About this archive |
Hey everyone, it's Josie Kins speaking from the future here. I hope you're doing well. It's the year 2026, and it's been about 13 years since the original PsychonautWiki was launched off of the back of my childhood blog, Disregard Everything I Say. A lot has happened. In 2016, when I was in my early 20s, I was still actively working on this website. I'd say that it was when this website was at its prime in terms of output and community, and at the same time, I was also going through a lot. I had moved country, transitioned, lost my friends and my family, and was homesick and depressed, and in a very unstable relationship. I was an addict, and things weren't that great. But, this website meant the world to me, and it meant the world to a lot of other people as well.
At the time, even though I ran this website, all of my expertise was in psychopharmacology. I could not do web development. I could not do software engineering. I was not a particularly technical person. This was honestly a huge regret of mine, and i've since learned to be self sufficient here.
In 2016, when we lost our system admin due to him experiencing his own personal issues, we needed a new system admin. We put a reddit post out looking for one online, and somebody stepped up. They helped us maintain the website, and at first they seemed very helpful.
Fast forward 6 to 12 months, and I realized that the person who had taken it over and the new staff members, which I didn't control, were increasingly changing the website in ways that I didn't like and didn't support. Every single day I was fighting to prevent the Subjective Effect Index from having just dogshit edits made to it, essentially. It was upsetting. The Subjective Effect Index was my baby! It was what I wanted to do with my life! It was something I was really protective of. And on top of all of this. The new staff members were just horrible to me and my partners. It was messed up. I slowly realized that this thing that I have worked for was no longer mine, and furthermore, that it needed me more than I needed it, so I left and focused on https://EffectIndex.com.
This is the story that I've told publicly, but it's not the full story from my perspective, because, in early 2017, I was at home in the United Kingdom because my father had terminal lung cancer. It was a very stressful time for me, and I had diverted a lot of attention away from this site. What also happened was that my partner, Oscarette/OskyKins (you can see her writing all throughout the site), deeply loved and deeply cared about this website. She wasn't there from the very very start, but joined within a year and is practically a site founder. It was her life's purpose. She really cared about harm reduction and helping people, and she was a deeply mentally unstable person with borderline personality disorder. It was bad, man. You'll have to believe me on that. I'm not going to immortalize the places that she ended up in by going into detail about it here, but essentially, sometime in the summer, she passed away due to an overdose, in America while I was in the United Kingdom. Less than a month or so later, my father passed away, also.
This traumatized me. I straight up had PTSD. I was a wreck for years. I'm still dealing with it to this day. I'm happy and thriving over all, but in 2026, I'm still dealing with the emotional repercussions of what happened in that one month period in 2017. I did focus on Effect Index, but eventually was too depressed to stay motivated. I'd say between 2018 and late 2020, I wasn't working on subjective effect documentation at all. I was out of commission. I was struggling to function as a human being. I was working a pretty cushy job, just in a shop, and I was mostly just letting life pass me by and ignoring this space altogether. Then around late 2020, everything culminated in the worst mental health breakdown of my life, but I pulled through it and found my full motivation again. Shortly after that, pretty much as soon as the psychedelic research industry opened up around late 2020-early 2021, I got snapped up into a job as a researcher, because it turned out that I had indeed become the person with leading expertise in the documentation of subjective effects. I started building a career for myself in the psychedelic industry, and had already built a name for myself in the psychedelic / psychonaut community.
It's been almost a decade since I left PsychonautWiki. You can go back to the original domain name, and you can see that it kind of got run into the ground. Slowly but surely, it didn't pay off as a shortcut to fame, wealth, or power for any of the website owners. They did not have the creative drive, the vision, or the motivation to keep it going, to keep innovating, to keep up with the times, and it got run into the ground. I don't doubt that there were lots of great contributors and lots of great new articles, but still, my point holds true. It's clear to everyone involved, and clear to everyone outside of PsychonautWiki, that it's not in as good a shape as it used to be and that it's not fit for its original purpose. So, let it be known, here it is when it was in its prime, when it was at its peak, a relic of a bygone time, the way you remember it.
For my professional resume, my emotional well being, and, most importantly of all, for Jenny, who would not have wanted this website to have completely stagnated away. I have now created a static historical archive of this website as it was in 2016 or before. There are a minority of web pages that I could only archive later versions of, hopefully no later than 2017 or so. And if you want a modern encyclopedic database of this sort, check out my project: https://dose.wiki (available after august 31st)
I'm rambling into a voice to text transcriber in a Whole Foods Market right now because this stuff has just really been weighing on me. I just want people to know my raw thoughts on this situation. Thank you for reading. Thank you to anyone who has supported me and stuck with me throughout the years. It's been amazing, and there are a lot of people who I met through this website that still hold a special place in my heart, even if I haven't spoken to most of you all for years. Thank you.
~Josie
