Unfortunately, for people who are predisposed, going away to college or falling in love can also trigger a psychotic break. I don't think we would tell people not to do those things though.

This is like equating swimming in the middle of the atlantic with swimming at your local leisure center.

You can't make a meaningful comparison without numbers, so I'm not sure where you get your confidence. As it happens, my intuition is that your comparison is wrong.

I would bet that people who are predisposed to e.g. schizophrenia are, for the most part, going to experience some insult that makes it come on at some point before 30 years old. It's just a question of when, where, what, but it'll happen.

I bet the group of people who could develop schizophrenia were they to experience the right insult, but don't, is very small.

>You can't make a meaningful comparison without numbers

Except that these numbers do exist and it's a well documented phenomenon.

I don't know, personally I believe that a person can be genuinely afraid of water, I had it, I was generally even afraid to go into knee-deep water. So I'm 100% sure there is such a thing. Fortunately, the swimming school https://3sswim.co.uk/prices/ helped me get rid of this phobia, now I enjoy swimming, I think that in general, this was my goal

When not done under proper set & setting, yeah.

If you're around people you trust, in a controlled environment, you're not likely to develop schizophrenia.

If you just decide randomly to trip in an unknown environment with people you're not comfortable around, yeah, it's going to be a wild ride and you might not ever truly get off it even after the stuff wears off completely.

Things can just go bad, no matter how hard you try. There is always some level of risk involved, especially if you have a family or personal history of mental illness, in which case it's advisable to not fuck with it at all. "Set and setting" doesn't paper over everything.

Isn’t this generally the case for everything?

Things can go bad in any experience.

You can go zip lining and things can go bad. You can go through any experience and can be left with various degrees of physical and mental damage.

Does that mean we shouldn’t do anything?

Risks are not created equal.

Never implied they are but neither are the rewards.

The risk of psychedelic drugs is more comparable to motorsports, the more involved action sports, heavy equipment operation, etc. and your average person would be very wary of participating in these even though there are plenty of risk mitigations for these activities.

I'm not saying you shouldn't do drugs. I'm saying that many of them require way more respect than most people realize they need to give them, and trying to downplay that is not good. I can tell you from personal experience that it's easy to get yourself and people you care about in dangerous places.

Speak for yourself, I’d hop into (and probably crash) a formula 1 car no questions asked

I would to, but most people get nervous revving their car past 4k.

To be fair it’s not a good comparison. An F1 car is , all things considered, an incredibly safe place to be in.

Certainly safer than your average road car in most circumstances.

Then maybe we should focus on the education around this instead of prohibition.

> The risk of psychedelic drugs is more comparable to motorsports, the more involved action sports, heavy equipment operation, etc.

Yeah...I'm going to need to see some numbers to believe that.

> When not done under proper set & setting, yeah.

Sorry but this is the biggest load of garbage. You can do everything right, and still come away with trauma and psych issues. It's like writing randomly to memory from ring 0 and hoping you don't irreversibly wreck your install.

> You can do everything right, and still come away with trauma and psych issues

Yes, but the question is: how likely are "trauma & psych issues"? How dangerous is the drug in comparison to going out and having six drinks over the course of the night, or (if you do LSD say once a year) a year's worth of drinking? Or, how about in comparison to living somewhere that means you need to drive to work every weekday?

This presumes I think drinking is better, I don't, in fact I would probably argue LSD is a less harmful drug on the whole compared to alcohol.

Yeah sorry, I don't mean to presume. I just mean that you need to know the magnitude and have comparisons to really have a meaningful opinion.

"set & setting" is mainly a convenient red herring to switch off any curious inquiry about the risks from psychedelics. It goes like this:

-- My friend took drug X and he had an accident!

-- Set & setting?

In other words, we don't care about your friend and his accident, we're just trying to counter any suggestions that he had an accident because of drug X. It was his fault for choosing the wrong set & setting.

Which should tell you all you need to know about the "communities" that form around those substances. People ready to blame each other for whatever happens to them just in case their favourite drug gets a bad name. What a community.