The Toxicity Profile of Psychedelics

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Toxicity profile seems to be very good with a compound like psilocybin, magic mushrooms. With therapeutic index, which is the dose that you would typically take, or you might take therapeutically relative to a dose that's going to cause you harm or kill you massive window there. Animals don't self administer psychedelics and humans only really go there. So then more drugs are sort of self exploration when taken in the right way. And then people, you know, often do those explorations quite sparingly. They might do it a couple of times a year if they consider themselves a psychedelic user.

The Convention on Psychotropic Substances was a 1971 United Nations treaty that placed strong restrictions on the use of psychedelic drugs — not only on personal use, but medical and scientific research as well. Along with restrictions placed by individual nations, it has been very difficult for scientists to study the effects of psychedelics on the brain, despite indications that they might have significant therapeutic potential. But this has gradually been changing, and researchers like Robin Carhart-Harris have begun to perform controlled experiments to see how psychedelics affect the brain, and what positive uses they might have. Robin and I talk about how psychedelics work, how they can help with conditions from addiction to depression, and how they can help people discover things about themselves.

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Robin Carhart-Harris received his Ph.D. in psychopharmacology from the University of Bristol. He is currently the Director of the Centre for Psychedelic Research in the Department of Brain Sciences at Imperial College London, and holds an honorary position at the University of Oxford. His research involves functional brain imaging studies with psilocybin (magic mushrooms), LSD, MDMA (ecstasy) and DMT (ayahuasca), plus a clinical trial of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression.

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