That anyone even entertains the notion that alcohol isn't significantly more dangerous than psilocybin demonstrates how extremely miguided the public is about the subject.I could be wrong, but as I understand it, they're different categories of danger altogether. Alcohol can kill you. Psilocybin can't, but it is at least possible that it can lead to mental illness. Although the probability of psilocybin leading to lifelong psychosis seems to be astronomically low, that's a fate I'd easily mark as 10 times worse than early death... so there's more downside to the psychedelics. At least with psychedelics, the risks are more subjective and much more poorly understood.
Ever have a terrifyingly bad trip? Or a panic attack? If the answer to both is no, and you haven't been to war (I haven't), you have no idea of the depths of negative human experience, nor of post-event fallout. Having suffered from panic attacks and endured bad trips, I'd be terrified to go anywhere near even a 1 in 1 million chance of lifelong mental illness, even though I take that risk of death every day just by being alive.
I don't know what the probability of having a psychotic break on shrooms is. I bet it's low, but it seems to happen. The open question is whether these psychological events were "waiting in the wings" so to speak. It has been argued that the people having these problems were doomed to have them anyway, and that the drugs merely sped them along, but the jury seems to still be out on that one.
With alcohol, we have an extremely dangerous drug but we know what the dangers are, and we're generally pretty good at dosage control (which we have to be, since the ratio between a fatal dose and the average recreational dose is so low). When I buy a beer, I know how much alcohol I'm getting and can control the dosage.
In cultures that use psychedelics for religious purposes, there's no increased risk of mental illness for users of the substances, which leads me to believe that the substances themselves are actually pretty safe, but we're talking about people who have been using the substances responsibly for decades. It's difficult to use them in our context so pristinely-- the supply comes from an illegal scumbag market that provides unreliable goods, dosage is erratic, users are generally uneducated about what they're doing and have psychological hangups (I believe that guilt/fear about using drugs is one of the causes of bad trips).
It's also interesting that many people can't help but view this issue through the prism of their own cultural biases, stereotypes and anecdotes.
Look: I've actually used these drugs, and I know that for many people, they're provide wonderful experiences. I've had a few great experiences on them, even though I don't use them now and probably never will.
The people I'm talking about are the party types who are using these drugs all the time, to the point that drugs are the only things in their lives. That's what I mean by "acidhead", "e-tard", etc. and that's a terrible road to go down. I'm not talking about the person who uses acid a couple times per year or even a couple times per month. I'm talking about the people who use them so intensely and frequently that they start organizing their lives around drugs instead of the other way around. (I highly doubt that you're in this category, seeing as you post on HN.)