Ever since the Fireside Project launched its Psychedelic Support Line in 2021, the nonprofit has hoped to provide “non-clinical emotional support” from trained volunteers who “understand what you’re going through because they’ve been there themselves.” But sometime within the five years that this hotline has been live, the project’s founder and research partners realized something: They were sitting on a vast trove of anonymized data detailing how real people actually use these drugs in their everyday lives.

Now psychiatric researchers and scientists collaborating with Fireside from institutions in Paris and Geneva have compiled information from 25,419 of these support calls into a rare (and sorely needed) database for what they’re calling “psychedelic epidemiology.” Conducted between April 2021 and February 2026, the calls showed that—while the majority of callers to the hotline (60%) wanted to talk through their experiences with “magic mushrooms,” or psilocybin—the callers most likely to reach out mid-trip weren’t even on a psychedelic. They were weed smokers and other cannabis users, nearly half of whom (47%) had called the hotline in a state of panic or concern over their marijuana use, past or present.

“Cannabis merits particular attention because it occupies a unique policy position,” Fireside’s founder Joshua White and his coauthors, including Swiss-based psychiatrist Mickael Eskinazi, wrote in their new study published Friday in Science Advances.

Cannabis, they noted, is “the most widely legalized psychoactive substance in the U.S.” and yet “largely excluded from both psychedelic harm reduction frameworks and mental health crisis infrastructure.”

Cannabis users were distinct in several important ways, based on the data recorded by the Fireside hotline’s 220 volunteers.

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