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Comment by pjerem | Hacker News Reader

I’m not an expert so I’ll just ask questions but IIRC, there is no deadly dose of psylocybin.

I would imagine that at some point the effects would plateau. Of course you would be pretty far away in space in multiple dimensions at the same time.

I would be surprised, if this plateau exists, that nobody would have reached it.

In psychedelics space, it’s not unheard of people accidentally taking 100-1000x the expected dose and having the best (or worse) time of their life without further health issues.

Also it seems that set&setting is far more important for the experience than the actual dose.

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Google shows the injected LD50 of psilocybin in mice is 285 mg/kg.

This dose is very much in the range that we should expect some deaths in their test group from overdose based on prior tests.

Edit:

The dose in the study was 15 mg/kg, not 15 mg.

Ahhh! 15mg/kg is much more reasonable!

Another aspect to consider is how quickly tolerance builds. After a few weeks of regular low psilocybin doses, even what's considered a high dose can have little to no noticeable effects. Taking equivalent amounts in the study isn't as far-fetched as it might seem, given a few weeks/months of tolerance building.

The question remains though: would it still have the same effects? The psychological effects are certainly diminished with tolerance, but who knows if this study's findings act on the same/a similar mechanism.

A benzo before or during SSRI treatment and there are no subjective effects. Depending if you want to administer a single dose or an entire course during a certain period of time.

You’d probably do profound psychological damage to yourself. It’s not deadly but that doesn’t mean it won’t affect you permanently to be stuck in some kind of a hell for what will feel like an eternity

Some people have accidentally taken several milligrams of LSD, whose full active dose is 100 ug, and they are fine. Every molecule's effects saturates at some point.

Yes, some people are fine, and some people are not fine at all. Even Terence Mckenna had at least one extremely bad trip(that we know of) on mushrooms that drove him to quit taking them for the rest of his life. That was with a lifetime of experience taking mushrooms and other psychedelics, and at a dose several orders of magntiude lower than the dose suggested by this paper.

And this is not a one-off thing, but a monthly regimen. So we're talking about taking a dose that's way beyond heroic, every month, for the rest of your life. That's so far outside the realm of responsible psychedelic use, I don't think any human has even come close to attempting it. The only thing that's for certain is there's no way of knowing what the psychological effects would be, but I have a hard time believing it wouldn't get extremely ugly.

Ram Dass tried to stay permanently high once, and ended up after some days drinking it from the bottle. Didnt work, still eventually came down.

I don't think Ram Dass ever came down. He blasted through Richard Alpert, and stayed on the other side permanently for the rest of his life.

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