[zepto]

> we don't know if psychedelics "accelerate" the onset of symptoms of degenerative mental conditions. For example you may experience schizophrenia-like symptoms under the influence of LSD and while that may be a warning that you need to see if you will actually develop "natural" schizophrenia, maybe you will never do. But maybe you will!

This sounds like there is only downside risk.

Schizophrenia can be hard to treat. Bringing it on ‘early’ seems like just losing good years, even more so if there is a chance it would never have developed at all.

[pvarangot]

Schizophrenia is impossible to treat. You deal with the symptoms with drugs or a support group.

As I said there's no solid evidence that psychedelics bring anything early or make you develop something that you wouldn't have. It could be argued that they make it easy to manifest a tendency to go into certain mental states that a "typical" person would not go into, but it would be hard to find a case of someone that went schizo on psychedelics by only a few uses and really didn't come back.

Of course if you develop an addiction, or abuse them and repeatedly mix and binge them with other drugs in crazy intense environments after those first experiences, they are going to break you. But that downside risk is not exclusive for psychedelic drugs and does not warrant spending inordinate amounts of resources and wasted opportunities by keeping them totally illegal or tightly controlled.

In any case, the reason to make some of this drugs illegal is that they allegedly pose no medicinal use at all and that recreational use is terribly dangerous for society. The first one is totally false, there's even ongoing promising medical research with psychedelics even though they are illegal! The second one is close to what you are arguing about, and honestly the reasons why this may pose a danger to society is more because society sucks and not because the drugs suck. What we should make illegal is abandoning people because they have a mental disease, not drugs.

[zepto]

I don’t know why you are talking about whether drugs should be illegal or not - that seems like a different issue.

If you are seriously claiming that there is no risk to someone who is predisposed to schizophrenia taking LSD, I think you are spreading dangerous bullshit.

Certainly all of MAPS clinical studies screen such people out of LSD trials, because there is a risk.

Triggering a psychotic episode in a schizophrenic person is about the worst thing you can do for them.

[pvarangot]

> If you are seriously claiming that there is no risk to someone who is predisposed to schizophrenia taking LSD, I think you are spreading dangerous bullshit.

I'm saying we don't know, so yeah there's a risk but there's also a risk they are beneficial and we will never know.

> Certainly all of MAPS clinical studies screen such people out of LSD trials, because there is a risk.

It's not only because there is a risk, as I said there's only anecdotal evidence for that. I think the main reason MAPS clinical studies screen people with schizo tendencies and also bipolar is because those studies are to deal with certain PTSD and ASD symptoms and test subjects with "comorbidities" would ruin their experiments because of how low n is.