(I don’t think this answer contains much in the way of new information, but it seems like there’s some value in providing a bit more evidence about the LW consensus on this stuff, to whatever extent there is one.)
“Drugs” covers a lot of things with wildly different effects and side-effects. “Drugs are bad” is the sort of statement that one should expect to be an oversimplification. (Unless the badness in question follows from the thing that “drugs” in this sense all have in common, namely that they are illegal. But I think you mean “harmful” rather than “likely to get you into trouble with the police”.)
Having said that, things don’t generally get made illegal without some justification and I’d be very cautious about taking any illegal drug even if I knew for certain that I would never get in any legal trouble for it, and I think your son should be being much more cautious than it sounds like he’s being.
(There is a well known failure mode of “advanced rationality”, where you learn clever ways of rationalizing things faster than you learn actually arriving at correct opinions. It seems possible that some of this has happened to your son.)
On some of the specific drugs, and claims about drugs, here:
I think your son is right that there’s not much evidence of substantial long-term harm from LSD. But given how dramatic its short-term effects are, and given that it’s difficult to study precisely because it’s an illegal drug, I am (1) not very confident that we would have good evidence of long-term harm if it were there and (2) not very confident that we shouldn’t expect long-term harm.
Also, there is some evidence that sometimes drugs like LSD have some adverse long-term consequences. Your son might want to take a look at Scott Alexander’s HPPD and the specter of permanent side effects.
No no no no no, your son should not be trying to synthesize LSD himself if he wants to try it and has trouble buying it. No no no. Bad idea. Do not do this. I really hope he was joking.
Psychedelics and amphetamines are relatively low-risk. But I wouldn’t want to be taking either without medical advice, and if I were 15 I would want to be extra-careful because (1) it seems possibly that actively-developing brains are easier to mess up and (2) 15 is still a bit younger than fully-grown-adult and available advice on dosing etc. might be inappropriate. Psychedelics are unlikely to do much long-term harm (but, again, see Scott Alexander’s post linked above) but their short-term effects can be really dramatic. Amphetamines can be addictive, and you need to be careful about their cardiovascular effects.
The correct response to “amphetamines and LSD don’t seem any worse than coffee and alcohol” is “actually, alcohol is pretty bad and if it were a new discovery it would probably be illegal and that would plausibly be a good decision”.
Heroin is really addictive and so far as I can tell what usually happens if you take heroin is: initially it feels really amazing, but quite quickly you need larger and larger amounts but the craving to take it doesn’t go away even when the euphoria does, and unless you get quite lucky you probably end up hopelessly addicted, not enjoying your life much, and getting into trouble because e.g. you are stealing to fund your habit. If it really did “provide proportionally more even if for a shorter amount of time” there would be an argument to be had, but I think usually it provides proportionally less for a shorter amount of time.
Also, unless you are quite sure that the only value your life has is the balance of your own pleasure and pain within it, note that if you take heroin, somehow manage to keep having the same highs as at the start, and somehow manage not to need to take so much of it so often that the constant need to procure more heroin takes over your life, and do in fact manage to have it increase the amount of pleasure in your life by a bigger ratio than it shortens your life by—it still isn’t doing anything to help, and is probably harming, the other things in your life that might have value. Were you hoping to achieve things? To learn things? To get rich? To make friends? To find love? To raise children? To help people who are worse off? (Etc.) Not one of those things will happen more successfully on heroin, and even in the overoptimistically favourable scenario we’re imagining here they will probably all happen less successfully on heroin.
If your son experiments with drugs as cautiously and meticulously as gwern does, then perhaps he’ll do himself no harm in the process. But he probably won’t be as cautious and meticulous as gwern; gwern is a very unusual person and most people do not have his personality or his skills. (And, e.g., someone who says “eh, if I can’t get my hands on LSD I’ll just synthesize it myself” without being a skilled professional chemist … is almost certainly not that sort of cautious and meticulous person.)
I think “wait until he’s old enough to make these decisions for himself” is not a bad place to have ended up for the moment. Some of what you report your son as saying sounds pretty immature and waiting a couple of years may indeed fix that and make it less likely that he will do dangerous things.
Just to follow on, there are a few reasons not to synthesize drugs.
One is that there is a state security apparatus monitoring what people buy, both in terms of equipment and chemicals. Your son will get caught and very possibly go to jail. That also will affect his future life prospects—for example, if he wants to work in a research lab with controlled substances, the federal government will background check him and this would not look good.
The other is that if he’s successful, he will suddenly have a very large quantity of powerful narcotics on hand. If anyone finds out, that makes him and your family targets for criminals as well as the federal government.
Finally, the synthesis for LSD is really long and complicated. I don’t know which steps are dangerous, but probably a bunch of them. And if successful, then it would be really easy to, say, contaminate the house with LSD.
(I don’t think this answer contains much in the way of new information, but it seems like there’s some value in providing a bit more evidence about the LW consensus on this stuff, to whatever extent there is one.)
“Drugs” covers a lot of things with wildly different effects and side-effects. “Drugs are bad” is the sort of statement that one should expect to be an oversimplification. (Unless the badness in question follows from the thing that “drugs” in this sense all have in common, namely that they are illegal. But I think you mean “harmful” rather than “likely to get you into trouble with the police”.)
Having said that, things don’t generally get made illegal without some justification and I’d be very cautious about taking any illegal drug even if I knew for certain that I would never get in any legal trouble for it, and I think your son should be being much more cautious than it sounds like he’s being.
(There is a well known failure mode of “advanced rationality”, where you learn clever ways of rationalizing things faster than you learn actually arriving at correct opinions. It seems possible that some of this has happened to your son.)
On some of the specific drugs, and claims about drugs, here:
I think your son is right that there’s not much evidence of substantial long-term harm from LSD. But given how dramatic its short-term effects are, and given that it’s difficult to study precisely because it’s an illegal drug, I am (1) not very confident that we would have good evidence of long-term harm if it were there and (2) not very confident that we shouldn’t expect long-term harm.
Also, there is some evidence that sometimes drugs like LSD have some adverse long-term consequences. Your son might want to take a look at Scott Alexander’s HPPD and the specter of permanent side effects.
No no no no no, your son should not be trying to synthesize LSD himself if he wants to try it and has trouble buying it. No no no. Bad idea. Do not do this. I really hope he was joking.
Psychedelics and amphetamines are relatively low-risk. But I wouldn’t want to be taking either without medical advice, and if I were 15 I would want to be extra-careful because (1) it seems possibly that actively-developing brains are easier to mess up and (2) 15 is still a bit younger than fully-grown-adult and available advice on dosing etc. might be inappropriate. Psychedelics are unlikely to do much long-term harm (but, again, see Scott Alexander’s post linked above) but their short-term effects can be really dramatic. Amphetamines can be addictive, and you need to be careful about their cardiovascular effects.
The correct response to “amphetamines and LSD don’t seem any worse than coffee and alcohol” is “actually, alcohol is pretty bad and if it were a new discovery it would probably be illegal and that would plausibly be a good decision”.
Heroin is really addictive and so far as I can tell what usually happens if you take heroin is: initially it feels really amazing, but quite quickly you need larger and larger amounts but the craving to take it doesn’t go away even when the euphoria does, and unless you get quite lucky you probably end up hopelessly addicted, not enjoying your life much, and getting into trouble because e.g. you are stealing to fund your habit. If it really did “provide proportionally more even if for a shorter amount of time” there would be an argument to be had, but I think usually it provides proportionally less for a shorter amount of time.
Also, unless you are quite sure that the only value your life has is the balance of your own pleasure and pain within it, note that if you take heroin, somehow manage to keep having the same highs as at the start, and somehow manage not to need to take so much of it so often that the constant need to procure more heroin takes over your life, and do in fact manage to have it increase the amount of pleasure in your life by a bigger ratio than it shortens your life by—it still isn’t doing anything to help, and is probably harming, the other things in your life that might have value. Were you hoping to achieve things? To learn things? To get rich? To make friends? To find love? To raise children? To help people who are worse off? (Etc.) Not one of those things will happen more successfully on heroin, and even in the overoptimistically favourable scenario we’re imagining here they will probably all happen less successfully on heroin.
If your son experiments with drugs as cautiously and meticulously as gwern does, then perhaps he’ll do himself no harm in the process. But he probably won’t be as cautious and meticulous as gwern; gwern is a very unusual person and most people do not have his personality or his skills. (And, e.g., someone who says “eh, if I can’t get my hands on LSD I’ll just synthesize it myself” without being a skilled professional chemist … is almost certainly not that sort of cautious and meticulous person.)
I think “wait until he’s old enough to make these decisions for himself” is not a bad place to have ended up for the moment. Some of what you report your son as saying sounds pretty immature and waiting a couple of years may indeed fix that and make it less likely that he will do dangerous things.
Just to follow on, there are a few reasons not to synthesize drugs.
One is that there is a state security apparatus monitoring what people buy, both in terms of equipment and chemicals. Your son will get caught and very possibly go to jail. That also will affect his future life prospects—for example, if he wants to work in a research lab with controlled substances, the federal government will background check him and this would not look good.
The other is that if he’s successful, he will suddenly have a very large quantity of powerful narcotics on hand. If anyone finds out, that makes him and your family targets for criminals as well as the federal government.
Finally, the synthesis for LSD is really long and complicated. I don’t know which steps are dangerous, but probably a bunch of them. And if successful, then it would be really easy to, say, contaminate the house with LSD.
I’d like to add that Adderall isn’t just potentially addictive. It has other risks too, even under careful medically-supervised use. Over-use of Adderall (which is more common in non-medically-supervised use) can cause delusions and paranoia.