Study suggests that different substances have different associations with criminal behavior and police arrests. Psychedelics like psilocybin tend to be associated with lower rates of arrest, other substances like PCP and GHB show strong links to violent and non-violent crimes.

-A study published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology suggests that different substances have vastly different associations with criminal behavior and police arrests. The research indicates that while some psychedelics like psilocybin tend to be associated with lower rates of arrest, other substances like PCP and GHB show strong links to violent and non-violent crimes. These findings provide evidence that the influence of drugs on society is not uniform and depends heavily on the specific substance being used.

Jesse J. Norris, an associate professor of criminal justice at the State University of New York at Fredonia, conducted this research to examine the role of substances that scientists do not often study in relation to crime. He noticed that much research focuses on common drugs like alcohol or cannabis but rarely looks at chemicals like phencyclidine, which is also known as PCP. He wanted to explore how these less common substances relate to both police arrests and crimes that people report themselves.

Norris explained that two specific motivations led him to explore this topic. “First, PCP is stereotypically associated with extreme violence, and there are certainly some anecdotes to support that, in which people under the influence of PCP committed cannibalism or beheaded someone, for example,” Norris said. He realized there was very little systematic research on PCP and no broad agreement about its association with violence.

I wonder how those compare to cocaine/crack and meth.

And then for opiates and their synthetic counterparts, ie fentanyl.