My partner had a really bad trip. He hallucinated that a dear friend who was with him at the time, was a terrorist who was trying to kill him, and in a delusion brought on by an interaction between his mental illness and the magic mushrooms, he shot and killed her.

Now he's in prison for manslaughter.

Bad trips are real. Be glad you've never had one.

And by the way, this is NOT propaganda. This is my life. This is my partner's life. This is my friend's death.

I am NOT anti-psychedelic by the way. I have taken LSD and mushrooms before (and I'll likely take LSD again), and I even wrote about how LSD helped trigger an "ego death" that helped cure my eating disorder.

But this kind of rhetoric that "there are no bad trips, psychedelics are completely safe, there is no danger" is false. Yes the government overstated the risks of psychedelics to the average person. But for some people, especially people with existing mental illness (the sort of people who want to self medicate with psychedelics) - it IS a risk.