• LemmynySnicket@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    I was looking up psilocybin and was surprised to see the mean fatal dose for a bunch of lab animals. Didn’t bother equating it to humans, but I was surprised.

    • xantoxis@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Erm, it’s really truly not that dangerous.

      Let’s start with this chart (colorful chart near the top). The yellow-green bar on the right is cubensis, the most common shroom. 0.6% by weight. A typical dose of shrooms is gonna run about 0.5g to 2g, meaning a typical shrooms trip hits you with up to 12mg psilocybin. A shroom is roughly half a gram, maybe a whole gram, let’s just use 1g shrooms for simplicity–6mg of drug mass in that shroom.

      LD50 for psilocybin is 280mg/kg. This is how LD50 is always measured–amount of drug (in mass units) per kg of body weight, in order to reach a 50% likelihood of fatal symptoms resulting in death.

      Now, the average adult weight is somewhere in the 50-100kg range. Let’s take someone on the lighter end at 50kg. How many shrooms would our dainty psychonaut have to take to have a chance of dying? The math is simple: 280 * 50 / 6 gives us (LD50 * shroom count) for a grand total of: 233 largish shrooms, taken rapidly, to have a chance of dying from it. Now, you could refine it and pack that much of the drug into a much smaller dose than 233 shrooms, but we’re getting into silliness at this point.

      Basically, don’t take hundreds of shrooms at once and you’ll be aight.