[netcan]

As you say, there are risks and benefits. "How" matters a lot.

I think you exaggerate though. A lot of the risk is down to extremely irresponsible use... many steps removed from the high level of medical supervision you laid out.

The basics are some mental preparation, a trip sitter, correct dosage and a proper set. I don't consider psychologists the only or necessarily best guides.

Like all drugs (including alcohol), they can interact with preexisting susceptibilities to mental illness. Being an experience, it can also cause trauma. So can non drug experiences, like rock climbing. Dosage, set, setting & preparation mitigate these a lot.

Psychedelics are not a danger free activity, but like most dangerous activities most of the irl dangers are from ignoring safety entirety. FWIW, I think the more normalised, discussed and non judgemental psychodelic drug culture becomes, the more responsible users tend to be.

..And for comparison, it's a lot safer than many sports and hobbies.

[bigbubba]

> Like all drugs (including alcohol), they can interact with [...]

Interesting aside, some mushrooms contain the mycotoxin coprine. Coprine is normally harmless but can make you quite ill if combined with alcohol. Common ink caps are generally considered edible but contain this toxin. This toxin can be used to treat alcoholism and a similar substance (disulfiram) has been approved by the FDA for this purpose.

[erikerikson]

> it's a lot safer than many sports and hobbies.

What is the basis for this claim? How do we measure mental injury? What quantities are we talking about?

[netcan]

Is the only allowable statement one that can be backed by quantifiable analysis?

I didn't even specify which hobby, so lets go with alpine mountaineering. Hard to be more dangerous than this. Gridiron football has some good quantification, with ways of measuring mental injuries.

sheesh.

[erikerikson]

I certainly had no intention of precluding non-quantifiable basis for the claim. I had no idea what basis you were basing your claim on. Beyond that I really couldn't begin to imagine how the attributes of the bases might be compared to one another.

In different words I asked because sports and hobbies seem like apples to the oranges of psychedelic experiences. In that context I wondered how one would build the basis for comparison, not to mention generate the confidence to make such a bold assertion about the end result.

It would probably be easier to say that the inferential distance was too high for me to follow and I was curious about how you got there.

[filoeleven]

> As ACMD chairman Nutt repeatedly clashed with government ministers over issues of drug harm and classification. In January 2009 he published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology an editorial ("Equasy – An overlooked addiction with implications for the current debate on drug harms") in which the risks associated with horse riding (1 serious adverse event every ~350 exposures) were compared to those of taking ecstasy (1 serious adverse event every ~10,000 exposures).

> In 2012, he explained to the UK Home Affairs Committee that he chose riding as the "pseudo-drug" in his comparison after being consulted by a patient with irreversible brain damage caused by a fall from a horse. He discovered that riding was "considerably more dangerous than [he] had thought ... popular but dangerous" and "something ... that young people do".

Brain injuries in American football over the past decade probably show that to be an even more dangerous sport, but I haven’t run the numbers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Nutt#%22Equasy%22