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Magic mushrooms deemed ‘safest’ recreational drug by annual study

Magic mushrooms are the safest of all recreational drugs, according to this year's Global Drug Survey.

More than 12,000 people reported taking hallucinogenic mushrooms in 2016; of those people, only 0.2% of them said they needed emergency medical treatment - a rate at least five times lower than that for MDMA, LSD and cocaine.

Adam Winstock, a consultant addiction psychiatrist and founder of the Global Drug Survey, tells the Guardian that mushrooms aren't completely harmless.  They can be risky and cause panic attacks or confusion.

But Winstock also calls mushrooms “one of the safest drugs in the world,” noting that the bigger risk was people picking and eating the wrong mushrooms.

“Death from toxicity is almost unheard of with poisoning with more dangerous fungi being a much greater risk in terms of serious harms.”

Winstock says some people can experience panic attacks and flashbacks, so his advice to people taking them is to plan “your trip carefully with trusted company in a safe place and always know what mushrooms you are using.”

Global Drug Survey 2017, with almost 120,000 participants in 50 countries, is the world’s biggest annual drug survey, with questions that cover the types of substances people take, patterns of use and whether they experienced any negative effects.

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