Well, it's strange to compare mushrooms which have been used by various human cultures for 5,000 - 10,000 years with a religious figure (although I did read som

Well, it's strange to compare mushrooms which have been used by various human cultures for 5,000 - 10,000 years with a religious figure (although I did read somewhere that Jesus Christ was actually a mushroom -- but I don't believe it [1]). A better comparison might be, people have been reading the Bible for two thousand years, so we should assume it's safe to read the bible -- not that the main character was an actual person. I used psychedelics irresponsibly in my youth, for recreational purposes -- much like it sounds you did. I'd never take MDMA without a proper spectral analysis (which you can obtain for $100 from ecstasydata.org) and with a sitter. Then I took a decade off until I was facing recurring suicidal depression and was not interested in deadening my emotional experience via western psychiatry. I was fortunate enough to be given a chance to do MDMA in a therapeutic setting as well as some healing experiences with mushrooms. No question these compounds helped me release whatever was beneath the depression and other mental issues. “Magic mushrooms are one of the safest drugs in the world,” said Adam Winstock, a consultant addiction psychiatrist and founder of the Global Drug Survey, pointing out that the bigger risk was people picking and eating the wrong mushrooms. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/may/23/study-hallucinogenic-mushrooms-safest-recreational-drug-lsd https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/may/23/study-halluc... Also, I never said they were safe because they were natural -- that is silly. There are plenty of things in nature that will kill you. We haven't had thousands of years of people using botulinum medicinally or ceremoniously. As to your claim that "What matters is that it is standardised[sic], of known origin (traceable/provable), well studied in clinical trials, and the mechanisms well understood." We have had a draconian prohibition on psychedelics in general for several decades and the promising research was cut off. So, if one is actually interested in healing, what matters is in finding what works -- and sometimes that means finding ways outside sanctioned medicine. But of course, we do have data on psychedelics and their safety and efficacy for healing -- and the results seem to be much more promising than the current approaches. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sacred_Mushroom_and_the_Cross https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sacred_Mushroom_and_the_Cr...