Like 0.01%?
For every McKenna, Timophy Leary, etc, there were millions doing LSD in the 60s.
And the "prophets" were mostly a fashion of the era too.
When that died, in the 80s, and 90s and so on, you still had LSD, and shrooms, and Ecstasy, and others, but no "prophets".
But that doesn't mean psychedelics are especially prone to that.
Yes the experience of LSD is shattering your own reality but for me, i'm very conscious to not promote it in something everyone needs to experience.
Having a flashback on the toilet 4 weeks later and thinking 'does it ever go away, am i imprisoned now, did i break my brain' for 10 minutes, is something difficult to handle.
Also while doing it and experiencing once, i'm fine with doing it every decade once, still not promoting it to everyone.
Giving LSD to someone on their death bed without prior experience? Holy shit no.
Lying in a hospital bed and tripping for the first time might just a little bit crazy.
NOT! Saying it should be illegal, i think the current laws are braindead.
But yes you're completely right, the actual odds of an adverse psychologic reaction are much lower. My point was moreso that dealing with terminal illness can lead to its own kind of detachment from reality and all sorts of stress.
We can observe the behaviour in many types of interests.
This being HN, the obvious example is programming language zealotry. Other common examples are sports and cars. We see people walking down the street covered in car brand livery and think approximately nothing of it, and some of them will bang on about their chosen interest endlessly.
I tend to think it's more like a flaw in human psychology. Or maybe a strength of our inquisitive nature that sort of gets hijacked by an almost neurotic obsession.
Mind you I have had positive experiences with psychedelics; I wouldn't push them on anyone, and think it both creepy and unwise to do so.
As an example of how forbidding something can make it attractive, it was re-cut into an "exploitation" film...
this means we have no clue who paid right? as in: it could still be tax money through the CIA or smth.
Hallucinogens though... aren't just drugs that change something a little. They can give people profound religious experiences. Some people become an unsettling kind of prophet for a religion of the drug. In the 60s-ish era there were people that wanted to change the world with the drugs with plans to dose populations and leaders to effect major changes. They are very powerful things and with them minds can be rewritten... any sufficiently powerful tool is dangerous. Some early signals and bad actors (basically parts the drug culture that separated from the early scientists studying the drugs) scared the shit out of many in the established society and the propaganda machine turned on and turned them and drugs in general into an evil.
Sort of a knee-jerk stupid reaction that had some basis in real issues but was distorted and exaggerated by people who didn't know much of anything and just got on the bandwagon. (remind you of any other societal issues?)