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Comment by jlebar | Hacker News Reader

> Humans used psychoactive substances for centuries, usually under the supervision of a shaman or some type of religious figure to undergo a journey.

I don't have a position on legalizing psychoactive mushrooms, but I don't think this is a good argument.

For example, humans also used lead to sweeten wine for centuries, but that's not evidence that lead is harmless.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead(II)_acetate#Sweetener

I'm sure we could come up with many more such examples.

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Just to complete this line of reasoning -- the grandparent comment does not distinguish between good and bad effects of psychedelic mushrooms. It's easy (even reasonable) to skip over that distinction with mushrooms, because their bad effects are few and minor.

Mushrooms and leaded wine both have effects that their users long considered good. The difference between them, for purposes of this argument, is that for leaded wine we've since discovered very bad effects that completely outweigh the good effects, whereas for mushrooms we haven't.

> because their bad effects are few and minor.

I have issues with this. I've personally had very bad mushroom trips that have had effects that lingered for a year or longer. I'm not saying keep them illegal, but I don't for one second believe it's a black and white issue, either.

Not necessarily black and white, sure, but there is a threshold defined as the net personal/social benefit of the thing. If this is net positive, there's not enough reason to ban it. If there is net negative, there are reasons to ban it.

Further, the ban/not ban dichotomy is also fuzzier in practice. We can restrict access according to attributes of people, or restrict consumption to private settings, or otherwise. These decisions must be informed by the net benefit.

Disagree. Mushrooms that have had mold grow on them are pretty much guaranteed to make you sick and guarantee a bad experience. So it is possible to have objectively bad mushrooms in nearly the same way as you can have objectively bad wine.

Lead poisoning has permanent negative effects, mushrooms not so much.

Nobody is running about trying to purchase, at least for their own account, lead sweeteners on the black market. We know the risks, and we don't want it. With psychoactive substances, however, many people who know the risks still want it. It strikes me as absurd that inhibiting them should be a public matter.

you wouldn't allow drugs in traffic and you wouldn't want them in public. Alcohol use shows that not always is drug use constrained to private settings, so there is the argument against it, because what starts in private might under the influence end up in an inappropriate place.

Following that logic we must also ban sex, because some people don't constrain it to private settings and sometimes take it into public places that are inappropriate.

One thing after another, in order of death toll.

Alcohol is allowed so what exactly are you saying? When it was banned under prohibition in the US, it didnt change much either.

There will always be irresponsible people, however we shouldn't intrude on the freedoms of everyone for the faults of a few.

I was not strictly promoting prohibitive penalization, for one. My comment tried to clarify whether intoxication was res publique or purely private.

The fallacies in your conclusion are:

> freedoms of everyone

> faults of a few

Whether intoxication leads to freedom is debatable.

Secondly, casualties from alcohol abuse are hardly "a few".

You say people susceptible to the detrimental effects, perhaps from a preexisting tendency for lack of inhibition and aptitude are responsible. Whereas they are literally irresponsible. Further, your comment in response to my question could be understood to uphold the right to a buzz over thousands of deaths a year.

I think the comment above is understated. There is evidence that psychoactive compounds have been used since at least 3000BCE in Mesoamerica. Looking into it it seems lead was first mined around the same time in Greece but the lead sweetener idea wasn't popular until the roman empire. Note that there were reports even back then of health issues associated with the practice.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2173580814...

Do you have any other examples on the thousands of years timescale?

> There is evidence that psychoactive compounds have been used since at least 3000BCE in Mesoamerica. Looking into it it seems lead was first mined around the same time in Greece but the lead sweetener idea wasn't popular until the roman empire.

Well, the Wikipedia page says that lead was being used as a sweetener as late as the 1850s, and this page suggests that we have records of the practice going back to at least 160BCE, so "thousands of years" doesn't seem inaccurate?

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/win...

> Do you have any other examples on the thousands of years timescale?

Off the top of my head, tobacco? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco#Traditional_use

Opium? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium#Ancient_use_.28pre-500_C...

Bloodletting? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodletting#In_the_ancient_wo...

I dunno, I'm not an anthropologist, but I'm not trying too hard...

We can take "safe" as meaning "gets you high, and doesn't kill you" not as "absent from all conceivable known and unknown long-term health effects". Also, "safe" can simply be taken to mean as "the sought-after mushroom, properly identified" (believed to the user to be safe) and not some other, unknown mushroom mistaken for it.

The risk of using the wrong item is separate from the risks inherent in the genuine item; in that context, it makes sense to use "safe" for the genuine item as a rhetoric device.

Of course, none of these mushrooms are safe; there are unsafe doses of their ingredient.

Nothing is safe without reference to dose; not water, not salt, ...

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