In my experience (this thread, too), the conversation gets polluted by people that swear by their self-medication and call more cautious people naysayers.

How come every time we try to have a conversion, it always ends up all "point counterpoint" and "personal experience with the topic" and "differing personal experience" and "discussion of how those experiences relate to the topic"!? EVERY TIME!

Its almost as if all experience is subjective…

The only valuable conversation about such research is an objective discussion of the quality of the study at hand.

> The only valuable conversation about such research is an objective discussion of the quality of the study at hand.

No

People's lived experience is very useful

Those are called anecdotes.

Empirically, they're usually not nearly as useful as people think. People are on average unreliable observers of their own experiences.

Much better than individual anecdotes are collections of anecdotes that are searchable and somewhat categorized. A lot of old school drug forums provide this.

Much better still is systematically varying data and taking statistics to separate signal from noise.

Yep. I think anecdotal evidence is actually ranked as one of the lowest forms of evidence if I recall correctly from graduate school.

In the pre-modern world people had a very different relationship to death and there wasn’t anything like anxiety as its experienced today. Psychedelics are essentially an attempt to bring someone back to a more “authentic” experience of life before technological controls settled in. Perhaps its better to take the chance? I think so, but I want others to recognize it as a genuine risk that is truly unpredictable and not a personal failing on the part of the user.

I wonder what you mean by saying there wasn't anything like anxiety as it's experienced today in the premodern world. The term "anxiety" comes from Latin "anxietas", and Old English had "angsumnes", both with apparently similar meanings, so it seems the idea has been around for a while, and most likely because it's a basic human emotional condition that could occur in various circumstances throughout history and prehistory.

As for a relationship to death, it's difficult to generalise over all people throughout history, but for example in medieval Europe where you had a seemingly quite vivid belief in the possibility of hell after life, that could result in some extreme anxiety of the most inescapable kind. Maybe that accounts for some of the more extreme behaviours of those times, who knows.

> and there wasn’t anything like anxiety as its experienced today

You know that how exactly? We really do not have even remotely enough data to be able to make such boldly absurd claims.