Higher is healthier? Psychedelic science.

• Author: Doherty, Brian
• Position: Citings - Brief article

DESPITE WHAT you might have learned from old government-sponsored black-and-white educational films or hippie-era exploitation flicks, psychedelic drugs do not drive you inexorably insane. A new study in PLoSOne, an online peer-reviewed journal from the Public Library of Science, examined survey results from over 130,000 U.S. adults, more than 21,000 of whom had used psychedelics, and found there are "no significant associations between lifetime use of any psychedelics, lifetime use of specific psychedelics (LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, peyote), or past year use of LSD and increased rate of any of the mental health outcomes" they examined.

Those prospective bad outcomes included "serious psychological distress ... mental health treatment ... symptoms of eight psychiatric disorders--and seven specific symptoms of non-affective...