'Psychedelic renaissance' hits New Zealand

The latest set of results from the 2024 New Zealand drugs trend survey have shed light on the non-medical use of pharmaceuticals in New Zealand.

More than 10,000 people took the survey, and this year for the first time they were asked about their recreational use of pharmaceuticals and the use of psychedelics for therapeutic purposes.

From the results, it looks like New Zealand may be part of a global trend that has been dubbed the 'psychedelic renaissance'.

Dr Robin van der Sanden, member of the NZ Drugs Research Team at Massey University's SHORE & Whāriki Research Centre, said being an anonymous survey they were able to get accurate data.

"We don't collect personal data, we don't store IP addresses or anything. We've created a bit of a software solution to avoid that. We essentially try to collect sort of broad data that isn't going to be too sort of interesting to other authorities or anything," she told RNZ's Afternoons.

"And yeah, just kind of get people to broadly indicate their experiences with drugs in the past six months."

The participants were recruited via social media.

"Any concerns about it being self-selecting or that people might be more likely to take part in this if they take drugs, for example, in all honesty, that's exactly what we want, you know?

"Because the thing with mapping drug trends is you could go to all the trouble of getting yourself a representative survey sample and that costs a lot of money. That's really hard. It takes a lot of time.

"Or you could just go straight to the people who actually know a thing or two and get the answers straight out of the horse's mouth, which is what the New Zealand Drug Trends Survey tries to do."

For the first time in the annual survey, people were asked about their therapeutic use of psychedelics.

"There's this growing awareness of the potential therapeutic benefits of psychedelics, and so people are kind of increasingly trying these for themselves, trying to get these benefits, you know? See if they can maybe, I don't know, alleviate depression a little bit with psilocybin (magic mushrooms), for example.

"And a lot of that is self-medication, given these substances are not legally accessible in New Zealand."

Around a quarter of new users of psychedelics, ketamine and MDMA (ecstasy) in the recent survey said they were doing so for therapeutic purposes, rather than recreationally.

"Common reasons for therapeutic use were kind of broad kind of holistic things like, you know, gaining self-knowledge, spiritual enlightenment - and then also kind of trying to treat a mental health condition like depression, for example…

"There's always been this kind of association between psychedelics and kind of broadening your mental horizons, maybe experiencing things in ways you wouldn't normally experience them - and that can obviously have quite a profound therapeutic impact."

But the science was still developing, she said, and users might not know what dosages might work on them.

"But that doesn't stop people from kind of trying to perhaps reap the broader benefits for themselves."

As for the recreational use of pharmaceuticals - prescription and over-the-counter medicines - van der Sanden said there was a common perception they were "very safe".

"And so we perhaps are sometimes a little bit laissez-faire in whether we take correct dosages, whether we take them daily for extended periods of time. And some people take them also for more recreational motives - like aspirin, because it can sometimes make you feel kind of good, you know?"

Other uses that came up in the survey included using drugs like benzodiazepines or opioids to get high, ADHD medications like Ritalin to help focus and increase productivity or energy, or borrowing medications from a friend that were not prescribed to you.

"That's also a kind of non-medical use, or taking more of what is prescribed to you than you should be, for example."

The survey was unable to show whether drug use overall was up or down, since it dealt in a group mostly already using drugs, but it did show how use was changing.

"We see kind of slight changes here and there - for example... increased use of [cocaine] in this year's survey, you know. But that is then within our sample who are already more drug-involved than your average New Zealander."

The rate of cocaine use among new drug users was up, as was psychedelics. MDMA has levelled off after a few years of rising.

"Our hope is with the survey to kind of provide an up- to-date, kind of evolving response to drug harms in New Zealand that is a valuable resource for policymakers and harm reduction activists and the like."

Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.