The tricky thing about psychedelics is that they have been described as delivering the "placebo effect on steroids". That is to say, the set and setting prior to ingestion directly effects outcomes, so if you want to maximize your chance of seeing some consistent results, you would want to prime people with certain expectations and knowledge prior to them taking the psychedelic. If you were to control it against an active placebo (people often use an amphetamine), the participants would be able to deduce they aren't actually taking a psychedelic.
I like to call it psilo-cebo for mushrooms, or psyche-cebo in general.
The approach should be to use different types of psychoactive drugs to multiple pseudocontrol groups. Have a control group have placebo, then another LSD, another Ketamine, another a synthetic cannabinoid, another mushrooms.
That way even if the effects are genuine of psilocybin it will pop from the rest in the results, if is in psychedelics in general LSD will pop as well, if it's anything "mind exploring" Ketamine will pop too, if it's just getting high what makes things better, the cannabinoid will join into the results.
And obviously this has to be done on people without drug experience, because the effects are rather easy to tell apart by drug users.
"obviously this has to be done on people without drug experience, because the effects are rather easy to tell apart by drug users"
Interestingly, the subjective experience of having a "high" seems to be somewhat learned through prior experiences. Testing on people without drug experience may not be the accurate test one might want and assume.
This is most likely because of the function serotonin has on neurons and neural networks. 5ht is a g protein coupled receptor, and in the case of serotonin what happens when you hit one with an agonist is you set a cascade of second messengers intracellular that modify how the cell responds, such as adjusting the protein expression of different ion channels and/or receptors. This can lead to a greatly increased sensitivity to stimuli that already exists.
participants were able to deduce it because it's not at all the same experience in any way shape or form. Your use of the term "placebo" is extremely incorrect in this case.
