How Safe Are Psychotherapeutics?

Psychotherapeutics like psilocybin, MDMA, mescaline, ayahuasca, and LSD are all classified as Schedule I substances. This classification is reserved for “drugs with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” Not surprisingly, heavier penalties for Schedule I drugs are justified on the basis that they are purportedly more dangerous than a Schedule III or IV drug. 

But are psychotherapeutics deserving of this dangerous reputation? 

Not really.

One way to determine how dangerous a substance is, is to look at its safety ratio. A safety ratio is calculated by comparing an effective dose, the amount someone would use recreationally or medically, to a lethal dose, the amount it takes to kill. 

Not surprisingly, heroin has a very low ratio of six, meaning it’s pretty easy to accidentally overdose. Cocaine, which has been classified as a Schedule II drug, has a safety ratio of fifteen. Both have earned their reputation for being deadly. 

Psychotherapeutics, by contrast, have much better safety ratios. DMT, the active ingredient in ayahuasca, has a safety ratio of fifty. LSD has an impressive safety ratio of one thousand as does psilocybin, for which there has never been a confirmed deadly overdose. 

More startling than how safe psychotherapeutics are, is how dangerous commonplace substances are. Alcohol, the mostly widely-used psychoactive substance, has a safety ratio of just ten. It is therefore not surprising that when a group of experts assigned numerical scores to drugs based on their harm to both the user and society, alcohol was the most damaging (72 on a 1-100 scale) and psychotherapeutics were the least (psilocybin scored just 6). 

Drug policy, like all policy, should be based on facts. In this case, the facts show that psychotherapeutics are safer and less harmful than alcohol and not deserving of their Schedule I classification. 

For more facts on psychotherapeutics, refer to the tables below.