Greetings Dopemeisters,
I’ve been doing a lot of reading into that magic mushroom lately, shrooms, and trying to persuade my friend that it is a safe drug, according to my research, although it seems like a fairly unresearched drug. Does anyone have any hardcore statistics of the annual death rate of shrooms, it’s effects on the brain, and maybe long term side-effects. I’ve really exhausted google and my other primary sources of information, but maybe you guys can come up with some better.
Though this board is usually happy to answer factual questions, any which directly cause or could directly cause persons to engage in illegal activity is “frowned upon.” Just some advice.
But places like Erowid usually have comprehensive data, complete with citations.
The problem with mushrooms is at least two-fold. One is the difficulty that exists in distinguishing these mushrooms from visually similar but very poisonous counterparts. The second is that they are a hallucinogen, and hallucinogens have historically been shown to have a possibility of creating states of extreme anxiety and panic in their users, among other unfavorable mental states. The relative likelihood of these states is never really examined in any data I have ever seen, and anecdotal evidence from users will frequently comment that first-timers need to be babysat by a more experienced user to guide them through the process. And all users either have known people who have had, or have had themselves, bad trips, which are the states of extreme anxiety or panic, from hallucinogens.
The LD50 of psilocybin is about 250 mg/kg. In order for 50 out of 100 100kg persons to die from eating mushrooms, each would have to ingest approximately 4000 grams of mushrooms (which have an average psilocybin content of .63%). So you are probably not going to die from overdose 
That’s over 8 pounds of the critters! (I almost want to throw up thinking about it)
As such, mushrooms are probably a relatively harmless, non-addictive drug which is nonetheless capable of creating harmful or unpleasant mental states (the likeliness of which, as I’ve stated, has never to my knowledge been put on an empirical framework).
And need I mention that they are illegal and taste like shit.
Information is legal, the mushrooms are not. I provide information in the hope it will be useful, and to counter myths from both sides of the debate.