alt Hacker NewsCouldn’t you get consent from the participants to consume hallucinogenic substances but also getting them to agree that there will be a number of trials and they won’t know which one if any of them will actually contain it?
So instead of a single experiment where half of the people get it and half don’t, the experiment will be repeated ten times with the same people over a few months, different meals each time and in total each person will get hallucinogens in their food either zero or one times.
And then you see what effects people report and if that correlates well with who was actually given the hallucinogens, and if there is a lot of placebo among the rest of the people each time that they were not given hallucinogens.
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What if the hallucinogen has long term health effects? What if tiny people show up for a participant years from the experiment, while driving?
I guess you can be upfront about unknown unknowns, and most human experiments have some of those, but I assume there are standards to keep those to a minimum.
1. The main problem I imagine is not consent but ethics approval. You are probably gonna find some experienced psychonauts curious enough to want to try, but getting it approved by an ethics committee I imagine being tricky.
2. Multiple times per person over months risks attrition which gonna mess it up, and the statistical power increase you get could be offset by that (eg if a person gets it they may not be motivated to come again for the placebo). On the other hand ppl may be more motivated if they know they are gonna get it at least once so dunno.
3. Placebo with hallucinogens is always tricky. I would use psilocybin as (extra or only) control, esp if you test for little ppl. This way you can test if they report more tiny ppl in the new mushroom vs psilocybin.