The safety rules every modern trial still follows
What they did
The authors reviewed the risks of giving classic hallucinogens to humans and set out screening, preparation, physical setting and monitoring procedures for research use.
What they found
They identified acute psychological distress and the unsafe behaviour that can follow as the primary risk, noted that hallucinogen-triggered psychosis is uncommon, and concluded that adverse outcomes are rare when the safeguards are followed.
Worth knowing
The whole point of this paper is that safety depends on the conditions. Every reassuring statistic elsewhere on this page comes from studies that followed these procedures.
Johnson et al. Human hallucinogen research, guidelines for safety. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 2008.
Read the sourceKeep reading
adverse eventsNo serious harms in healthy people, some in psychiatric patientsdose responseEffects rose with dose, and most found the experience pleasantharm rankingPsilocybin ranked least harmful of twenty drugs, alcohol mostThe 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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