No serious harms in healthy people, some in psychiatric patients
What they did
Researchers screened 214 studies of classic psychedelics and meta-analysed adverse event data from 114 of them, covering 3,504 participants.
What they found
No serious adverse events were reported among healthy participants. Roughly 4 percent of participants with pre-existing neuropsychiatric disorders experienced serious adverse events including worsening depression, suicidal behaviour, psychosis and seizures.
Worth knowing
The most quotable finding is that only 23.5 percent of studies since 2005 used systematic adverse event assessment. The safety record looks clean partly because much of the field has not been looking carefully.
Hinkle et al. Adverse Events in Studies of Classic Psychedelics, A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. JAMA Psychiatry, 2024.
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dose responseEffects rose with dose, and most found the experience pleasantharm rankingPsilocybin ranked least harmful of twenty drugs, alcohol mostabuse potentialLow abuse potential, and a case for lighter schedulingThe headline finding worth carrying around is that risk concentrates in people with existing psychiatric conditions and in unsupervised settings. If either applies to you, talk to a doctor before you start anything.
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