Risk of mis-prescription: "one in 12 visits to the doctor in the US results in the patient receiving dangerous medications"

http://www.in-pharmatechnologist.com/Drug-Delivery/No-improv...

Risk of prescription being mis-filled: "An estimated 51.5 million errors occur during the filling of 3 billion prescriptions each year."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12688437?dopt=Abstract

Risk of manufacturing error in prescription drugs: "Dr. Collazo recently worked with a drug manufacturer that had a baseline rate of 4.7 errors per thousand units manufactured."

http://www.fdanews.com/humanerrordrugdevice

Risk of ??????: "Three batches of Nurofen Plus in pharmacies in south London have been found to contain another drug, Seroquel XL 50mg, which is manufactured by AstraZeneca – a completely separate drug company."

http://metro.co.uk/2011/08/25/nurofen-plus-containing-antips...

That's all entirely fair to point out - clearly serious breaches happen, even in heavily regulated environments! I don't think failings in those arenas undermine the notion that legal risk and quality/authenticity risk of illegal drugs is very often intertwined.

I think even folks over at Erowid advise caution in dealing with these things. In that regard, conflating legal risk & qualitative risk isn't really a non sequitur. That's really all I was trying to say.

I understand your point, but - as you identify - LSD users are more aware of the risks and have a higher perception of risk.

Although I don't have evidence either way, my suspicion is that this results in a comparatively low risk in truth. It's not immediate that the legal status impacts on the risk at all.

Only 6.5% of those misfillings were clinically significant. Overall less than 1% danger rate. That is bad, but not worse than street drugs.

The mis-prescriptions were for infirm elderly patients, who I suspect wouldn't do great on LSD either.