Charitably, you could argue a functional society involves some amount of indoctrination into a set of shared beliefs and a large percentage of people losing that indoctrination would destroy society. Could the US function if everyone was a pacifist, anti-capitalist, hippie? I think that was and still is the primary concern.
I do first aid at music festivals and volunteer at a free clinic that serves a homeless population. I see a lot of spun folks and folks in varying stages of "burned out" (to use the term from the stereotype). I'm still in EMT school, but I've had to work with a lot of folks having adverse reactions to these substances.
Meth and alcohol, simply being poor, childhood trauma, getting into a bad medical situation, losing a job and not finding one; all of those things will put folks into some bad places.
But most substance abuse, in my limited experience, comes down to various traumas folks get into and maybe some chemical predispositions.
That's not how most of the folks I know who have had very adverse psychedelic experiences have gotten into those states. And it is generally a very transitory state.
While there are long-term psychological effects from stuff like acid (and IME, MDMA, Ket, and Nitrous are worse physiologically than things like LSD, C2B, DMT, psilocybin, mescaline, etc), generally psychedelic substances lead people to doing less of those drugs over time and that has a very different effect than, say, alcohol and chronic poverty.
Propaganda about these things has a hard time taking hold in the face of most folks lived reality.
If you want to specify LSD, you should do that, not "psychedelics." There are many, many psychedelics. They have sometimes radical differences. You cannot generalize that word into "many people never make it back." That is flat-out wrong, not to mention harmful.
Psilocybin is a more selective 5-HT2A agonist than LSD and is more rapidly metabolised. At normal recreational or clinical doses, they really aren't very different. LSD isn't quite as well-researched as psilocybin as a psychiatric drug, but the data we have suggests that it isn't meaningfully different in terms of risks or benefits.
Way to generalise. I also know people who drank water, went to sleep and never woke up.
Ego dissolution is dosage dependent and you don't need to reach that point to get positive benefits.
Also, many people do psychdelics that probably shouldn't.
Plus, these things are illegal which means that most of the time you are not getting the real but instead pharmacologically similar substances that might have secondary effects. This is way you can't reliably imply a correlation because it is a black market and often what you think you consumed is not what you actually consumed.
Unless you actually tested what your friends consumed, you don't know what it was.
That's a tautology. But what you meant is not true. Some of the compounds are chosen because they are chemically similar and have psilocybin like effects. Even if you were to test this with a standard kit it would be classified as psilocybin. Your average consumer would be none the wiser. The reason these compounds exist is literally because of that very reason. They were made in the context of slow moving policies targeting psychedelics by listing specific compounds.
You can grow mushrooms from spores and quality control the whole process.
The biggest problem with psilocibyn is people are told its benign, then they go on a 'trip', and sometimes in their come-down delusion completely destroy their lives: leave their families, leave their career, and tend to 'come to' (if they do) several months later.
Bad trips are supposedly 'experiences' (and now your in the realm of metaphysics), and going to jail or hurting yourself and others supposedly just should be washed over, or, you have permanent anxiety while sober now.
The psychadelic apologists make themselves unfalsifiable because they can help people stuck in a purely materiastic mindset - which our souls know is completely false.
Anyone in the party scene, or 'psychonaughts' (as I was, and did massive amounts of mushrooms for years, and had friends doing the same, sometimes 2-5x a week), the consequences of screwing with your brain chemistry cannot be avoided.
Joe Rogan has done immense damage with minimizing risks of monkeying with your brain chemistry. This also relates to weed, which is not the weed of forty years ago compressed bricks with seeds in it, but its incredibly intense.
You'll never hear so many excuses about their drug addiction then from weed smokers who spend hundreds a week, and can't miss a single day of smoking, toking, edibles, oils.
NA and AA would be better paths to start with these trauma's, then fix the underlying trauma itself - which is also a spiritual problem, and not material. We, wealthy-west should theoretically be the most 'happy', and not lead for the last 60 years in depression, suicide, psychologists and psychiatrists, etc. Its not true, which is why nothing is working.
Or to summarize, as the meme goes - something like 'these non spiritual normies taking psychadelics getting one-shot by a seven-dimensional demon, now leave their husband and career, wanting to 'teach about love' in the amazon.'
I'm not saying that everyone should go do LSD and I don't know the details or stories of the people you saw. Like I said, I understand the perspective of people who feel responsible for maintaining a social order. I'm just trying to point out how relative all of this is to societal frameworks.
What are you using as attributes to form a judgement of what is "worse"?
If everyone was truly free, we'd have to pay the real price to clean up shit and that would mean an inversion of our pyramid scheme.