No, if you are susceptible to schizophrenia, it can trigger it and turn it into full blown schizophrenia including all the other comments about potential downsides.
HN is just low quality commentary on a lot of stuff and this is just another example. It's full of Internet urban legends and junk like that.
The classic sign of the Internet person who's trying to make himself seem like an authority on some subject is to try to use the trappings of expertise: speaking in passive voice, using words like "evidence" to describe urban legends, speaking in pseudo-formal tones to simulate expertise.
It's so clear that there is collectively very little expertise among this group on most subjects.
The paper I linked even discusses this a bit - the problem is that psychedelics are an intense experience, and they have this reputation for causing psychosis (helped along by the drug war lies, naturally), and so people tend to attribute subsequent psychiatric issues to their psychedelic experience, inappropriately.
I'd ask you regarding your anecdata, do you actually know someone personally who you witnessed this happen to, or is it more like "a friend of a friend" had this happen, and told you about it? I've never personally known someone to whom this has happened, but like you, I've heard my fair share of tall tales from the gossip mill. It's just that, in this particular instance, I think it's pretty likely that the stories are just that - stories.
There's one other extreme example where someone I'm acquainted with did a lot of psychedelics over the course of a summer who seems permanently changed (although not ill or non-functioning in any way) but there's too much that could've happened outside the drug use that summer that could have affected him for me attribute those changes to drugs (although many other friends did).
If you're talking about years of binging on mind altering substances, it's a virtual certainty that there were underlying psychiatric issues causing that. You can't simply conclude that because one thing came after the other, the drugs caused it, when we're talking about years of abuse.
You mean you are going to prefer anecdotal evidence over scientific research?
The "studies that usually fail to replicate" are the ones supporting a LSD inducing schizophrenia.
Your "own observations of reality" are interesting to you, but do not form a basis for creating public policy
scientific research of this particular type has proved to be unreliable enough that it should be taken with a grain of salt. Fwiw my anecdote was probably caused by weed not LSD, my friend was taking frequent doses of a "legal" research LSD precursor he found in europe and didn't have problems until later when he stopped and smoked weed more. Idk if the LSD precursor accelerated his problems or not and I don't care to speculate.
> Your "own observations of reality" are interesting to you, but do not form a basis for creating public policy
I did not imply that psychedelics should be illegal, if it were up to me I'd legalize all drugs.
My issue is with people calling these chemicals "harmless", that very stance I believe is harmful. Any drug should be treated with respect. Weed is not harmless and the right edible or strong enough joint will fuck you up for days. People abuse MDMA regularly and come down with serotonin syndrome or fuck up their brain by not waiting 3 months or more. Ketamine is often abused too and that's not a fun ride either.
I've heard that SV types take LSD micro doses and I've tried it, I got a more cheerful day out of it but the next day I didn't have any motivation to do anything and didn't get much pleasure out of the whole day. So your mileage may vary, be careful when doing this stuff, do proper research and make sure you have enough free time with no responsibilities in the near future when doing them because you can't predict your specific reaction.
Yes, if it has the potential to ruin my life and the life of people I care about, as it is plainly obvious to anyone who pays any attention at all to the world around them that these drugs are extremely harmful to a subset of the population.
I pay attention.
Decades of observing.
Some negative effects (the paranoia induced by repeatedly taking magic mushrooms for instance).
I too have heard horror stories, I just have not witnessed them.
But then I prefer to pay attention to the scientific research by people like David Nutt
You do what you want based on your own prejudices and if you must your bigotry. But places like thos that influence public policy statements like:
"as it is plainly obvious to anyone who pays any attention at all to the world around" as an argument against scientific research simply does not belong here
You have to know that you're having this discussion with people who have done psychedelics and have friends who have done psychedelics.
These survey methods come with huge uncertainty and lots of pitfalls. I would not be surprised if the result in the paper is not reproducible. In fact, "over half of psychology studies fail reproducibility test"[1]
Just this past summer I had a friend tell me he was thinking of getting some mushrooms for us to all use at a party, like it was something you just casually do for fun like weed.
I have another friend with a serious family history of schizophrenia and he does pot and now psilocybin because they’re “natural and harmless.” I warned him, showed him literature, etc. There’s been far too much propaganda (?) on how safe those substances are for him to think they could ever cause harm.
And frankly, he’s always been a bit crazy but the past couple years…. Something has definitely changed in him. We’re talking things like believing he can heal people.
The only thing that has really changed is that we have fewer people in jail, we can know our doses in milligrams (instead of "hits" or whatever), and we can talk openly about our plans and get feedback from a wider audience re: whether they're good ones.
If psilocybin were legal, you friend would probably know better than to mess around with it if he has a family history of schizophrenia. As it is, he can only talk about it in small echo chambers, which is how harmful misinformation thrives.
"For the entire population twelve and older, Colorado’s marijuana use has increased starkly since legalization, rising 30 percent to become third in the nation, 76 percent above the national average. Among college-age youth (20–25), past-month use is 50 percent higher than the average, while past-month use for ages 12–17 is 43 percent higher."
https://www.hudson.org/research/17052-the-colorado-experimen... / https://www.thenmi.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/RMHIDTA-Ma...
I very much doubt your last point as I haven't seen the same thing happen with marijuana. Again, I told him myself. There's a good portion of the population that wouldn't conceive of taking a prescription medication unless absolutely necessary but think that several illicit drugs are somehow wonderdrugs that can cure all ailments.