[Alex3917]

> I must be missing something; any thoughts?

Since the beginning of the era of modern psychedelic research, no one has developed any serious longterm mental illness as the result of taking psychedelics in a research setting. And this is out of thousands of people.

I think part of the reason is that it's actually a lot easier to determine if someone is predisposed to mental illness than it actually is to determine if the person sitting in front of you has a mental illness. E.g. if one of your parents was bipolar or you had a relative who committed suicide then you'd be immediately excluded from any trial. And because they are only doing this research on adults, this means that participants would have all had 20+ years to figure out if their parents have signs of mental illness or whatever.

[MichaelGG]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSD_and_schizophrenia

Look in the references: "Four additional studies found post-LSD psychotics with prior psychosis but also patients in whom the drug precipitated psychosis without a prodrome ... One group reported cases of psychosis following a single dose, suggesting a peculiar vulnerability to the drug in certain individuals. A review of this problem concluded that prior illness was evident in many, but not all, psychoses following LSD "

Your general gist seems to be correct (that it's a rather low risk for people without history), but "no one" seems to be incorrect. Which makes sense - LSD's a powerful medication. And for comparison, this happens with stuff they give to kids, like Ritalin and speed.

[Alex3917]

When I said since the beginning of modern psychedelic research, I meant since Rick Strassman began studying DMT in 1991. In the 50s and 60s there were lots of cases like this, but that's not really analogous to modern research. (In many cases back then they were actually purposely trying to cause mental illness.)

[trxcllnt]

That article's only reference is a study I linked to earlier, which concluded, "We did not find use of psychedelics to be an independent risk factor for mental health problems."

[DanBC]

That one elephant died.

Although the elephant got a considerably larger dose (297 mg!!) than people would, and the experimenters handled the situation poorly.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2004/feb/26/research.scie...

[trxcllnt]

From the end of that article: "While the experiment is quoted as evidence of LSD's toxicity, it seems most likely that the Thorazine or the combination of drugs killed Tusko, not the acid. Lending credence to this, in 1984 psychologist Ronald K Siegel repeated the experiment with two elephants, using LSD only. Both survived."

[just_had_coffee]

How could either of those instances have got approval from an ethics committee? :/