All morels are poisonous when eaten raw. There is zero gap in knowledge here.
There are plenty of gaps in knowledge about mushrooms, and there's a lot of unknowns about the ecology of morels but plenty of people eat these all the time.
that said it’s common knowledge to anyone who knows anything about mushrooms that you need to cook morels.
Is there some internet fight against Big Cap?
They're delicious and the grow in huge quantities. So most people will eat a lot of them.
And most people are okay, but several have either allergies or a sensitivity to them. And they get violently sick.
Rule number one of wild gathered foods, regardless of what it is: eat just a little of it until you know it won't make you sick, even if it's 100% safe.
I don’t have the source at hand but I recall reading a few years ago that you should start by rubbing it on your skin, and if no reaction run it inside your lips, and if no reaction, chew it a bit and spit it out, and if no reaction then eat a very small amount, and only eat more after a significant period of time has passed, and then in small doses.
It seemed reasonable to me. Slowly increase the risk level.
Pure lay speculation, but based on the fact that humans have been deliberately ingesting lots of alcohol for millennia (and mammals have been doing intermittently for untold millions of years), the liver may preferentially break down ethanol and then acetaldehyde even when substances that are problematic/deadly in lower concentrations are present. Alcohol metabolism has been optimized for.
Interesting anecdote, methanol causes intoxication similar to alcohol and is harmful but not deadly in and of itself. However, methanol ingestion can cause blindness and death specifically because the liver breaks it down quickly into formic acid, which then circulates throughout the bloodstream. In cases of methanol poisoning, the antidote is to drink alcohol (ethanol) in sufficient quantities, since the liver preferentially breaks down the alcohol, allowing the methanol to be broken down much slower to the point that it is no longer deadly (half-life goes from 2-3 hours to 90+ hours when ethanol is present).
The abandoned alien ships in Frederik Pohl's Gateway are specifically described as morel-shaped. It's where I learned a morel is a type of mushroom.
The only two mushrooms people generally recommend trying raw are the beefsteak polypore and the caesar's amanita. But this isn't because they are healthier when eaten raw, but rather because they have some unique culinary properties that are considered worth the risk when consumed in small quantities.
(2) There's some question about whether cooking mushrooms even resolves the issue.
(3) The effect seems smaller than that of potatoes and other acrylamide carriers, which we know, end-to-end, to be causative of human cancer.
You do you, but mushroom carcinogenicity is not on my behavior-alteration list.
(I don't like raw mushrooms so it's easy for me to say this).
Acrylamide, like many things, is known to be causative of cancer at extremely high doses. There is no indication that the levels found in food are harmful; it would be very difficult for a human to eat the levels of acrylamide shown to be harmful.
The list of things carcinogenic at doses two orders of magnitude larger than those found in food is large.
The more important consideration, from the limited reading I've done, is to limit consumption to cultivated mushrooms from reputable sources. Environmental toxins in raw mushrooms is a definite problem! But the white buttons you get at Safeway are no more likely to poison you than the potatoes or romaine you buy there.