How do you know if a drug is not toxic?

[aftertheflood]

I sent this to Ask Erowid about a year ago and never got a reply, so I figured I'd post it on here.

My question is:
What is considered adequate research on a drug to ensure its lack of toxicity? There are over 1000 studies on LSD. People say it isn't neurotoxic, but which studies prove that?

Dr. Shulgin apparently said that 2c-b is doubtfully neurotoxic because of it's pharmacology. Is it safe to make assumptions based on pharmacology? Would it be safe to say that psychedelic phenethylamines as a class aren't neurotoxic? What about the case of mephedrone? Most bath salts are said to be neurotoxic, but mephedrone is an exception.

How can we know for sure that a drug is not toxic in some way?

 

[ebola?]

Honestly, you can never be sure whether a drug lacks toxicity entirely. Animal experimentation can yield not only data on lethality, but postmortem neurobiopsy can show cellular death and other structural abnormalities. But beyond that, for the most part, you have to be working with a specific hypothesis about the type of toxicity that you expect to observe and then use specialized techniques that will reveal that type of toxicity (but few if any others). And later, after the use of a particular drug is well-established in humans, you can look at epidemiological data from users to look for statistical trends in health outcomes.

ebola

 

[Seppi]

I sent this to Ask Erowid about a year ago and never got a reply, so I figured I'd post it on here.

My question is:
What is considered adequate research on a drug to ensure its lack of toxicity? There are over 1000 studies on LSD. People say it isn't neurotoxic, but which studies prove that?

Dr. Shulgin apparently said that 2c-b is doubtfully neurotoxic because of it's pharmacology. Is it safe to make assumptions based on pharmacology? Would it be safe to say that psychedelic phenethylamines as a class aren't neurotoxic? What about the case of mephedrone? Most bath salts are said to be neurotoxic, but mephedrone is an exception.

How can we know for sure that a drug is not toxic in some way?

Well...technically everything is toxic. Toxicity is an imprecise term.

 

[aftertheflood]

Well...technically everything is toxic. Toxicity is an imprecise term.

The definition I found for toxicity is that it "is the degree to which a substance can damage an organism." Given that this is a valid definition, are you saying that every substance is damaging in some way? Because I've found quite the opposite with psychedelics. Or are you defining toxicity a different way?

 

[SeenSoFar]

The definition I found for toxicity is that it "is the degree to which a substance can damage an organism." Given that this is a valid definition, are you saying that every substance is damaging in some way? Because I've found quite the opposite with psychedelics. Or are you defining toxicity a different way?

He's referring to the fact that anything becomes poison if enough is ingested. Psychedelics have a high therapeutic index, which is to say that the difference between a dose that gives the effects you want and a dose that causes damage to the ingesting organism is quite great, but even with LSD, widely regarded as the safest psychedelic, if you take enough, eventually injury or death will result.

I think what you're trying to ask is: how does one determine if any given drug is non-toxic AT THERPEUTIC DOSES, and the answer to that is through long and careful research. For example, to determine if a drug is a serotonergic neurotoxin, an animal's serotonergic neuron density can be measured, then the animal can be dosed (either acutely or chronically) with the compound under investigation, then the density of serotonergic neurons is checked again. If there is a statistically significant decrease, and the results are consistently repeatable, this could indicate that the compound is a serotonergic neurotoxin.

Hope that helps!

 

[aftertheflood]

Hope that helps!

It absolutely does. Thank you!