A New Study Found Psychedelic Use Near Political Conventions Tracked With More Support for Partisan Violence
A new longitudinal study found that U.S. adults whose most intense psychedelic experience in a given two-month window fell on a date close to the 2024 Democratic or Republican National Conventions, or near Election Day, reported more support for partisan political violence afterward — while those whose peak experience landed on the Fourth of July reported less. Led by Otto Simonsson at Sweden's Karolinska Institutet and published Oct 6 in the journal Psychedelic Medicine, the study tracked nearly 22,000 U.S. adults across two 2023–24 survey waves; of the roughly 12,000 who completed both, 505 reported psychedelic use in the interval and gave the exact date and estimated dose of their most intense experience. About four in five of those users identified as Democrats. The study doesn't say whether this was recreational or more controlled use — participants reported only the date and dose, not the context, so "naturalistic" here just means "outside a clinical trial," nothing more specific.
We've all read that Grindr usage spikes in host cities during party conventions — add psychedelics to the list of things apparently also happening on the convention floor this cycle.
The researchers frame the actual finding through set and setting — the idea that a psychedelic experience is shaped by a person's mindset going in and the environment around them — extended to the broader cultural and political mood on a given day, not just the room someone is sitting in. One notable, unplanned finding: among the small number of Republican respondents whose session fell on the date of the July 2024 assassination attempt on Donald Trump, support for partisan violence went down, not up.
Read the caveats as seriously as the headline. This is observational, not a controlled trial, so it can't establish that the drug caused the shift rather than correlating with who was already paying close attention to politics that day. Only the Fourth of July comparison was pre-registered; the convention, election, and assassination-date findings are exploratory, drawn from subsamples as small as 19 people, without correction for running multiple comparisons. None of this means psychedelics cause political violence; it's a preliminary signal that when someone uses may matter, not just whether they do.