suggesting that a) researchers should define the type of use they intend to study as explicitly as possible when surveying psychedelic-naïve populations and b) in the U.S., psychedelic-naïve undergraduates may benefit from education about differences between contexts, especially considering their potential to impact public policy. Future work should extend these findings to undergraduates (i.e., potential voters) from different U.S. states and international countries to better understand emerging policy phenomena surrounding psychedelics.