Shrooms: What You Need to Know
Keep in mind that “harm reduction” material shouldn’t be interpreted as a guide to avoiding all potential negative consequences.<p>When it comes to psychedelics, the pendulum of popular opinion has swung from an extreme of “extremely bad for you” to “actually good for you” but neither extreme is good, IMO.<p>It’s worth reading some of the material about how psychedelic users are weirdly prone to picking up strange beliefs. Not <i>everyone</i> of course, but even a large number of psychedelic researchers who were supposedly doing it the “right way” were still walking away with bizarre and irrational beliefs: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slatestarcodex.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;04&#x2F;28&#x2F;why-were-early-psychedelicists-so-weird&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slatestarcodex.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;04&#x2F;28&#x2F;why-were-early-psyched...</a><p>These belief-shifting outcomes aren’t mentioned in harm reduction guides. In many cases, they’re actually celebrated by users with an implicit assumption that all belief changes from psychedelics must be inherently good. I think it’s important to understand that thoughts and feelings imparted by psychedelics aren’t <i>real</i> and may likely be entirely meaningless.<p>It’s also important to know that the thoughts and feelings and experiences induced by psychedelics aren’t necessarily entirely positive. The negative anecdotes tend to get lost among the hyperbole about psychedelics producing magical experiences, but it’s not hard to find stories about difficult trips or trips that induced long-lasting negative mental states on Internet forums. They tend to be downvote, ignored, or explained away by blaming the victim for doing it wrong. However, it is a very real and not uncommon possibility, which is why harm reduction guides emphasize the need for sitters to monitor the user and why every psychedelic research study had included 10X as much therapy sessions as psychedelic sessions.