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Study Finds Magic Mushrooms Are the Safest Recreational Drug (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Mushrooms are the safest of all the drugs people take recreationally, according to this year's Global Drug Survey. Of the more than 12,000 people who reported taking psilocybin hallucinogenic mushrooms in 2016, just 0.2% of them said they needed emergency medical treatment -- a rate at least five times lower than that for MDMA, LSD and cocaine. Global Drug Survey 2017, with almost 120,000 participants in 50 countries, is the world's biggest annual drug survey, with questions that cover the types of substances people take, patterns of use and whether they experienced any negative effects. Overall, 28,000 people said they had taken magic mushrooms at some point in their lives, with 81.7% seeking a "moderate psychedelic experience" and the "enhancement of environment and social interactions."
Maybe the safest of the hallucinogens they were compared to, but to say they are the safest recreational drug likely means the researchers were themselves shrooming. :P
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
Ah, self-reporting. So there could be a huge selection bias if (for example) half of the shroomers died or became so incapacitated that they couldn't self-report their medical situation.
I've tried all of the above and shrooms gave me the largest side effect. An hour or so after consumption I would get extremely nauseous, and very emotional at times. A day after consumption my kidneys would hurt, apparently they go into overdrive to get the toxins out of your body. But I would gladly try them again. I knew these were the likely side effects before consumption. I see how LSD could give some people nasty hallucinations, I have seen people getting freaked out due to these. It's hard to stop them once they have begun. MDMA is one my of favorites, but I have seen people with side effects, especially extreme nausea. DISCLAIMER: Like all drugs, understand what you taking, know that consumption comes with risks and potential side effects. Make sure you get the real deal. AND MOST OF ALL take them in a safe environment and a sound state of mind.
TFA shows it is safer even than pot, based upon users self-reporting medical situations to authorities.
Marijuana has a history going back thousands of years, with essentially zero fatalities related to its use. I don't believe for one second that anything else is safer for you when it comes to recreational or medical use.
Regardless of that fact, it doesn't matter. Government is fighting legalization hard, due to the revenue created from shit that harms the fuck out of you. Tobacco and alcohol not only create deaths that are needed, but also generate billions in revenue related to medical treatments. Weed doesn't provide any of these benefits, proving just how fucked the reasons are for fighting legalization.
i would rather drink a beer or two and smoke a little 100% natural marijuana of the cannabis indica family, if this redneck state dont legalize it soon i am moving to a legal weed state
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Definitely. Where to look, and a lot of experience identifying the species. There are only a few really lethal mushrooms, though. The Death Cap (amanita phalloides) is one of the clean nicer looking white mushrooms out there.
You don't start dying from it for awhile after you've eaten it, until it's deep within your system. And its a horrible death.
LSD poisoning is also almost unheard of. While it is technically possible to take a lethal dose, it don't think it has ever happened. You need thousands of doses for this.
Those who seek emergency medical attention usually just went into a trip that is too much for them to handle. Same situation as with cannabis.
One reason shrooms have less problems is that inexperienced people tend to take it in small doses. With LSD and cannabis it is common for people to take way more than they can handle. With LSD, you are never sure about the dosage, and cannabis (a "soft" drug) tends not to be taken seriously.
No, the truth is more that a semi-common hallucination for pot heads to have is thinking they're dying. A non-zero amount of these idiots will actually call emergency services while freaking out. The weed isn't significantly more dangerous physically if you exclude possible long-term lung damage, it's just a lot more likely to freak you out to the point your dumb ass calls the cops on yourself.
Really? Do you have any documentation of that? I can't recall ever having had that particular hallucination, nor do I know anybody that has (at least, that they've communicated with me. Indeed, I can't recall anybody at all ever -- ever -- seeking emergency medical treatment because they got high smoking pot. Some complete neophyte, smoking for the first time, maybe could freak out, or somebody who was fed brownies and didn't know that they were getting a huge dose of weed along with them, sure, but both of those are special cases and not "pot heads" calling EMS because they think they are dying.
Pot is one of the safest "mind altering/illegal" substances on the planet. There is no lethal dose -- you'd be dying of smoke inhalation, not from the effects of the drug, if you tried to kill yourself with it. There are no long term effects -- if you quit, it clears out of your system end of story. There isn't even a particularly solid link between weed and e.g. lung cancer, although it wouldn't surprise anybody if smoke of any sort is a factor in inflammation, which in turn is a factor in cancer. As pointed out above, the metric of "chose to visit the ER" is just plain silly, and the levels they are reporting for this are pretty absurd -- one in 200.
Did none of those 200 have, say, something to drink as well? Alcohol as a confounding factor would all by itself explain the difference. Is all of the pot that they were smoking JUST pot, or was some of it laced with opium, or cheap weed mixed with cheaper spice to simulate "good" weed? There are zero controls, they are relying on self-reported statistics about stuff everybody lies about (in an ER, are you going to admit that you just used a felonious schedule 1 substance that you might still be holding out in your car or house, or are you going to claim that your meth-induced DTs are due to smoking weed?), and whether or not you go to the ER, tripping balls on serious hallucinogens is a hell of a lot more dangerous than getting high on pot and listening to music while gaming with friends. Your odds of self-inflicted or accidental injury are (IMO) orders of magnitude higher once you have completely disassociated your head from reality with a hefty dose of a real hallucinogen, where it is difficult to ingest enough pot to get a hallucinogenic experience in the most common ways of using it (although if you eat a pile of hash brownies or pot chile you can manage it, sure). If you try it via smoking it you'll just fall asleep before you actually hallucinate, or more likely, stop smoking because you are as relaxed and high as you care to be.
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
There are no long term effects -- if you quit, it clears out of your system end of story. There isn't even a particularly solid link between weed and e.g. lung cancer, although it wouldn't surprise anybody if smoke of any sort is a factor in inflammation, which in turn is a factor in cancer.
I can't remember the exact statistics, but, I think I recall the volume of carcinogens in Marijuana smoke (many being the same as in cigarettes) is somewhere around the 1000% that of an average tobacco cigarette. (I could be off a few hundred % there in one direction or the other- point being, its multiple times worse)
Now, that number is pretty misleading. Yeah, an individual smoke me be 10 times as *um* high, but no-one chain smokes Marijuana. (at least I hope not).
Your average cigarette smoker probably smokes way more than 10 times more frequently than your average pot-head. Cigarette smoker over their lifetime is going to get a lot more risk for lung cancer. Pot head is going to have a higher risk too but probably not in the range of a smoker.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch