"SWIM" Team: Trip Reports, Anonymity, and Discursive Freedom during Psychedelic Prohibition

The War on Drugs has recently been overshadowed in the headlines by the “psychedelic renaissance,” a renewed interest in psychedelics as therapeutic medicines and spiritual tools. Despite the growing popularity of psychedelics, harsh penalties for drug possession have continued to threaten psychedelic users around the world. The rise of internet forums in the 1990s gave psychonauts a newfound freedom to share information, experiences, and recipes with likeminded individuals. Along with this freedom came the implicit requirement of anonymity, embodied by the acronym SWIM (“someone who isn’t me”), which is commonly used on forums. This paper analyzes the role of trip reports and drug forums in online psychonautic communities. I argue that online psychedelic forums developed in tandem with the rise of the public forum as a source of informational authority for the general population, representing a shift in spiritual authority from traditional religious institutions to the anonymous psychonautic collective.