Harm is based on all risks not just the metrics that make what you care about look better. 60% of American adults drink regularly so extreme edge cases happen, but they aren’t anywhere close to the risks from car accidents etc.

Risk of death is significant, but we’re talking under 0.1% per year.

Some absurd number, like 70% of domestic violence, 25% of sexual assaults, 30% of regular assaults, around ~40% of murders, ~15% of robberies, and ~50% of injurious or fatal car accidents occur when people are under the influence of alcohol.

that very few are overdosing isn't the issue.

True, social harm is definitely high, on the other hand ~62% of US adults drink. The expected rates of all of those things aren’t 0.

See, this is where LSD gets interesting.

No, LSD won't kill your body. But what are you? You aren't just your body, you are your mind and mental state and the consistency of that.

Do enough LSD, especially consistent high doses, and the "you" you know will die and be permanently replaced by something else.

I of course agree that LSD won't put you in a coffin. But there are more axes upon which a drug's danger should be evaluated than "what percentage of users are put in coffins?"

I really hate the “LSD is safe” mantra people have.

I had a college roommate who did a shit ton of LSD one night and I woke up to the fire alarm having been pulled and him punching holes in the wall.

The police (fire department called the police) dragged him off and the hospital had to give him a bunch of antidepressants to short circuit the LSD.

He was literally not the same person ever again. That is terrifying, even more so than chemical dependency, to me.

In defense of LSD, your roommate did "a shit ton of LSD". Keeping dosage under ~300ug radically decreases the likelihood of any sort of permanent personality shift like that.

That said things can still happen on a bad trip. I posted my own personal experience downthread.

Literally not the same as in personality change or as in unable to stick to reality after?

Huge personality shift

For better, worse, or just plain different?

I don't understand how anyone who has ever taken LSD can say that it's safe. Maybe at low doses.

Once you can't seperate fantasy from reality you're just one bad trip from falling out of a window you thought was a door.

edit: The responses here just seem like denialism from people who got lucky to be honest.

You can be aware that you are tripping and still imagine that something is something else.

Roads looked like footpaths to me, windows looked like doors, knives looked like forks, and so on and so forth. I was aware that it wasn't real but couldn't be sure of the safety of existing in the world.

I basically had to sit in a corner for 10 hours, hope that the corner was actually the one I thought it was and that I wasn't going to fall down a staircase instead.

It was great fun but felt like russian roulette.

Have you ever done it?

Because what you’re describing doesn’t resemble LSD at all. You’re describing deleriants like datura if anything.

One rumor I've seen is that dealers have been replacing LSD with NBOM which has a significantly higher chance of causing a psychotic break and is harder to safely dose. This gets back to the big problem with illegal drugs isn't the drugs, it the illegal.

Ehrlich’s reagent can be used to test for the presence of an income, NBOMe, 25I, and related compounds will not show up as an indole.

And if I try to change your mind about how much it matters to get a new perspective and new evaluation on some things, I might murder you.

A conundrum.

Personal anecdote: I used to do a decent amount of LSD (~150ug every 4-5 months for ~3 years), until one time I had an extremely bad trip. Ever since that bad trip, I've found that every time I get high (from LSD, mushrooms, or even marijuana) I start having extreme anxiety to the point where I can't enjoy it anymore and am just waiting for it to end. The bad trip was now 8 years ago and to this day I've not had a great experience on any of the above drugs since then.

I consider myself lucky that the anxiety only shows up when on drugs, which is pretty easy to avoid by, y'know, not doing drugs. But clearly something permanently shifted inside my brain.

The inability to experience something I used to enjoy without a near-panic-attack is a bit more of an effect than a conversation might have.

Magnitude matters. A full frontal lobotomy counts as personality death even if a conversation doesn’t.

Do you think LSD is comparable to a lobotomy?

And critically, lobotomy isn't a change from one set of mental states to another. That big chunk of brain doesn't grow back.

Memories once missing don’t grow back either. The most extreme cases of LSD use have impacted such basic functions as limiting people’s ability to communicate.

Post lobotomy people generally weren’t brain dead, even if diminished. So for extreme cases, yes it’s a solid comparison.

> Alcohol is an _extremely_ harmful drug.

Yeah. If alcohol was discovered only today, there wouldn't be a government in the world that would legalise it.

It's legal because its grandfathered in, from the time before humans developed society and civilisation.