Can Psychedelics Cause Overdose? | Are Psychedelics Physically Dangerous?
Channel: Real Talk Philosophy
Date: 2021-07-20

--Transcript--
In 1974, 8 people snorted inordinate amounts of LSD, after mistaking it for cocaine. They developed comatose states, hyperthermia, vomiting, gastric bleeding, and respiratory problems. But they all survived with hospitalization.

Many of the reports of serious harmful effects of taking psychedelics are from case reports rather than during controlled studies. There have been two cases of reported deaths caused by psilocybin overdose, but researchers argue that there’s too little information to rule-out cross-contamination.

There have also been some case studies where people thought they had taken a psychedelic, such as LSD, but had actually taken a different drug. For example, a married couple took what they thought was LSD, leading to the wife’s death. The media blamed the death on LSD, but the autopsy revealed that they had actually taken 25b-NBOMe.

As far as researchers have been able to confirm, there are no known deaths due to overdose from LSD, psilocybin, or mescaline. 

Now, psychedelic-related deaths from car accidents and other reckless behavior do sometimes occur. 

We can compare this to alcohol-related deaths, which toll 3 million a year. And every year there are 350,000 opioid-related deaths. 

Researchers have recorded psilocybin lethal overdose in rats.  They extrapolated this rat lethal overdose, and calculated that for a 60 kg (130 lb) human, the lethal overdose would likely be 1.7 kg (or 3.7 lb) of dried mushrooms, which is 17 kg (or 37 lb) of fresh mushrooms.  The Lethal dose of pure psilocybin has been extrapolated to be 6g, 1000x the effective dose of 6mg. 

Several researchers indicate that the major harm from mis-identification of mushrooms, as there are many poisonous species of mushroom. The number of deaths from this, though, is unknown. 

Now, with LSD - the fatal dose is 1000x larger than the effective dose. Compared to Heroin whoes fatal dose is only 5 times the effective dose. Hence,it is virtually impossible to overdose on LSD. (Gable, 2004)

There has been one recorded LSD overdose. This was Tusko, a male Indian elephant at the Oklahoma City Zoo. 
On August 3, 1962
researchers from the University of Oklahoma injected Tusko with 297 mg of LSD. This is nearly three thousand times the human recreational dose. 
Within 5 minutes, Tusko collapsed to the ground. 
1hr 45min later, Tusko died. 
But it is disputed whether it was the LSD that killed Tusko or the tranquilizer they administered to keep him sedated through the experience. 


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