Matthew Perry’s Cause of Death Revealed as ‘Acute Effects of Ketamine’

ZeroCool@feddit.ch to News@lemmy.world – 460 points –
Matthew Perry’s Cause of Death Revealed as ‘Acute Effects of Ketamine’
variety.com
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You can die drinking too much water too fast, most drugs can easily kill you.

I was looking up psilocybin and was surprised to see the mean fatal dose for a bunch of lab animals. Didn't bother equating it to humans, but I was surprised.

Jesus christ, scientists. Tripping a lab rat to death? fuck

Maybe they attained enlightenment and left their bodies behind.

Eventually, yeah. Enlightenment is the inevitable result of a trip to hell.

Erm, it's really truly not that dangerous.

Let's start with this chart (colorful chart near the top). The yellow-green bar on the right is cubensis, the most common shroom. 0.6% by weight. A typical dose of shrooms is gonna run about 0.5g to 2g, meaning a typical shrooms trip hits you with up to 12mg psilocybin. A shroom is roughly half a gram, maybe a whole gram, let's just use 1g shrooms for simplicity--6mg of drug mass in that shroom.

LD50 for psilocybin is 280mg/kg. This is how LD50 is always measured--amount of drug (in mass units) per kg of body weight, in order to reach a 50% likelihood of fatal symptoms resulting in death.

Now, the average adult weight is somewhere in the 50-100kg range. Let's take someone on the lighter end at 50kg. How many shrooms would our dainty psychonaut have to take to have a chance of dying? The math is simple: 280 * 50 / 6 gives us (LD50 * shroom count) for a grand total of: 233 largish shrooms, taken rapidly, to have a chance of dying from it. Now, you could refine it and pack that much of the drug into a much smaller dose than 233 shrooms, but we're getting into silliness at this point.

Basically, don't take hundreds of shrooms at once and you'll be aight.

The math is simple: 280 * 50 / 6 gives us (LD50 * shroom count) for a grand total of: 233 largish shrooms, taken rapidly, to have a chance of dying from it

You mean to get to the point where you have a 50% chance if dying from it. You still have a chance (<50%) of doing from it at much lower doses.

it is actually really hard for ketamine to kill you, that is why it was used as anaesthetic in combat medicine, because it is safe to be administered by untrained staff. but it is really important not to anaesthetize yourself in the pool :(.