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Comment by todd3834 | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been around a lot of people on mushrooms. I will say that the experiences I’ve observed never made anyone think they could fly off a building. Maybe they were just lucky or the shrooms were always weak.

However, I have very real concerns about the effects on those who might have dormant mental illness. I have no proof but the idea that many kinds of drugs could amplify or accelerate a mental illness scares me in a mass consumption setting.

If there is no evidence for this then I’d like to know. If there is evidence for this then we need to really make it clear and educate people of the risk.

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I suspect we will never really know until mass consumption becomes legal. There is so much FUD regarding drugs the truth is hard to tell.

My 2 cents, out of all the psychedelics, Mescaline seem to be the most gentle on the human psyche.

Let's make it clear, if by gentle you mean an intense 18 hour journey in a mind roller coaster you cannot control or stop, then yes, that's what a friend told me.

It depends on the dosage. Start by slowly taking incremental 50mg steps, once a month. Less if you have a low body weight .

But less is more. Mescaline is very potent.

It’s not something you want to be doing too much of anyway, it’s exhausting.

Incidentally mescaline tends to be one of the exceptions from the "legalize all plant medicine" crowd. Apparently it's a lot of effort to cultivate peyote; there isn't much of it, and it's associated with tribal practices. People advocating for legalization tend to leave out peyote because they don't want people competing with tribal shaman for access to it.

I believe there's another source (S. Pedro cactus?) that doesn't have the tribal history, and is thus considered a reasonable alternative for legalization.

The research is old and in its infancy, but I believe there is a pretty clear evidence that link underlying predisposition to certain mental illnesses and a psychotic episode when using psychedelics. I believe it remains to be determined what exactly this means, and how to go about it.

It is, in my opinion, a very strong argument for not allowing unsupervised mass consumption. And to be fair, most people are not using psychedelics in a way that maximize their psychological healing, but rather just to trip. On the flipside, smoking and alcohol are legal, and that causes a lot of early deaths every single day, even to people not smoking or drinking.

By “not allowing” do you mean putting people in jail, or something else? Because passing a law doesn’t make it just go away. Putting people in jail seems worse in every way.

You should never put people in jail for using any controlled substance. That is mostly an american thing. For people using it, just fine them and be done with it. Go after the people producing, distributing and selling.

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