1. Psychedelics, including cannabis, can flip schizophrenic switches on.
2. Many sell psychedelics as a panacea. Theyre not. They can help people make major positive changes, but the person has to do the work. Psychedelics are a tool. Not a cure all.
3. A study from the 50s (I think) found LSD helps alchoholism. LSD never had any kind of therapeutic effect for me.
Psylocibin definitely does, when taken in the correct context, and when personal work surrounds the experience.
4. A friend has done far too much psychedelics under the guise of therapeutic use and its changed him, not for the better. Taking psychedelics every weekend isnt therapy. Its escapism with an excuse. Its just another form of getting fucked up.
I agree with your overall take re safety and effectiveness in broad populations, but let me at least make the positive pitch as (hopefully) somebody whose epistemics and background you can respect.
Background - I have done large amounts of basically every drug known to man, and psychedelics feature heavily in that landscape. I'm not the typical person who can say this - I went to grad school, I've published in physics and microbiology, I'm a serial entrepreneur who has done several startups, I was a competitive powerlifter and even today in my dotage am well into the thousand club, etc. I've spent a good amount of social time around lower class, largely bad-at-life drug users, and I've spent a good amount of social time around FAANG and finance tier drug users, and have a wider sample than most.
Here's my take: for people generally in our segment - and here I'm going to identify that as a relatively higher openness, higher attainment, thinkier, more skeptical, libertarian-leaning-or-favorable, rationality enjoyers - psychedelics have a place, and are more likely to be positively life changing, or at the least fun.
Like your initial CDF was just crazy even for gen pop - research some of the neurology of LSD or other psychedelics. They dump LARGE amounts of serotonin and moderate amounts of dopamine into your system, you feel GREAT while on them, and most people would feel great just due to the things going on at a neurotransmitter level, and the odds of "nothing happened" is floored at "probability you got fake drugs." If you have known verified LSD or other psychedelics, the probability of "nothing happens" is <1%.
For our segment, I'd personally put the CDF at something like:
5-10% chance positive life changing
89-84% chance positive
5% negative
0.5% negative life changing
0.5% nothing happens
Okay, so first where do the positive life changing events come from, what are they shaped like?
We're all neural nets here - the way neural nets work is by encoding a set of weights that inform our priors and internal feature engineering and transformations that lead to our perceptions and ideas.
Psychedelics flatten that landscape of weights, they level your priors, so you more immediately perceive things, and without your usual filters and biases and habits.
Why might this be good? One, it can open you to entirely new ways of being and thinking.
I'm no slouch intellectually, and I've done some of the best mathematics and philosophy of my life on psychedelics. Two, back to the new ways of being and thinking, it can give you critical insights and a relatively outside view into the various problems that lay large in our lives.
Problems like should I stay in this relationship or not, should I stay in this job / geography / house or change things up, and so on. It can give you unexpected insight and empathy when thinking about some of the issues you have with other people, and it can give you unexpected insight and empathy into your own values and goals and aspirations as you consider your own dilemmas and problems, and a very clear answer can appear on any of those importantly life-changing questions, which endures and remains true after the trip is over. I'm saying it can literally be a journey of self discovery, and you can discover and become more aligned with your own values.
This is actually how many people and cultures have used psychedelics historically (and psychedelic use goes back thousands of years) - to gain further insight or outside views into important personal or tribe-affecting issues, or to decide what they really value, or to decide their life course.
So, that's the essential pitch for positive and life changing - it can give you the insight or the push to materially change your life and circumstances, to have more clarity about your own values or aspirations or goals, and to more deeply understand and empathize with other people in your life.
That doesn't always end positively - that's part of why negative is at 5%.
Some people make a big life change and regret it. I count that as just "negative," because I think trying to make a material life change to do better is itself a large enough good, which not nearly enough people do, that it should be encouraged, but I want to make that fully clear. Is it unfair to count trying to do that as life-changingly positive when it succeeds and merely negative when it fails?
Feel free to disagree, but let me lay out my reasoning - the dominant case for most people is lives of quiet desperation. Did you know at 20 years only ~18% of marriages are still together and non-dead-bedroom? Do you know according to the Gallup 2026 State of the Workplace survey, ~80% of people are "disengaged" at work and a full 2/3 of people say they are not thriving in life overall? On top of that, approximately everyone is an obese sedentary that never moves their body, and spends 7-11 recreational hours per day on screens. That's not a recipe for a good life! Absolutely anything that might kick people out of this fat, miserable, dull gray hell that they call "life" is a strong good, in my own opinion! And any attempt like that which fails is just "business as usual," and at least you tried to better your lot. Sure you end up hating life, but you were *already there.*. So maybe you still think it's unfair, but that's why I've allocated it that way.
Also on the 5% negative side, some people are neurotic or tightly wound enough that not being in full control or not being in their usual patterns feels really bad for them. That also contributes. In the limits, they can full blown trauma spiral or have a panic attack and descend into a bad trip for the rest of it, and that's the 0.5% in my schema. In the absolute limits, maybe 0.1% of the 0.5% is something like kicking people prone to schizophrenia into worse states, and on that front, yes, if you have a familial history or are at risk in any way, the downside is big enough you should just avoid psychedelics. But for everyone else, I think there's a lot of lift to be had.
Okay, so that's my pitch. Basically there's a large chance you'll at least enjoy it and experience something novel, a very decent chance of materially positively affecting your life, with Lindy use cases along those lines extending back thousands of years, and a relatively small chance of negativity or bad outcomes.
Who SHOULD do psychedelics? People pondering a big life change, people who aren't sure that what they're doing in life is fully aligned with their values, people who think there must be some better way of being or living and aren't sure what to do to get there. Also people who are interested in self-exploration or self-editing, or getting really into some particular math or philosophy problem.
Who should NOT do psychedelics? People who are fully happy with their lives, anyone with schizophrenia family history or risk, and really tightly wound neurotic types.
But it's not just me, I (inevitably) come with data. In our specific segment, ie people on SSC surveys and on r/nootropics, microdosing LSD or shrooms was roughly ~20% life changingly positive, with relatively large N!
My personal thesis is it has to do with that weight leveling and outside view stuff. Microdosing gets you a small portion of that, while still allowing you to function in daily life. It achieves a better neuroplasticity, in other words, and allows you to consciously change weights and priors and habits if that's something you're aiming for. Psychedelics above all, are a tool par excellence for self-understanding AND self-editing.
Cutting this here because it's already too long for most people to read, but feel free to DM me if anyone reading this wants to hear more.
Stanley kubrick on LSD: "One of the things that's turned me against LSD is that all the people I know who use it have a peculiar inability to distinguish between things that are really interesting and stimulating and things that appear so in the state of universal bliss the drug induces on a "good" trip. "
Also you ought to listen to Sam Harris' 'Drugs and the Meaning of Life' if you have not already. Basically their principle utility, for sensible people, is in wavering several cognitive illusions (including the self illusion - from what I can gather you already recognise this as an illusion).
Your point about anecdotes is correct - multiple anecdotes aren't data. But there is empirical data on their therapeutic benefit, and also on how they change personality (principally increased openness).
My experience with LSD tells me that it's main effects come about from magnifying your internal world. It also does other things, like analysis suppression and enhancing the ability to see analogies, removing habits! (very major effect) and weird quirks with your mental faculties - extremely vivid imagination and inducing emotions which you haven't felt in a decade or more.
What seems to be happening with people who praise psychedelics is IMO they noticed some pattern of how their mind works and assumed that they now have control over it or have overcame it. This was my experience. Sure, it informs you of things you'd never be able to know without it, but this information doesn't affect your personality in any significant way. Around two weeks or so after the trip you will go back to your old personality.
The removal of habits i mentioned is at it's peak during the peak of the actual trip, where very core habits of your mind get removed, like your entire personality, memory, etc. (all of which ive experienced and can confirm). After this peak and as the drug leaves your system you start to regain your habits. I believe the reason people panic on psychs and have bad trips is because removing your habits also removes coping mechanisms or thinking patterns you'd usually use to overcome negative emotions.
It can also be negative, as in its totally possible to experience such negative emotions during a trip that you've now unlocked knowledge which you otherwise never would've dreamed of. After a bad trip, i now know that there are levels of suffering possible which exceed anything ive ever experienced in my regular life. This knowledge is now haunting me whenever i do MDMA or ketamine, because i know its at least possible to experience this, and the paranoia this produces is insane.
I hope this ramble will be useful to you in some way. I believe im somewhat of an outlier when it comes to psych usage, since my thoughts on the whole thing are much more grounded and dont try to involve anything spiritual (i believe spiritual "insights" on lsd are people's projections of the values which sit at the top of their own hierarchy, which becomes easier to see on LSD). If you ever use them, i believe the major effect will just be your system of values and beliefs becoming more internally coherent.
Sebastian makes a good argument against psychedelics. People are likely to overreport positive experiences, and underreport negative experiences. One could call this the “evangelist effect.”
It's interesting, because my experience was basically the opposite of what you'd expect. Not remotely fun, I had some minor visual disturbances but nothing that could be called a hallucination, and I didn't experience anything meaningful, it was more like an absence of the entire concept of meaning. Everything I'd experienced in my life up to that point and everything I might experience in the future became completely empty of any significance or emotional weight whatsoever. Even maintaining an image of myself as a cohesive individual became difficult. It was, figuratively speaking, exactly as if my personality and all my feelings about the world were a glove that I'd always mistaken for my own hand, and suddenly I could take it off, and when I tried it to put it back on it didn't quite fit. Maybe there never was a hand underneath.
I do think that, as unsettling as the whole experience was, it may have been beneficial. When I was younger I had a bit of what they call main character syndrome, or, to be a little clinical, maybe some variety of autistic or schizoid narcissism, and going through such a miserable form of ego death may have mitigated that. At the very least it gave me a much deeper appreciation of certain philosophical concepts.
Also worth mentioning that there was a family of four brothers I spent a lot of time with when I was young. They took their experiments a lot further than I took mine. Last I checked, three of the four, or maybe four of the four, were straight up schizophrenic. There was definitely a strong genetic factor at play for them, but still, I doubt our lifestyle in those days did them any favors.
That's not quite what the study found with respect to abuse though is it? Forgive me, I'm an academic lay person so I downloaded the paper and asked ChatGPT to tell me what it means. In any event, it seemed to suggest that the important distinction was that the subjective experience of abuse was more predictive of later psychopathology than the objective facts of the abuse itself.
So, as I understand it, [objective abuse] + [subjective evaluation of abuse as bad thing] = [later psychopathology].
(I should add that I'm not simply a disinterested reader, but an Australian lawyer practicing in personal injury. A finding such as what you described would be fairly harmful to my profession, but it seems the actual paper was more circumspect. Even so, I'd be interested to know the truth of the matter, just how strong is the link between abuse and later psychological injury.)
1. Psychedelics, including cannabis, can flip schizophrenic switches on.
2. Many sell psychedelics as a panacea. Theyre not. They can help people make major positive changes, but the person has to do the work. Psychedelics are a tool. Not a cure all.
3. A study from the 50s (I think) found LSD helps alchoholism. LSD never had any kind of therapeutic effect for me.
Psylocibin definitely does, when taken in the correct context, and when personal work surrounds the experience.
4. A friend has done far too much psychedelics under the guise of therapeutic use and its changed him, not for the better. Taking psychedelics every weekend isnt therapy. Its escapism with an excuse. Its just another form of getting fucked up.
I feel like I conclude that psycodelics will probably do nothing or (unlikely) they will do something either terrible or great.
This seems like a very bad gamble unless your life is already terrible (say 1% amazing and life changing, 1% ruins your life, 98% nothing)
I agree with your overall take re safety and effectiveness in broad populations, but let me at least make the positive pitch as (hopefully) somebody whose epistemics and background you can respect.
Background - I have done large amounts of basically every drug known to man, and psychedelics feature heavily in that landscape. I'm not the typical person who can say this - I went to grad school, I've published in physics and microbiology, I'm a serial entrepreneur who has done several startups, I was a competitive powerlifter and even today in my dotage am well into the thousand club, etc. I've spent a good amount of social time around lower class, largely bad-at-life drug users, and I've spent a good amount of social time around FAANG and finance tier drug users, and have a wider sample than most.
Here's my take: for people generally in our segment - and here I'm going to identify that as a relatively higher openness, higher attainment, thinkier, more skeptical, libertarian-leaning-or-favorable, rationality enjoyers - psychedelics have a place, and are more likely to be positively life changing, or at the least fun.
Like your initial CDF was just crazy even for gen pop - research some of the neurology of LSD or other psychedelics. They dump LARGE amounts of serotonin and moderate amounts of dopamine into your system, you feel GREAT while on them, and most people would feel great just due to the things going on at a neurotransmitter level, and the odds of "nothing happened" is floored at "probability you got fake drugs." If you have known verified LSD or other psychedelics, the probability of "nothing happens" is <1%.
For our segment, I'd personally put the CDF at something like:
5-10% chance positive life changing
89-84% chance positive
5% negative
0.5% negative life changing
0.5% nothing happens
Okay, so first where do the positive life changing events come from, what are they shaped like?
We're all neural nets here - the way neural nets work is by encoding a set of weights that inform our priors and internal feature engineering and transformations that lead to our perceptions and ideas.
Psychedelics flatten that landscape of weights, they level your priors, so you more immediately perceive things, and without your usual filters and biases and habits.
Why might this be good? One, it can open you to entirely new ways of being and thinking.
I'm no slouch intellectually, and I've done some of the best mathematics and philosophy of my life on psychedelics. Two, back to the new ways of being and thinking, it can give you critical insights and a relatively outside view into the various problems that lay large in our lives.
Problems like should I stay in this relationship or not, should I stay in this job / geography / house or change things up, and so on. It can give you unexpected insight and empathy when thinking about some of the issues you have with other people, and it can give you unexpected insight and empathy into your own values and goals and aspirations as you consider your own dilemmas and problems, and a very clear answer can appear on any of those importantly life-changing questions, which endures and remains true after the trip is over. I'm saying it can literally be a journey of self discovery, and you can discover and become more aligned with your own values.
This is actually how many people and cultures have used psychedelics historically (and psychedelic use goes back thousands of years) - to gain further insight or outside views into important personal or tribe-affecting issues, or to decide what they really value, or to decide their life course.
So, that's the essential pitch for positive and life changing - it can give you the insight or the push to materially change your life and circumstances, to have more clarity about your own values or aspirations or goals, and to more deeply understand and empathize with other people in your life.
That doesn't always end positively - that's part of why negative is at 5%.
Some people make a big life change and regret it. I count that as just "negative," because I think trying to make a material life change to do better is itself a large enough good, which not nearly enough people do, that it should be encouraged, but I want to make that fully clear. Is it unfair to count trying to do that as life-changingly positive when it succeeds and merely negative when it fails?
Feel free to disagree, but let me lay out my reasoning - the dominant case for most people is lives of quiet desperation. Did you know at 20 years only ~18% of marriages are still together and non-dead-bedroom? Do you know according to the Gallup 2026 State of the Workplace survey, ~80% of people are "disengaged" at work and a full 2/3 of people say they are not thriving in life overall? On top of that, approximately everyone is an obese sedentary that never moves their body, and spends 7-11 recreational hours per day on screens. That's not a recipe for a good life! Absolutely anything that might kick people out of this fat, miserable, dull gray hell that they call "life" is a strong good, in my own opinion! And any attempt like that which fails is just "business as usual," and at least you tried to better your lot. Sure you end up hating life, but you were *already there.*. So maybe you still think it's unfair, but that's why I've allocated it that way.
Also on the 5% negative side, some people are neurotic or tightly wound enough that not being in full control or not being in their usual patterns feels really bad for them. That also contributes. In the limits, they can full blown trauma spiral or have a panic attack and descend into a bad trip for the rest of it, and that's the 0.5% in my schema. In the absolute limits, maybe 0.1% of the 0.5% is something like kicking people prone to schizophrenia into worse states, and on that front, yes, if you have a familial history or are at risk in any way, the downside is big enough you should just avoid psychedelics. But for everyone else, I think there's a lot of lift to be had.
Okay, so that's my pitch. Basically there's a large chance you'll at least enjoy it and experience something novel, a very decent chance of materially positively affecting your life, with Lindy use cases along those lines extending back thousands of years, and a relatively small chance of negativity or bad outcomes.
Who SHOULD do psychedelics? People pondering a big life change, people who aren't sure that what they're doing in life is fully aligned with their values, people who think there must be some better way of being or living and aren't sure what to do to get there. Also people who are interested in self-exploration or self-editing, or getting really into some particular math or philosophy problem.
Who should NOT do psychedelics? People who are fully happy with their lives, anyone with schizophrenia family history or risk, and really tightly wound neurotic types.
But it's not just me, I (inevitably) come with data. In our specific segment, ie people on SSC surveys and on r/nootropics, microdosing LSD or shrooms was roughly ~20% life changingly positive, with relatively large N!
https://www.jeravalue.com/en/life-changing
Why might this be?
My personal thesis is it has to do with that weight leveling and outside view stuff. Microdosing gets you a small portion of that, while still allowing you to function in daily life. It achieves a better neuroplasticity, in other words, and allows you to consciously change weights and priors and habits if that's something you're aiming for. Psychedelics above all, are a tool par excellence for self-understanding AND self-editing.
Cutting this here because it's already too long for most people to read, but feel free to DM me if anyone reading this wants to hear more.
Stanley kubrick on LSD: "One of the things that's turned me against LSD is that all the people I know who use it have a peculiar inability to distinguish between things that are really interesting and stimulating and things that appear so in the state of universal bliss the drug induces on a "good" trip. "
*Psychedelics
Also you ought to listen to Sam Harris' 'Drugs and the Meaning of Life' if you have not already. Basically their principle utility, for sensible people, is in wavering several cognitive illusions (including the self illusion - from what I can gather you already recognise this as an illusion).
Your point about anecdotes is correct - multiple anecdotes aren't data. But there is empirical data on their therapeutic benefit, and also on how they change personality (principally increased openness).
My experience with LSD tells me that it's main effects come about from magnifying your internal world. It also does other things, like analysis suppression and enhancing the ability to see analogies, removing habits! (very major effect) and weird quirks with your mental faculties - extremely vivid imagination and inducing emotions which you haven't felt in a decade or more.
What seems to be happening with people who praise psychedelics is IMO they noticed some pattern of how their mind works and assumed that they now have control over it or have overcame it. This was my experience. Sure, it informs you of things you'd never be able to know without it, but this information doesn't affect your personality in any significant way. Around two weeks or so after the trip you will go back to your old personality.
The removal of habits i mentioned is at it's peak during the peak of the actual trip, where very core habits of your mind get removed, like your entire personality, memory, etc. (all of which ive experienced and can confirm). After this peak and as the drug leaves your system you start to regain your habits. I believe the reason people panic on psychs and have bad trips is because removing your habits also removes coping mechanisms or thinking patterns you'd usually use to overcome negative emotions.
It can also be negative, as in its totally possible to experience such negative emotions during a trip that you've now unlocked knowledge which you otherwise never would've dreamed of. After a bad trip, i now know that there are levels of suffering possible which exceed anything ive ever experienced in my regular life. This knowledge is now haunting me whenever i do MDMA or ketamine, because i know its at least possible to experience this, and the paranoia this produces is insane.
I hope this ramble will be useful to you in some way. I believe im somewhat of an outlier when it comes to psych usage, since my thoughts on the whole thing are much more grounded and dont try to involve anything spiritual (i believe spiritual "insights" on lsd are people's projections of the values which sit at the top of their own hierarchy, which becomes easier to see on LSD). If you ever use them, i believe the major effect will just be your system of values and beliefs becoming more internally coherent.
Run some trials! This is what experiments are for, we don't have to rely on priors.
Sebastian makes a good argument against psychedelics. People are likely to overreport positive experiences, and underreport negative experiences. One could call this the “evangelist effect.”
It's interesting, because my experience was basically the opposite of what you'd expect. Not remotely fun, I had some minor visual disturbances but nothing that could be called a hallucination, and I didn't experience anything meaningful, it was more like an absence of the entire concept of meaning. Everything I'd experienced in my life up to that point and everything I might experience in the future became completely empty of any significance or emotional weight whatsoever. Even maintaining an image of myself as a cohesive individual became difficult. It was, figuratively speaking, exactly as if my personality and all my feelings about the world were a glove that I'd always mistaken for my own hand, and suddenly I could take it off, and when I tried it to put it back on it didn't quite fit. Maybe there never was a hand underneath.
I do think that, as unsettling as the whole experience was, it may have been beneficial. When I was younger I had a bit of what they call main character syndrome, or, to be a little clinical, maybe some variety of autistic or schizoid narcissism, and going through such a miserable form of ego death may have mitigated that. At the very least it gave me a much deeper appreciation of certain philosophical concepts.
Also worth mentioning that there was a family of four brothers I spent a lot of time with when I was young. They took their experiments a lot further than I took mine. Last I checked, three of the four, or maybe four of the four, were straight up schizophrenic. There was definitely a strong genetic factor at play for them, but still, I doubt our lifestyle in those days did them any favors.
That's not quite what the study found with respect to abuse though is it? Forgive me, I'm an academic lay person so I downloaded the paper and asked ChatGPT to tell me what it means. In any event, it seemed to suggest that the important distinction was that the subjective experience of abuse was more predictive of later psychopathology than the objective facts of the abuse itself.
So, as I understand it, [objective abuse] + [subjective evaluation of abuse as bad thing] = [later psychopathology].
(I should add that I'm not simply a disinterested reader, but an Australian lawyer practicing in personal injury. A finding such as what you described would be fairly harmful to my profession, but it seems the actual paper was more circumspect. Even so, I'd be interested to know the truth of the matter, just how strong is the link between abuse and later psychological injury.)