I agree there was no justification to their criminality but would like to caution against portraying them too widely as harmless. Specifically, psychadelics should be considered very carefully(and potentially not partaken in at all) in context of those who have experienced psychosis or are relatives of people with psychotic disorders.

This is a bit disingenuous.

I have known too many people with "psychotic disorders". I have learnt the hard way to show such people enormous respect. A person who cannt distinguish a real thing from a thought is somebody that can do very surprising things.

These can be wonderful things, great artists etcetera. But it can also mean unexpected violence.

Yes "psychadelics should be considered very carefully... in context of those who have experienced psychosis". Everything should in that context.

A cup of tea should be.

I'm sorry for whatever happened to you that is causing you to behave as if someone who had experienced psychosis cannot live a full, functioning, well-managed life. Someone with a well-controlled schizophrenia spectrum/psychotic disorder/mood disorder with psychosis does not generally have to be careful about "everything". Someone who experiences psychosis due to insomnia, dehydration, or drugs generally does not pose a risk to themselves or others once the causal factor is removed. I understand your reaction may be coming from a place of trauma but please understand it is misinformed.

> I'm sorry for whatever happened to you that is causing you to behave as if

I know this is currently a popular snarky rhetorical maneuver, but it gives me the creeps every time. It’s pretty ugly.

> you to behave as if someone who had experienced psychosis cannot live a full, functioning, well-managed life

It is true that it is possible to manage psychosis.

But it is also true that if you live with some one with psychosis you must respect the illness.

Denying that is dangerous. Unexpected violence is dangerous, and unexpected violence is a common symptom of psychosis.

People who experience psychosis are more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators of it, and it is perfectly safe to live with someone who has a well-managed disorder with psychosis as part of its symptom profile. I understand this may not be your personal experience.

> I'm sorry for whatever happened to you that is causing you to behave

> I understand your reaction may be coming from a place of trauma

This is basically personally attacking someone on no evidence except their opinion, which happens to be different from yours.

I wonder what trauma you have experienced to behave like this. /s

Please take my position in good faith, in response to someone who claims to have learned misinformation "the hard way".

If it is in good faith then let me respond (albeit quite late). I've also learned "the hard way" how to behave around people who experience psychosis by taking care of multiple friends at various points in time. Some people get violent, some don't. Those that don't generally will almost never get violent -- their brain seemingly just "doesn't have that pattern", so when their consciousness is starting to hit random buttons, it doesn't often come up as an option. People that do get physical (or heavily paranoid) have the potential to go violent, and that must be kept in mind for your own safety. It's obviously a lot more muddy than that but it's something to know.

I also know a nurse in a psychiatric clinic (the harder kind), he gets bit so much they have special vaccines (?, or some other kind of medication) to protect him against illnesses that can come from a human's mouth.

I don't believe the above reactions that I have learned are trauma, it's just the rational way to act when you've seen literal examples of what can happen.

While I am also in complete favour, stating that there are no negative health effects is somewhat false. Abusing any kind of psychedelic can lead to HPPD [1], a very real long term disorder.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen_persisting_percep...

I would classify HPPD as widely harmless. If you poll non-users you'll find that many people have HPPD like effects and can't recall ever not having them. Seeing a slight trail behind a bright fast moving object is inconsequential in life.

Brains are quite nonlinear. I wonder how many people already had visual artifacts and assorted weirdness, but never paid attention to them because the brain just paves over it, until an experience highlights those artifacts, and now they can't not notice them.

Many people with psychedelic-induced HPPD report them being a difficulty, though. Take this case study: >These symptoms persisted for the last 13 years, with little change in intensity and frequency. All efforts at treatment, psychopharmacological as well as psychotherapeutic, failed to alleviate the symptoms. Often the patient was unable to focus properly with her eyes and tired rapidly while performing intense visual tasks – these deficiencies being detrimental to her studies and professional work as an architect. As a consequence, the patient became depressed with latent suicidal impulses. She also found it increasingly difficult to distinguish between ‘normal’ and ‘ abnormal’ perceptions.

This papering over of side effects that people insist on is why so many are so hesitant to legalize these drugs. It's doing no favor to the cause when so many refuse to acknowledge the danger that's inherit in some kinds of psychoactive drugs.

There are a couple of things to keep in mind here:

1. The link between psychedelic use and persisting minor visual disturbances is reasonably well established.

2. The link between psychedelic use and serious, problematic visual disturbances or psychiatric issues is not well established at all, and modern evidence calls into question[1].

Even if we do take at face value the attributions of problematic HPPD to psychedelics (which we really shouldn't), the prevalence of this phenomenon is extremely low. So low that there isn't much in the way of empirical data to estimate its prevalence - just case reports. And case reports are a notoriously unreliable way to reason about etiology.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.16968

>2. The link between psychedelic use and serious, problematic visual disturbances or psychiatric issues is not well established at all, and modern evidence calls into question[1].

You are misinterpreting this. This is saying there's no link between psychedelic use and increased cases of psychosis. That isn't the same as debilitating HPPD, or any depression/anxiety caused as a result. In fact in that same article he highlights this;

>But he has concerns about Krebs and Johansen’s overall conclusions, he says, because individual cases of adverse effects use can and do occur.

>For example, people may develop hallucinogen persisting perception disorder (HPPD), a ‘trip’ that never seems to end, involving incessant distortions in the visual field, shimmering lights and coloured dots. “I’ve seen a number of people with these symptoms following a psychedelic experience, and it can be a very serious condition,” says Grob.

>If you poll non-users you'll find that many people have HPPD like effects and can't recall ever not having them.

Yep

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/11/lots-of-people-going-a...

I have HPPD and it is kind of fun and not at all distressing or problematic for my life. Cool part of how my brain works.

It is all relative.

In the case of recreational drugs it is relative to alcohol.

So not "completely harmless" but "relatively harmless"

Many people have bad trips that end up in irreparable self harm or harm to others, often inducing death by police.

Psychedelics radically impact cognition and consciousness, and not always in a safe way.

It's not always just a 'woah man' giggling in a park.

People climb high things and fall. They run into traffic or harms way. They often attack first responders that are attempting to deescalate.

Thought loops are dangerous and psychotic breaks are an obvious possibility to anyone who has done these substances.

Yes, this can happen, but it is extremely rare. Advil probably has a higher death rate than psilocybin.

Tylenol is an even better choice: "Paracetamol poisoning is the foremost cause of acute liver failure in the Western world, and accounts for most drug overdoses in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracetamol

Acetaminophen/paracetamol falls in the weird zone of drugs that would never have gotten approved by the FDA for OTC use if they were discovered today.

Because you're incorrect. Some people face serious side effects. It can trigger mental illness in those that have a predisposition. It can cause HPPD. Here's a report I just dug up for an earlier comment:

>These symptoms persisted for the last 13 years, with little change in intensity and frequency. All efforts at treatment, psychopharmacological as well as psychotherapeutic, failed to alleviate the symptoms. Often the patient was unable to focus properly with her eyes and tired rapidly while performing intense visual tasks – these deficiencies being detrimental to her studies and professional work as an architect. As a consequence, the patient became depressed with latent suicidal impulses. She also found it increasingly difficult to distinguish between ‘normal’ and ‘ abnormal’ perceptions.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3736944/

"it's basically indisputable that they are socially harmless."

I wouldn't go that far. Any substance that alters perception, inhibition, etc has the potential for some social impact. For example, public drunkenness, DUI, liquor license etc were created because intoxicated people caused some sort of problem and laws were created around that. While these were created for alcohol, it's likely similar laws would be created for other substances.

Did you just compare LSD intoxication with "public drunkenness"?

Not so much "chalk and cheese" but "feather and revolver"

My state has no law against public drunkenness and there is no discernible difference here between other states I have lived in which had such a law. Honestly I think that was written as a religious feelzy.

I bet your state has a disorderly conduct or similar. The laws between states aren't vastly different on this sort of thing in most cases.

And that same law would apply to tripping people as it does to drunk people, so I don't understand what this is getting at.

"so I don't understand what this is getting at."

It's merely an illustration that the absolute language used to proclaim that there are no social issues related to them is not correct.

A drunk (or high) person is significantly more likely to engage in disorderly behavior like tripping people than a sober person.

In my state disorderly conduct requires mens rea of disturbing the peace. It's not something you can do accidentally. Compare that to public drunkenness in someplace like California, it's strict liability -- doesn't matter whether you meant to act drunk or not (in fact you can be held accountable for being "unable" to exercise care). They're extremely different laws.

What state is that? It's likely they have something similar. Almost all do. Many also consider that willful intoxication will satisfy mens rea.

Arizona. It's against the law here to pass a law against public intoxication:

>"No county, municipality or other political subdivision may adopt or enforce any local law, ordinance, resolution or rule having the force of law that includes being a common drunkard or being found in an intoxicated condition as one of the elements of the offense giving rise to criminal or civil penalty or sanctions..."

And in fact they specifically make it illegal to do the thing you suggest, and use other laws as a backdoor against public intox:

>"No county, municipality or other political subdivision may interpret or apply any law of general application to circumvent the provision of subsection A."

(This leaves ability to pass a law at state level, but state has no public drunk law)

https://www.azleg.gov/ars/36/02031.htm

They commonly use disorderly conduct against drunk people if they're making a disturbance. You also don't need to do it with the intent to disturb, but just with the knowledge that you are, which is easier to prove.

But my point still stands - there are social negatives that we pass laws around consumption of various drugs (including alcohol), and that they are very similar in most states (AZ might not have a public drunkeness law, but still has plenty about other stuff like DUI, public consumption, age limits, licensing, open container law, etc).

You're oversimplifying. "The law" is not the only thing that dictates peoples' behaviors. There are lots of other reasons why drinking may be more or less bothersome in some states versus others. Different places have different customs, particularly around drinking. Those customs combined with alcohol may create more or less of a public nuisance.

> socially harmless. Nobody gets addicted to them, there are no known negative health effects.

Not true.

My friend woke up handcuffed to a hospital bed after a bad trip on mushrooms. He saw his dead body in the street and was convinced he was dead and a ghost. He then went running around Manhattan traffic jumping on cars.

An English teacher in high school witnessed her friend jump to her death from a balcony after taking LSD. The woman said she felt light as a bird, took off running, hopped up a chair and dove over the railing to the pavement 20 feet below. She broke her neck.

I am not saying psychedelics should remain banned. But to casually call them harmless is incredibly irresponsible. They need to be taken under supervision by people with experience. This is called trip sitting. Not all trips are good as emotions and state of mind can effect the outcome. Things can go wrong fast. Be safe.

if you are worried about the harmful behavioral effects of psychedelics, consider that a significant fraction of all violent crimes involve alcohol:

* 15% of robberies

* 37% of sexual assaults

* 27% of aggravated assaults

* 60% of domestic violence (victim reported)

* 40% of child abusers (self reported)

* 40% of convicted murderers (self reported)

* 30% of traffic violence fatalities

https://www.alcoholrehabguide.org/alcohol/crimes/

psychedelics are essentially insignificant and are almost never involved in violence.

Yes. And.

I often hear stories about people tripping on mushrooms getting upto mischief. When I did I always find that, along with the mushrooms, there was a bottle of whiskey, or equivalent.

My culture is awash with alcohol. It is hard to disentangle the dreadful effects of the alcohol overdose experience form the psychedelic experience after consuming a bottle of whiskey.

Sounds like both should be illegal then?

No, it means both should be legal and the behavior is what should be prosecuted, not the substance taken.

> An English teacher in high school witnessed her friend jump to her death from a balcony after taking LSD. The woman said she felt light as a bird, took off running, hopped up a chair and dove over the railing to the pavement 20 feet below. She broke her neck.

What behavior could be prosecuted here except for giving someone LSD without supervision?

The trope of people jumping out of windows on LSD is entirely Art Linkletter's fault for not being able to accept his daughter's suicide, but instead blaming in on the fact that she had mentioned that she had done LSD before.

Since, if you're on LSD (or pretending to be) and acting out, the first thing you're expected to do is talk about how you can fly and threatening to jump out of the window. It's silly. No part of LSD makes upper-floor windows magnetic, and the trope has proved longer lasting than the memory of Art or Diane Linkletter.

edit: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-scarlet-linkletter/

> Diane’s death helped spread a widespread urban legend that lives on to this day, although it was around well before her fatal plunge. According to a popular story that warns young people about the dangers of drug use, “some girl” jumps from a window while on an acid trip because the drug fools her into thinking she can fly. The claims immediately made after Diane’s death that she had been on LSD, coupled with her method of suicide, seemed to some to fit this existing cautionary tale, and afterwards her demise was pointed to as an example of this legend’s coming true.

> No part of LSD makes upper-floor windows magnetic

Salvinorin-a on the other hand has (slightly?) more potential for this scenario. Users can experience what they call “salvia gravity,” a sensation of being pulled in some particular direction, which they follow with their body. I saw someone curl into and begin to lean against a 2nd-floor window screen. His friends kept him safe for the ~7 minutes the trip lasted. If he had been alone though, he could have fallen out.

I don’t know how common that effect is, and it’s quite different from the folklore of people thinking they can fly on acid. This is just a PSA for the few people who are interested in trying that particular drug.

Who do we prosecute when a motorcyclist crashes into a tree at 120 mph?

We should prosecute the US institute of traffic engineers since it’s literally in their model policy that streets must be designed so you can go fast enough to kill yourself, and the correct number of pedestrian deaths before considering any mitigations is significantly more than none.

So if you go faster than kill-yourself speed a missile gets fired and evaporates you? Or how are you supposed to make a street that doesn't allow you to go fast enough to kill yourself?

Make 'em wiggly and add stop signs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_calming

https://visionzeronetwork.org/about/what-is-vision-zero/

That seems like an odd argument for a substance that disconnects you from your actions.

I am worried about self harm.

in that case, consider that around a third of all suicides are actively drunk at the time, and people addicted to alcohol suffer as much as a 120x greater suicide risk

https://www.alcoholrehabguide.org/resources/dual-diagnosis/a...

and then consider the mortality and harm caused directly by consumption of alcohol, which is significant, and one of the statistically largest causes of death at 140,000 people killed per year

https://nccd.cdc.gov/DPH_ARDI/

and once again, the involvement of psychedelics with with suicide is extremely limited and rare. psychedelics are often self-reported as a source of long-term relief from suicidal feelings, after even a single experience.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8033757/

Are you worried about self-harm that psychedelics are able to prevent?

From my read of the scientific literature, most situations like the ones you describe are at least partially caused by underlying disorders that pre-existed (and manifested). And the second one you describe is a pretty common story to be told (same rumor at my college).

> From my read of the scientific literature, most situations like the ones you describe are at least partially caused by underlying disorders that pre-existed (and manifested).

Do you have a qualifying medical certificate and professionally diagnosed my friend? The answer is no. So don't try to down play a serious incident you have ZERO knowledge of.

> And the second one you describe is a pretty common story to be told (same rumor at my college).

When my teacher told us the story she was quite emotional and serious. It could be a well intentioned lie to discourage "drug use" but again, you have no way of knowing the truth so knock it off.

Note that my text was written to not specifically say that you lied, or misinterpreted the situation. my point was "the average observation is not entirely consistent with your anecdote", and "if a person does a crazy thing on drugs, it may not have been the drugs that made them crazy"

(as for credentials- no, no actual medical credentials, but I do have a phd in biophysics [emphasis on drug discovery], and have worked in the field of medical biology for decades). More importantly, my goal is here to avoid the "reefer madness" effect by countering establishment propaganda and college rumors with my read of the scientific literature, and also to raise awareness that mental illness is common and that psychedelic drugs can be a precipitating condition that turns a maintained disease into an emergency.

Trip responsibly,

> Do you have a qualifying medical certificate and professionally diagnosed my friend?

It's weird that you yourself don't require these kinds of qualifications to participate in this discussion. I guess you don't need them in order to disqualify people from disagreeing with you.

How are these two scenarios different in practice?

1. Someone has had a latent mental disorder since birth, which then manifested itself permanently upon taking psychedelics, and would have never manifested itself without them

2. Someone who originally had no mental disorders developed a permanent one from taking psychedelics

Just replace "psychedelics" with "*" because the general question is interesting, not psychedelics. People have just sort of gone along with the idea that psychedelics precipitate mental illness more than other drugs, or other life activities. There isn't really strong data for that with LSD.

Is that any less reason to think this isn’t a good idea? How many latent, otherwise-benign disorders might become manifest if people experiment with these drugs?

Or with alcohol, or with religion, or with watching movies about time travel.

Is there a Biff Tannen copycat crime spree I wasn’t aware of?

China has been concerned that time-travel movies cause people to lose their grip on reality.

An English teacher you say... you have a reference for that - or is that just an iteration/mutation of the original story? (Frank Olson)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Olson

Basically a chemist gets secretly drugged with a massive dose of LSD, then nine whole days later allegedly jumps out the window of a hotel... this was after he was declared a possible security risk...

So more than likely he was helped out that window.

If not that - it was probably the guilt: for being a part of MKUltra and the clandestine drugging of American citizens - he had a moral crisis, that much is certain.

I'm not saying your story isn't true... but I've been on the internet long enough to see how stories morph over time.

Psychedelics, especially in conjunction with SSRIs, can cause serotonin syndrome. They can cause visual disturbances that far outlast the trip: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen_persisting_percep.... They can trigger psychosis in certain people, i.e those with bipolar disorder.

Alcohol, especially in conjunction with acetaminophen or other OTC pain meds, can cause liver damage.

As long as alcohol is a legal substance to consume, it makes no sense to criminalize substances widely shown to have lower harm coefficients than it. There's tons of studies which mostly-objectively quantify harm/addiction caused by substances. The only drugs squarely as bad or worse than alcohol are tobacco products (also legal, contains many more psychoactives beyond nicotine), meth, crack cocaine (delivery route matters), cathinones, GHB, certain gaba-ergics, and most opioids.

Nicotine in isolation, ketamine, classical psychedelics, cannabis, MDMA, most of the Shulginoids (phenethylamines and tryptamines), all fall short of the harm caused by alcohol.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2020.5921...

Sounds like an argument to ban alcohol...

Yeah well we kinda tried that, didn't end well :p. Banning cannabis was much easier due to its much smaller appeal at the time.

The three first principle components of a drug's harm are the therapeutic window (log ratio of LD50 to median active dose), addictivity (harder to quantify, but we have models based on pharmacokinetics and dynamics), and degree of harm to others when altered.

Alcohol is dangerously toxic on the order of ~15-25 units, has fast onset and hits GABA so rather addicting, and as a CNS depressant, is obviously very risky to others.

If a designer analog came out with the profile of EtOH, it'd immediately go to Sch I.

I have a friend who had HPPD for years and loved it! It's gone now and he misses it.

I agree with you, save for the negative health effects. It's very rare but sometimes it breaks people (firsthand witness to this way back when).

It still should be legal but we should be honest about risks.

While most people harping on the "there are no known negative health effects." claim are talking about the drugs making people crazy I would point out that some psychedelics can also make people become sick. It passes, no long term harm, but it still seems like a miserable time and one I'd call a "negative health effect".

Sure, too much alcohol can cause people to get sick too, but then nobody ever said alcohol had "no known negative health effects" either.

Remember when you compare the health effects, public health or private health, of LSD and alcohol, you are making a strong recommendation for LSD.

Certainly in terms of short-term judgement impairment, this isn't true:

https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/teendeathbridgefal...

Honestly I couldn't give a shit if there were horrible effects. Kidnapping someone off the street and throwing them in a padded room with a doctor over watching to make sure they're medically OK is perfectly safe, but ought to be illegal. Buying rat poison and eating it is completely unsafe, but if that's someone's thing then they're free to have at it.

Of course, if I buy rat poison, I have a pretty pure product and I can look up the ld50 and make a scientific estimate on how much I can take before I die. Not so with some random shit off the street.

> Of course, if I buy rat poison, I have a pretty pure product and I can look up the ld50 and make a scientific estimate on how much I can take before I die. Not so with some random shit off the street.

True.

Where I live (Aotearoa) drug testing has been made legal and there are many opportunities to take your stash along to the spectrometer (I am not a chemist, unsure about the actual nature of the instrument, except it is reliable) and get it tested.

Most rodenticides, and a great many other hazardous household chemicals actually carry a warning that they are illegal to use in a way different than described in the instructions.

No, if you are susceptible to schizophrenia, it can trigger it and turn it into full blown schizophrenia including all the other comments about potential downsides.

But also reading comments on the Internet can trigger that stuff. The only safe thing is to ban online comment spaces.

HN is just low quality commentary on a lot of stuff and this is just another example. It's full of Internet urban legends and junk like that.

The classic sign of the Internet person who's trying to make himself seem like an authority on some subject is to try to use the trappings of expertise: speaking in passive voice, using words like "evidence" to describe urban legends, speaking in pseudo-formal tones to simulate expertise.

It's so clear that there is collectively very little expertise among this group on most subjects.

yeah, it just happens most anyone with friends who do psychedelics have had some of them go on psychotic breaks that take months or years to fix. It's not super common but I'm gonna trust my own observations of reality over studies that usually fail to replicate

I'm sympathetic to the impulse, and I think it's a good one to be skeptical of things like that when they conflict with anecdotal evidence. However, I think you have to look at the context of the anecdata in this case to conclude that it's probably better to rely on empirical data.

The paper I linked even discusses this a bit - the problem is that psychedelics are an intense experience, and they have this reputation for causing psychosis (helped along by the drug war lies, naturally), and so people tend to attribute subsequent psychiatric issues to their psychedelic experience, inappropriately.

I'd ask you regarding your anecdata, do you actually know someone personally who you witnessed this happen to, or is it more like "a friend of a friend" had this happen, and told you about it? I've never personally known someone to whom this has happened, but like you, I've heard my fair share of tall tales from the gossip mill. It's just that, in this particular instance, I think it's pretty likely that the stories are just that - stories.

I personally know 2 people who suffered from a bad trip. One who thought demons were out for them for about a month and another who just had some wild mood swings for a couple weeks afterwards. Both were temporary but the effects of a bad trip are no joke.

There's one other extreme example where someone I'm acquainted with did a lot of psychedelics over the course of a summer who seems permanently changed (although not ill or non-functioning in any way) but there's too much that could've happened outside the drug use that summer that could have affected him for me attribute those changes to drugs (although many other friends did).

Yes, I know someone directly that had suicidal tendencies for months after a couple of years of binging on weed, some lsd precursor I'm forgetting and mushrooms. He's fine now thankfully but he went through hell.

"Years of binging on weed and 'some lsd precursor'" are not exactly the same thing as traditional plant based psychedelics. The only LSD precursor you could be referring to is Ergotamine (rye fungus), which is pretty well known to be toxic.

If you're talking about years of binging on mind altering substances, it's a virtual certainty that there were underlying psychiatric issues causing that. You can't simply conclude that because one thing came after the other, the drugs caused it, when we're talking about years of abuse.

I've known him for 20 years, he didn't have any psychiatric issues at all before he started doing psychedelics often. He went deep into Terrance McKenna videos and had high ambitions to bend reality through his will and drug trips, this was fueled by magick videos and the like, got into crystals, all that crap. The "lsd" was ald-52.

> not super common but I'm gonna trust my own observations of reality over studies that usually fail to replicate

You mean you are going to prefer anecdotal evidence over scientific research?

The "studies that usually fail to replicate" are the ones supporting a LSD inducing schizophrenia.

Your "own observations of reality" are interesting to you, but do not form a basis for creating public policy

> You mean you are going to prefer anecdotal evidence over scientific research?

scientific research of this particular type has proved to be unreliable enough that it should be taken with a grain of salt. Fwiw my anecdote was probably caused by weed not LSD, my friend was taking frequent doses of a "legal" research LSD precursor he found in europe and didn't have problems until later when he stopped and smoked weed more. Idk if the LSD precursor accelerated his problems or not and I don't care to speculate.

> Your "own observations of reality" are interesting to you, but do not form a basis for creating public policy

I did not imply that psychedelics should be illegal, if it were up to me I'd legalize all drugs.

My issue is with people calling these chemicals "harmless", that very stance I believe is harmful. Any drug should be treated with respect. Weed is not harmless and the right edible or strong enough joint will fuck you up for days. People abuse MDMA regularly and come down with serotonin syndrome or fuck up their brain by not waiting 3 months or more. Ketamine is often abused too and that's not a fun ride either.

I've heard that SV types take LSD micro doses and I've tried it, I got a more cheerful day out of it but the next day I didn't have any motivation to do anything and didn't get much pleasure out of the whole day. So your mileage may vary, be careful when doing this stuff, do proper research and make sure you have enough free time with no responsibilities in the near future when doing them because you can't predict your specific reaction.

How many well recorded and observed anecdotes are required before it becomes recorded data worthy of being considered a replication of a poorly designed and unreplicated academic study? Do I just gotta format it in two columns like it's a high school newsletter and pray nobody reads the dozens of references I threw in there but never actually used beyond roughly associating my own thoughts with ones someone else already had?

>You mean you are going to prefer anecdotal evidence over scientific research?

Yes, if it has the potential to ruin my life and the life of people I care about, as it is plainly obvious to anyone who pays any attention at all to the world around them that these drugs are extremely harmful to a subset of the population.

> these drugs are extremely harmful to a subset of the population.

I pay attention.

Decades of observing.

Some negative effects (the paranoia induced by repeatedly taking magic mushrooms for instance).

I too have heard horror stories, I just have not witnessed them.

But then I prefer to pay attention to the scientific research by people like David Nutt

You do what you want based on your own prejudices and if you must your bigotry. But places like thos that influence public policy statements like:

"as it is plainly obvious to anyone who pays any attention at all to the world around" as an argument against scientific research simply does not belong here

> most everyone

You have to know that you're having this discussion with people who have done psychedelics and have friends who have done psychedelics.

It might be that we underestimate the number of people who sometimes can go on psychotic breaks without the drugs, as it is a taboo topic and is often dealt with quietly by mental hospitals. Also lots of homeless have mental conditions. This will skew the stats somewhat.

The title of this study "No link found between psychedelics and psychosis" should really be that "the authors did not find links between psychedelics and psychosis using their survey method".

These survey methods come with huge uncertainty and lots of pitfalls. I would not be surprised if the result in the paper is not reproducible. In fact, "over half of psychology studies fail reproducibility test"[1]

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18248

Well, if you care about your mental health, you would visit a psychiatrist and a psychotherapist about any such suspicions prior to taking psychedelics, but it is obviously difficult to conceal your true intent from them if it is highly illegal, so decriminalization has the potential to reduce harmful side effects.

Or, like has happened with marijuana, decriminalization will increase the amount of people using it and therefore schizophrenia.

Just this past summer I had a friend tell me he was thinking of getting some mushrooms for us to all use at a party, like it was something you just casually do for fun like weed.

I have another friend with a serious family history of schizophrenia and he does pot and now psilocybin because they’re “natural and harmless.” I warned him, showed him literature, etc. There’s been far too much propaganda (?) on how safe those substances are for him to think they could ever cause harm.

And frankly, he’s always been a bit crazy but the past couple years…. Something has definitely changed in him. We’re talking things like believing he can heal people.

There is no evidence that psychedelics cause schizophrenia. There is very weak evidence that it may precipitate latent schizophrenia earlier than it otherwise would have manifested, but even that isn't very well established.

I don't know anybody who started using cannabis because it was decriminalized (I don't use it myself). Are you sure that's a significant demographic?

The only thing that has really changed is that we have fewer people in jail, we can know our doses in milligrams (instead of "hits" or whatever), and we can talk openly about our plans and get feedback from a wider audience re: whether they're good ones.

If psilocybin were legal, you friend would probably know better than to mess around with it if he has a family history of schizophrenia. As it is, he can only talk about it in small echo chambers, which is how harmful misinformation thrives.

I know several people that went to Colorado for a wedding and they all took the opportunity to either try marijuana for the first time or the first time since high school.

"For the entire population twelve and older, Colorado’s marijuana use has increased starkly since legalization, rising 30 percent to become third in the nation, 76 percent above the national average. Among college-age youth (20–25), past-month use is 50 percent higher than the average, while past-month use for ages 12–17 is 43 percent higher."

https://www.hudson.org/research/17052-the-colorado-experimen... / https://www.thenmi.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/RMHIDTA-Ma...

I very much doubt your last point as I haven't seen the same thing happen with marijuana. Again, I told him myself. There's a good portion of the population that wouldn't conceive of taking a prescription medication unless absolutely necessary but think that several illicit drugs are somehow wonderdrugs that can cure all ailments.

Peanuts can cause a strong allergic reaction and death, thus peanuts are very dangerous.

People with a peanut allergy stay away from peanuts. It’s hard to know who will be triggered by these drugs, but even people with a family history don’t often believe they can harm them.

Depending on the dosage, the user's reaction to it, and what kind you psychedelic you're taking, it's very possible for people to end up tripping so hard that they think they're fighting for they're life, but they're actually attacking random people in the street.

I'm curious to see how often these events happen as more areas decriminalize it.

In the long run, they could be dangerous to profit margins of defense contractors.

Society has figured out quiet quitting all on their own without the need of widespread psychedelics and capitalism has not ended because of it. There's definitely no need to hold back LSD now.

Quiet quitting is a new name for “lazy”. Not a new concept.

> it's basically indisputable that they are socially harmless

Considering that the place with the highest psychedelic drug use is also the place with the highest number of mentally ill and homeless, that seems a rather preposterous assertion.

Yours is an excellent example of how correlative observational studies (however formal or informal) are practically useless. Once you have experience interacting with the unhoused population, you will quickly learn that they are largely using things like crack, meth, and opioids (if at all -- many are in fact sober), not psychedelics.

I don't find that surprising, but I'd still be interested to see a survey of what proportion of California's homeless population have used psychedelics extensively _in their past_. Because my experience leads me to believe that someone who does a lot of psychedelics in their younger years is more likely to wind up on a bad track later in life (even if they don't continue with those drugs later on).

Bayesian thinking can pay here, as well as a little self-critique.

Simply put, confirmation bias will convince you that people who do psychedelics end up on a bad track if your sample only includes people who are on bad tracks, rather than a sample composed of those who use psychedelics.

More probably (and this in my experience is definitely true) many more people use psychedelics than you might naively assume, and in fact probably the proportion of people who use psychedelics and end up on good tracks is way higher than that of those who use psychedelics and end up on bad tracks.

On a more meta-level, your searching and inquisition is still based on a more fundamental assumption, that homeless people are homeless for reasons stemming from their own decisions, rather than some confluence of bad events that leads one to ruin or another possible path to homelessness (e.g., they have mental health conditions which prevent integration into "normal" society without proper treatment, or that they simply want to be homeless and nomadic as a lifestyle choice). Empathy pays off here to temper un-credible assumptions and analyses.

> the proportion of people who use psychedelics and end up on good tracks is way higher than that of those who use psychedelics and end up on bad tracks

I'll agree with that, but the real question is whether people who use psychedelics more frequently end up on bad tracks than those who don't, which in my experience is definitely true.

> homeless people are homeless for reasons stemming from their own decisions

No, my bias is that many homeless are homeless because they live in a place that enables and even encourages actions that lead people to become homeless (psychedelics use being one example).

Psychedelic use in SF is not primarily among the homeless population. That population is using very different substances.

I wholeheartedly disagree, psychedelics can amplify mental illness and result in bizarre behavior. Decriminalizing psychedelics in a city with a large homeless drug infused population is asking for trouble.

Not sure it matters; it's not like the police enforce any laws when it comes to the homeless population here, except for when it's politically expedient to do so.