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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
Also: Beer puts more than 0.2% of users in the hospital? (per use or per year?)
I bet beer and pot together are safer than shrooms. Beer, pot, rifles, 4x4s, woods and a few shrooms...now we're talking. I digress.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
More like the potheads couldn't be bothered to report
The last place you take someone having a bad reaction to psychedelics is the ER. About the only places worse would be jail or the loony bin. You take them someplace they feel safe...ask them.
So 'going to the ER' is the wrong criteria in the first place. % that needed 'babysitting' over freakout is the better question, could also apply to very drunk people.
How would you even categorize: 'Convincing your tripping friend that climbing a tower crane is a bad idea.'
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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 jumped at reading the article to validate my existing beliefs, but the article rates mushrooms as safe by the amount of people admitted to the hospital as a result. I don't think that's a great measure to use. Just because you aren't immediately and seriously injured or disruptive doesn't mean it's not bad for your mind or body.
That's a derogatory, insensitive term that only privileged white males use; please refer to them from now on as "undocumented pharmacists."
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.
By safe they speak only about emergency medical treatment.
It doesn't include long term damage (non-emergencies) and severity.
You can get to the hospital just because you got into a situation you couldn't control, or because someone else panicked, but you were never in danger to begin with.
Tobacco is probably really safe by this metric. Cancer usually won't get you in an emergency room...
Still interesting, and the results make sense, just know it is not all there is to drug safety.
Bzzzt! Wrong, guess again. The by far most commonly consumed species most definitely is a mushroom, not sure where you came up with that: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... And while there is many other species with the active ingredient, they are all still mushrooms. *The more you know*
While I think the statistics here are pretty dubious, if we take them at face value I think another likely reason shrooms would have less hospitalizations is because you'll throw up if you take too many. Really, though, the difference between shrooms and acid is barely discernible and neurologically they do pretty much the same thing (serotonin/dopamine agonists).
Concerning pot, I knew someone who was allergic to it and it made his throat swell up the first and only time he smoked it. He had to go to the ER. That could contribute to some hospitalizations, but I'm sure most are, as you suggest, people who took a large dose and got scared.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
TFA shows it is safer even than pot, based upon users self-reporting medical situations to authorities.
The thing you need to read is not the article, but rather the Global Drug Survey https://www.globaldrugsurvey.c...
If you do read it, you'll see some problems.
Here's the one that bothers me the most, and it basically means the study and related articles are nonsense.
The report isn't based on the number of doses, it's based on the number of people who ever used the drug in the last year.
So you're probably comparing ten million of doses of natural cannabis products with a few ten thousand mushroom doses, if that many.
The report says the average cannabis users used it 134 days over the last year, but fails to mention how many days/doses for mushrooms.
I kind of doubt there are many people who take mushrooms 3-4 times a week, but the Average cannabis user (responding) does just that.
The numbers are similar for users of LSD, except there are more self-reported ER visits for LSD (1%). .6% ER visits.
Cocaine is reported at 1% have ER visits, amphetamines at 1.1% and cannabis at
Pretty close percentages No one thinks cocaine, amphetamines, LSD, and cannabis are that similar in danger, but this study does.
That's because they're looking at the wrong number.
Here's my favorite quote from the GDS study.
People who use psychedelics are generally very sensible and show some of the best preparation and adoption of harm reduction practices of any drug
Mushrooms go back just as far, or farther. Mushrooms are recreational even for deer and the like, no need for fire or anything.
Weed's legal on the whole west coast? Gov's not fighting that hard any more
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.
Depends on how you're consuming the marijuana. If you're eating or drinking it, I might believe you, but the negative health impact of inhaling burning hydrocarbons is well documented, even ignoring the drug content.
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and the ones that mother gives you don't do anything at all...
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I think the distinction not being spoken of here is acute physical reactions vs. acute psychological reactions.
Most of your hallucinogens are pretty difficult to achieve acute physical reactions with, but I think hallucinogens can be the source of acute psychological reactions, especially among inexperienced people and at common recreational doses.
I would also say especially with LSD and mushrooms because they are pretty strong to begin with, and even cannabis in inexperienced users or at high potency levels.
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.
Yeah, except that no one has ever died from psilocybin mushrooms. You cannot overdose on mushrooms. And the people in the study who did call for medical assistance had been using alcohol as well. RTFA. This is almost always the case, just as the vast majority of “heroin overdoses” involve the use of alcohol, or other CNS depressants such as benzodiazepines. It’s rarely heroin alone.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
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.
I bet beer and pot together are safer than shrooms.
That’d be a bad bet. Alcohol can kill you, psilocybin can’t. Alcohol causes liver, (and other organic), damage, psilocybin doesn’t. I would say pot and ‘shrooms are equally safe. No one has ever been known to overdose on either. Alcohol, not so much. But any recreational drug, including alcohol, if used in moderation is not going to cause you any harm. Few recreational drugs are as dangerous as, say, Tylenol, (acetaminophen), which is a liver toxin.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
Documentation? Seriously, just spouting bullshit doesn't prove anything at all. And bullshit articles with completely fake graphs culled from the internet are no better. If you want facts, you can try reading actual medical journal articles:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
From the abstract: The LD50 for dogs is 3 grams of PURE THC per kilogram of body weight. I have a body mass a bit over 100 kg, so the likely LD50 for me would be roughly 300 grams. The most potent varieties of pot on the market are around 1/4 THC (reportedly, I still have a bit of a hard time believing that on a pure sanity check basis, but hey, let's go with it). That means I'd have to ingest 4x300 grams or 1.2 kilograms of not just any pot, but the very "best" (most unbelievably potent) pot on the planet in order to get a dose with a 50% chance of killing me. A person with a body mass of 50 kg would still need well over a pound of the very best pot, and would need to smoke it all (or eat it all) so quickly that the body couldn't metabolize it away before it depressed his/her CNS to a lethal degree.
If one directly eats concentrated THC or a product like "butter" that is half THC or better, one "could" ingest a lethal dose, but all in all, THC is slightly safer than caffeine. People die every year from caffeine overdoses, caused not by drinking coffee or tea but by taking large number of caffeine pills, which concentrates it to a far higher level than one can ever manage drinking a naturally caffeinated beverage.
So please -- no, there are not "many" fatalities related to marijuana use. There are pretty much zero fatalities from THC poisoning from marijuana use per se. I suppose there could be a fatality or three from people who chug a pint of melted concentrated marijuana butter, but that isn't marijuana "use", that is specifically ingesting THC as a drug in mind-numbingly stupid quantities, as stupid as downing a bottle of No-Doz to stay awake to study for a test the next day. If you want to argue that there are highway deaths or accidental deaths attributable to marijuana use, that isn't what this study is looking at and has nothing to do with LD50, but again it is difficult to get meaningful statistics (with controls for confounding factors) to support this with actual numbers. For example, in Washington state, which recently legalized pot, there has been a corresponding increase in the percentage of people involved in fatal accidents that have measurable THC in their systems. Specifically, authorities in Washington recorded 436 fatal crashes in 2013, and determined that drivers involved in 40 crashes tested positive for THC, the active chemical in marijuana, according to the study. In 2014 they found that of 462 fatal crashes, 85 drivers tested positive for THC.
BUT, correlation is not causality -- it is reasonable to assume that legal weed is smoked by more people than smoked illegal weed, more frequently, so that the number of people with detectable THC in their systems has increased (THC is detectable weeks after ingestion). The main question is, has the number of traffic fatalities itself increased since legalization, and the delta indicated in this study isn't even a statistically significant change. These numbers completely ignore confounding factors -- such as what percentage of the THC users had blood alcohol levels in excess of the legal limits, what the population of the state has done in the meantime, how the number of registered drivers has changed, changes in the available roadway, and "normal statistical variation" in the number of traffic fatalities. The number itself is nearly meaningless.
With that said, I don't doubt that there are some surplus deaths due to accidents caused by people being too high to drive and driving anyway, or using power tools while high, etc. But even there, pot is almost certainly far safer than alcohol and a long list of prescription or over the counter drugs.
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
I've heard this argument, but it is difficult to back with actual statistics. Here's an article from 2008 that looks comparatively clean:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
It suggests that smoking pot regularly and heavily is associated with around a 5% increased incidence in lung cancer, but N in the study is pretty small for me to be happy with this number. Its an epidemiological study and hence has the usual problems with confounding -- lots of people smoke pot AND tobacco, use pot AND drink alcohol -- plus the usual difficulties of relying on self-reporting of use. In a sense the article is surprising -- in spite of nominally being more toxic, the bump in risk appears smaller than it is for tobacco, something I've read about in other research articles as well. Tobacco appears to be uniquely bad for you, worse than "just smoke" including pot smoke. It could be that pot has some anti-inflammatory activity (reported here and there as part of its possible "medical benefits") that partially offsets the smoke-related damage, since cancer, like most cardiovascular disease, appears to be associated with inflammatory response.
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Nobody suggested you shouldn't. I said it was the most dangerous, not that it should be outlawed. Drug laws are absurd.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Despite these quibbles with methodology, I'm personally miffed at the superstitious reference to "magic" mushrooms.
Can we agree, henceforward, to refer to these as "Science Mushrooms" ?
Signed,
A highly rational libertarian genius.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
As they said:
Your average cigarette smoker probably smokes way more than 10 times more frequently than your average pot-head
And that alone gives your body time to recover. Having enough recovery time would mean a lower overall cancer risk - because it's not just accumulation of toxic substances, it's also inflammation. And inflammation that isn't continuous is much less dangerous to long-term health.
Marketing is what it is:
Nobody wants to feel "scientific" when they take a recreational drug.
Feeling "magical," however, is another matter entirely.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
negative health impact of inhaling burning hydrocarbons is well documented
If its so well document, perhaps you can provide a citation or two? What are the exact health effects of inhaling the smoke from 1/2 gram of burning hydrocarbons without any drug content?
I agree with you, but none of that negates the abuse of statistics. You just don't say " of X is bad" where X is already selected to be the worst fraction of a group. It tells you nothing, unless you're conducting an analysis of X rather than the group. However, we're considering alcohol drinkers, pot smokers, heroin users. We are not specifically considering alcoholics, potheads who are stoned all the time, and heroin junkies.
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.