P.S. Is there a correlation between recreational experimentation with substances and the openness to Bitcorns, or are those substances just more wide spread these days due to pop media references and documentaries?
I'd imagine there's a significant overlap between people open minded enough to use psychedelics and people crazy enough to get into bitcorn.
In my younger and more vulnerable years I tried many psychedelic substances.
I for one would never, ever touch anything of that nature. I've known quite a few people who set off on a trip and never really came back.
It's one thing to blow your tits off with amphetamines, it's quite another to start meddling with your infinitely delicate brain chemistry.
Did they have any prior conditions? Did they mix the substances with something else? What exactly did they take?
Generally, LSD, Psilocybin, DMT and Mescaline are among the most safe substances that you could ever ingest, even when compared to alcohol and tobacco.
However, there are substances that are being sold off as LSD and whatnot that are quite something else. They have similar effects, but can actually be lethal or otherwise problematic. In the 60s a substance called DOM was sold off as LSD. However, it took far longer for its onset, so people took more thinking it was a dud. It also lasted much longer than LSD and didn't really have an "upper ceiling" (LSD stops within 12ish to 24 hours regardless of dosage), DOM on the other hand lasts longer the more you take. 10mg lasts for upwards of 30 hours nonstop, and people took 20 to 40mg of it (because idiots put 20mg on a blotter while 5mg was already a pretty heavy dose) and then got hospitalized.
Then there's other stuff that can literally kill you if you take just a little bit too much, which also gets sold off as LSD.
But when it comes to "classic" psychedelics, they're as safe as it gets.
If you wanted to overdose on mushroom (lethal dose) you'd have to ingest about 5 kilograms of fungal matter. And you would die way before the substance could kill you just by the sheer amount of matter that you'd be ingesting to get anywhere close. Heck, you'd be tripping so hard that you wouldn't even be capable of eating any more to get to a point where you could die, be it from the substance itself or the amount of "food".
So other than taking the wrong substance without realizing it and overdosing, the only potential issues are mixing substances with problematic interactions, or already being mentally unstable and then tripping in a bad environment at a bad time.
These substances aren't toys and it's important to be mentally at ease before, during and for a day or two after the event. They're also quite powerful tools though, and there's quite a body of successful research going on into treating depression, PTSD, addictions (tobacco, opiates, alcohol), anxiety and the like right now. The only reason this research isn't further than it is right now is because of the classification as Schedule I thanks to Murrica's political games a few decades ago.