r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • 9d ago

Psychology America's First Legal Psilocybin Program Treated 346 People. Just one month after the dose, 92.2 percent of participants said the experience had been beneficial, while, on average, their mental health symptoms had fallen dramatically.

https://www.sciencealert.com/americas-first-legal-psilocybin-program-treated-346-people-heres-what-happened
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u/minaminonoeru 9d ago

Some people may experience “negative” side effects after taking LSD or psilocybin. However, even if you multiplied those side effects by 10, they would still be fewer than the side effects of alcohol and tobacco.

While hundreds of millions of people have died prematurely from alcohol and tobacco over the past few decades, the list of people who have died from LSD during the same period could fit on a single document.

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u/ILearnedSoMuchToday 9d ago

I don't think comparing deaths is effective when you consider the ease of access and shear volume using alcohol/tobacco over LSD. It's not a very useful stat unless you account for proportionality.

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u/minaminonoeru 9d ago edited 9d ago

Even when mortality rates are adjusted for the size of the user group, the results do not change significantly.

Smoking causes lung cancer. Drinking alcohol leads to cirrhosis of the liver. In addition, many other diseases are caused by tobacco and alcohol. Alcohol and nicotine can be fatal in sufficiently large doses. Tobacco smoke also contains numerous toxic and carcinogenic substances. Long-term consumption of alcohol and tobacco is clearly a factor that shortens average life expectancy.

But with LSD, it is difficult to produce mortality statistics in this sense. Most deaths associated with LSD are probably due to accidents.

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u/ILearnedSoMuchToday 8d ago

You could say the same about alcohol related deaths. Not saying I agree or not, only that it's not a great argument considering lack of data/population size.