About this archive |
Hey everyone, it's Josie Kins speaking from the future here. 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, for Example: In 2016, I was a very different person. I was still actively working on this website. I'd say that it was when this website was at its prime in terms of traffic and community, and I was also going through a lot. I had moved country, transitioned, lost my friends and my family, and was homesick and unstable, and in a very unstable relationship. I was an addict, and things weren't that great. 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 is very much no longer the case btw)
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 every single day I was fighting to prevent the Subjective Effect Index from having just dogshit edits made to it, essentially. It was bad. The Subjective Effect Index was my baby! It was something I was really protective of, so I guess I decided I was going to make EffectIndex.com, instead.
This is the story that I've told publicly, but it's not the full story because, in early 2017, I had gone back to 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. Meanwhile, the person who had taken it over and the new staff members, which I didn't control, were increasingly controlling the website in ways that I didn't like and didn't support. I just realized that this thing that I have worked for was no longer mine, so I left.
What also happened was that my partner, Oscarette/OskyKins (you can see her mark all throughout the site), deeply loved and deeply cared about this website. 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. A month or so later, my father passed away, also.
This traumatized me. I straight up had PTSD. I was a wreck for years and years and years. I'm still dealing with it to this day. 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 the trauma caught up to me. 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 in America, just in a shop, and I was just ignoring this space altogether. Now it's 2026, and pretty much as soon as the psychedelic research industry opened up around late 2020 or early 2021, I got snapped up into it because it turned out that I had indeed become the person with leading expertise in the documentation and classification of subjective effects and general altered states of consciousness. I built a career for myself in the psychedelic industry, and I built a name for myself in the psychedelic or psychonaut community.
It's been almost 10 years 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 people involved. 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 Psychonaut Wiki, that it's not in as good a shape as it used to be, so here it is when it was in its prime, when it was at its peak.
I'm rambling into a voice recorder in a Whole Foods Market right now because this stuff has just really been weighing on me. It really did weigh on me, and people can go talk to the people that currently host the "official" site. Now they'll tell you that I stole from the website and that there was too much drama, which, honestly, that one, fair enough. The whole theft from the website thing has just grown in its claims over the years ad adsurdam. Last I heard, anyone who tries to talk to the current system admin of Psychonaut Wiki will tell them that I stole thousands of dollars and I spent it on transition surgeries and plane tickets and stuff. What actually happened was we got a donation for about $700 in 2017, and I spent it on a camera to record YouTube videos for the website. The YouTube videos were kinda cringe in retrospect, but it wasn't theft, and also it was a website that I had started. Also I paid for my own surgieries and plane tickets, thank you very much.
For my emotional well-being, for my resume, and, most importantly of all, for Jenny, who would not have wanted this website to have completely disappeared. I have now created a historical archive of this website as it was in 2016. There are a lot of web pages that we could only archive later versions of, hopefully no later than 2018 or so, but this is what it looked like when it was in its prime. Enjoy it.
I'm setting up a more modern site on the url dose.wiki, which you can go see if it's past August 31, 2026, right now, but this is how it looked during my tenure. Let it be known.
That's just the gist of it. This is completely unstructured, and I am not even gonna go through and grammar-check it or anything. I just want people to know my raw thoughts on this situation. Thank you for reading.
Head on over to dosewiki, and thanks for reading. Thank you to anyone who has followed 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 you all for years. Thank you.
~Josie
