Before anyone considers self-experimenting with 5-MeO-DMT, remember that survivorship bias is a major factor in online psychedelic reporting right now. You should not make treatment decisions based on articles like this one recounting Mike Tyson's psychedelic trips as told to podcast host Joe Rogan for the sake of entertaining their audience.

Psychedelics are no doubt an interesting area of research and potentially very powerful agents in the context of comprehensive, professionally-guided treatment strategies. However, it's important for everyone to acknowledge that these powerful drugs are not guaranteed to produce unilaterally positive changes in all people who use them. Ordering some psilocybin, LSD, or 5-MeO-DMT off of the darknet and dosing yourself in your home is a completely different experience than the MAPS style treatment protocols, which involve many intense sessions of pre-trip preparation, active guidance by professionals during the trip, and multiple post-session therapy sessions for integration and monitoring. It's a mistake to assume you can replicate these procedures by yourself, alone, with questionable substances purchased on the darknet.

I've also noticed that internet comment sections are actively hostile to any negative experience reports from psychedelics. Whenever psychedelic research related topics hit the front page of Reddit, it's fascinating to read the variety of anecdotal experience reports in the comments. They range from glowing endorsements of life-changing positivity like this article, to horror stories of multi-year depressive or psychotic episodes that were difficult to recover from. However, the negative anecdotes tend to be so aggressively downvoted that you can't see them unless you switch to "Controversial" sorting some times. Worse yet, the negative anecdotes draw attacks and victim-blaming from people who don't want to believe that psychedelics can be harmful.

It's common to dismiss the negative reports as failures of "set and setting" or "latent pre-existing conditions", but the truth is that the outcomes of these substances are very unpredictable. Everyone assumes that their own experience will be positive, or that their preparation and research will save them, but that's not always the case.

I've even witnessed positive psychedelic outcomes turn dark as people become fixated on their tripping experiences. In psychedelic research the drugs are a part of the therapy. A means to an end. However, I've seen more than a few casual psychedelic users put too much weight into their hallucinations, or become fixated with the false belief that they are just one or two more trips away from a major breakthrough. Or they think enlightenment will come if they just double the dose next time. Or they become obsessed with trying the next research chemical or trendy mushroom strain. Or their first response to every difficult situation in life is to reach for psychedelic drugs.

Fascinating topic, but I urge everyone to please watch from a distance rather than self-experiment. If you have serious medical conditions, please engage with professionals for a monitored treatment strategy. If you absolutely must have your fix of psychedelic medicine, you can always engage with a ketamine treatment facility.