Re:LSD: The Geek's Wonder Drug? (2006)
by spinchange on Saturday January 24, 2015 @12:08PM
(#8940149)
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.
Re:LSD: The Geek's Wonder Drug? (2006)
by learnstats2 on Saturday January 24, 2015 @12:39PM
(#8940268)
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.
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...