I've bookmarked your AMA because I think it helps to answer some serious questions regarding access to and use of psychedelics.

Where is your masterclass accessible from?

Do you think the US will ever actually accept and not just decriminalize, but legalize, the use of these compounds as a viable treatment option?

I’ve had a few great experiences on psychedelics, from MDMA, mushrooms, and LSD, which leads me to want to take them again. But how long should one wait in between uses? Or does that depend on a whole array of different factors?

See earlier threads about end-to-end verifiable elections. Many of the same cryptographic techniques are used, but voting is very different from moving money around on a blockchain.

Legality varies greatly by jurisdiction and individual psychedelic compound in question, so we're hesitant to provide sourcing information in a public forum. We'd recommend checking the legal status of the compounds that you are interested in in your given city/province. For example, many jurisdictions have licensed ketamine-assisted psychotherapy clinics, so you can have a safe, supervised experience if you are seeking psychedelics for purposes of clinical treatment.

For most folks, however, psychedelic access is largely restricted to either growing/making your own (complex and again, legally fraught) or accessing black/gray market sources. We created a brief harm reduction guide for Dealing With Your Dealer to minimize the likelihood of getting something other than what you were looking for (and maybe causing harm to yourself or community members as a result): https://www.psychedelicsafetyalliance.org/f/dealingwithyourdealer

For the purposes of this discussion, they're pretty much the same thing. Different equations, same end goal.

Thanks! Doing our best.

Erowid kicks ass.

To be clear, we're not conducting our own academic research, but we do study and aggregate a bunch of academic research for a lay audience. Many of the researchers we've spoken with have told us that science has an information dissemination problem, so we view part of our role as filling that gap.

It's also worth noting that many emergency medical professionals like Erowid, as they don't receive much education about psychedelics during their training and can be asked to care for patients experiencing some kind of medical issue that could be due to a substance that they've never heard of before.

Though Erowid doesn't always have information on *every* drug out there (especially very new ones), it's the most encyclopedic database we know of, has been around the longest, and was a major starting point for both of us in our journeys to understand WTF was up with drugs generally, psychedelics specifically, and how to keep people safe.

People lie to pollsters

Where would one get psychedlics if they wanted to try them?

I'm in Canada.

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I'm so glad to see a real psychedelic researcher promote EROWID. This has been one of the best resources for me to get the basics of various drugs and people's personal experiences with the substances.

There are tons of groups that are lobbying for drug policy reform in the United States; expanding clinical research and treatment options is just one of many. Many of the nonprofits and businesses that have been funding clinical research are also very involved in pushing for regulatory reform, most notably in the US MAPS. There are plenty of groups with a more international scope, such as Beckley Foundation.

There's excellent sociological science that's been produced that has examined the negative impact of the War on Drugs on marginalized populations that has in turn led to social justice-oriented reform initiatives by the ACLU, Drug Policy Alliance, and others. While the focus of organization efforts varies by local chapter, SSDP also does excellent work on the activism front as well.

Due to the freeze on psychedelic research that hit in the late 60's, there's still a ton of research to be done on various psychedelics, especially more esoteric ones like DMT. So if you're looking for peer-reviewed research on medical benefits, in many instances, you just have to wait until the research has been funded and conducted in the first place.

That said, if you want to see what does exist in the medical literature, PubMed or Google Scholar are our go-to databases for published research findings. Many of the studies you'll find in there are pretty jargon-heavy and not meant for the general public, but you can easily go in there and do a keyword search for the compound you're curious about and you'll get a list of things folks have published. Some studies have methodological issues that only research geeks can pick apart and it's still not always possible to say definitively that the findings of a single study are conclusive, but it's a start.

A better option for laypeople can be databases like Erowid or PsychonautWiki, which, though they don't list much in the way of medical research findings, can give you a more accessible glance at the experiences other people have had on a wide variety of psychedelics through the Experience Reports they collect. You can also occasionally find research cited on Wikipedia, though you'll want to follow up with those to make sure they're legit.

There are two major categories of deaths associated with psychedelics....

The first category has to do with the physiological impact that the psychedelic has on the body - in short, an overdose. These are extremely rare for most psychedelics, given that they have such a high LD50 (the "lethal dose" amount of a material which causes the death of 50% of subjects) compared to other psychoactive compounds such as alcohol. A famous example is the legendarily high dose of LSD that had to be given to an elephant to result in its death: https://www.illinoisscience.org/2016/06/lsd-and-the-elephant/

But other compounds may cause death through other physiological mechanisms - especially psychedelics with a strong impact on cardiac systems, such as ibogaine or MDMA. Each compound presents its own unique challenges, and should be researched carefully with respect to contraindications with other drugs - another potential source of fatal effects - and underlying conditions that may not place nice with your psychedelics.

The biggest risk we see is how psychedelics change behavior, and in particular awareness of the environment. People on psychedelics much more in danger from the world around them - from perhaps not checking both ways before crossing the street while on bicycle day ride, from accidentally drowning in a DIY float tanks in their home bathtubs while K-holed, from losing their balance and falling while giddily climbing tall structures at festivals - all situations ourselves and/or our first responder community members have had to deal with. Ketamine seems to be a particularly common factor in deaths of this nature.

This is why we strongly recommend folks not only take preventative steps to make sure they are taking the appropriate substance in an appropriate dose for their individual biology, but also use substances in community so that they have people that can help them not accidentally harm themselves while on their cosmic voyage. We've got a safe(r) psychonaut dosing protocol we put together for community here to minimize risk: https://www.psychedelicsafetyalliance.org/f/safer-psychonaut-dosing-protocol

How do you feel about the usefulness of Bayesian audits, as a simpler but perhaps imperfect, substitution for risk-limiting audits?

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Connecting with Decriminalize Nature to start an initiative to decriminalize plant-based psychedelics in your city or state is one option.

Supporting any such existing campaigns in your city or state is another.

If you're a college student, starting or joining a chapter of Students for Sensible Drug Policy is a good move.

You can also support the Drug Policy Alliance, which is the major national organization pushing for drug policy reform.

An example: there was a notable headline-generating incident recently in which an individual who had taken psilocybin-containing mushrooms assaulted several individuals on a plane. While rare, taking high doses of psychedelics in the wrong set and setting can be immensely disruptive and sometimes dangerous for those around you. While certainly not the majority of use cases, when situations like these end up in the headlines, it certainly makes it harder for activists to make the case for decriminalization or legalization on the basis of there being little public safety risk. https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2022/10/10/psychedelic-mushrooms-united-flight/

For more AMAs on this topic, subscribe to r/IAmA_Nonprofit, and check out our other topic-specific AMA subreddits here.

I don’t really trip anymore (maybe some mushrooms once in a blue moon), but they helped me a lot in understanding and accepting myself. How can I help the cause legally?

What are some examples of deaths from taking psychedelics?

Where can people learn more about the different psychedelics and the medical benefits? For instance DMT came up in recent years but there isn’t a lot of information on it from a scientific stand point

There are a couple.

A major one is the increasing prevalence of harmful adulterants like fentanyl in the underground drug supply. Though fentanyl specifically still doesn't show up in psychedelics sold in underground markets *that* often, there have been some reports of it showing up in ketamine, and given the way fentanyl has crept into many other drugs (heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine), we have concerns that this could continue further into the psychedelic market as well.

- Another issue is people not knowing how to dose themselves correctly, which is one of the things we cover exhaustively in our new masterclass. Being too high to drive or safely navigate public space carries a safety risk both to yourself and to others

- A very small but reliable percentage of people who take psychedelics will experience some kind of psychotic episode or become erratic, which can lead to unpredictable and risky behaviors that can affect their health and safety, as well as that of those around them. (As another example, one of us had a friend in college who was triggered into a major bipolar episode resulting from psychedelic use who impulsively decided to take a late-night bike ride to another state and was hit by a car.)

- There's also a possibility that more people experiencing psycho-emotional crises on psychedelics could check themselves into emergency rooms when they don't need medical attention, taking staff resources away from people in more urgent medical need.

How likely are these things? Hard to say. What we do know is that all of these things happen a little bit already and are statistically likely to happen to more people as more people start taking psychedelics without proper safety education.

But an americano is just espresso and water..

Honestly it was purely a rant because I'm so fed up with politics in this country going down the shitter. It only gets worse as time goes on, more attacks, more usage of blatant loopholes that our bullshit country continues to allow. Much like the way the gerrymandering case went a couple years back.... and corporate donations to politicians. It's all setup to fail hard. It's not a question of if, but when.

Edit: Why do you think the extreme right fought so hard to remove abortion federally, and continue to try at the state level in every state? That 'pro-life' bullshit is true, but only for the wealthy. They need little minions to take all the shitty, crappy jobs that nobody wants so they can be served/serviced. They worry about our population and want to force it to grow in recent years.

I could rant all day. Not arguing, just ranting, so tired of blantent bullshit.