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Comment by kykeonaut | Hacker News Reader

The problem here is that there is no evidence. All the evidence of negative effects so far is anecdotal, which in reality calls for more research in the area [0]. In addition, only about 0.2% report having sought emergency treatment [1] when using psylocibin.

[0] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/02698811221084...

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As someone who partakes in psychedelics to a moderate degree, I don’t think it makes any sense at all to dismiss the very many negative outcomes as “no evidence”. Perhaps it’s under-researched, but your comment strikes me as ideological and/or hyperbole.

Like with all treatments, it’s a careful balance of whether the risks are worth the positive health outcomes. But there’s no sense in denying that psychedelics, and thus psychedelic mental health treatment programs, have no evidence of potential issues.

While I agree with what you are saying in principle, I do want to point out that there is a massive difference between anecdotal evidence and _research_. In a purely academic sense, it is not an unreasonable statement to make that there is no evidence. In contrast, in the opioid case there existed scientific evidence of the highly addictive nature of the drugs that was more than just suppressed, they were outright _lied_ about by the pharmaceutical company behind the drug.

> Purdue Pharma created false advertising documents to provide doctors and patients illustrating that time-released OxyContin was less addictive than other immediate release alternatives. Furthermore, they sought out doctors who were more likely to prescribe opioids and encouraged them to prescribe OxyContin because it was safer. They did this because OxyContin quickly became a cash cow for the company. (https://oversight.house.gov/release/comer-purdue-pharma-and-...)

A degree of malfeasance in the same realm as Big Tobacco's denials of the risks and addictiveness of smoking:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/big-tobacco-kept-cancer-risk-in... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2879177/

Although, perhaps could be considered worse since it occurred more recently in a theoretically more highly regulated market than mid 1900's tobacco.

I think it is true that it is under-researched. Current clinical research on psychedelics exclude people who are previously diagnosed and/or have a family history of personality disorders, psychosis and bipolar depression. They also control for set and setting. Under those conditions, it seems that the use of psychedelics is very safe, but it doesn't give us a good idea of the risk of recreational use in the general public.

One interesting recent study I've found is this, but it's too small to conclude anything, and it also does not appear to be peer-reviewed yet: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/yzmcj

Yes, you are right, what I should have written was that there is no peer-reviewed clinical evidence of long term negative effects solely caused by the toxicity of psilocybin.

> very many negative outcomes as “no evidence”. Perhaps it’s under-researched, but your comment strikes me as ideological and/or hyperbole.

Very many people have encountered aliens, but there's still no evidence of aliens. Your comment is more ideological hyperbole than the one you're replying to.

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