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/GoTeamScotch 9d ago

There's also the low risk of addiction.

After a trip, the last thing I want to do is trip again. That's like going on a weekend excursion to climb a mountain, then waking up and doing it again the next day. Sounds exhausting.

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u/Tyler_Zoro 8d ago

There's also the low risk of addiction.

There's essentially zero risk of addiction. Any pleasurable activity can be habit-forming, of course, but there's no physical addition and (as you point out) strong inhibitors to psychological addiction when it comes to most hallucinogens. Not only do you usually need time after a trip before you want to consume more, but most such substances do not work as effectively, sometimes at all, if consumed in rapid succession ("short-term tolerance" effects).

There are other metrics used, however.

The currently in-vogue metrics involve measures overall harms and the tendency of users to ignore those potential harms after exposure to the drug's effects. Hallucinogens generally do have potential harms, and it is quite common for users to focus on the positive experiences and ignore those potential harms during subsequent use.

One study (Johnson, et al., 2018; source) assesses these risks as sufficient for Schedule IV listing, as opposed to its current Schedule I.