Drugs Most Similar to Near-Death Experiences

The real or perceived proximity to death often results in a non-ordinary state of consciousness called an NDE (near-death experience) characterized by phenomenological features such as the perception of leaving the body, feelings of peace, bliss and timelessness, life review, the sensation of traveling through a tunnel and an irreversible threshold. Some psychoactive drugs can reproduce similar altered states of consciousness.

A 2019 study computationally analyzed and compared word similarities in first-person written reports of voluntary drug-induced experiences with written reports of NDE’s. To compare the similarity of subjective experiences, researchers analyzed shared language between psychoactive substance use reports from the website Erowid.org and narratives of near-death experiencers. They compared 625 NDE reports with35,000 drug use reports using linguistic tools and computer-aided analytics. The drug reports included 165 psychoactive substances. The drugs with the most semantic similarities to an NDE fell into 8 categories and a ranking emerged, with ketamine as the most similar. A dissociativepsychedelic used medically as a veterinary and humananaesthetic, it is one of the few addictive psychedelics. Salvia divinorum and various forms of DMT also made the list of "most similar".

In a clinical setting, some of these drugs can be therapeutically valuable in treating depression and death anxiety in the terminally ill.