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Psychedelic compounds have been utilized by humans for centuries for medicinal, religious, and tribal purposes. Clinical trial data starting from the early 2000s and continuing today indicates that psychedelics are a clinically efficacious treatment for a variety of neurological and psychiatric disorders. However, all clinical trials examining these substances have excluded any individual with a past or current history of seizures, leaving a large cohort of epilepsy and non-epilepsy chronic seizure disorder patients without anywhere to turn for psychedelic-assisted therapy. These exclusions were made despite any significant evidence that clinically supervised psychedelic use causes or exacerbates seizures in this population. To date, no clinical trial or preclinical seizure model has demonstrated that psychedelics induce seizures. This review highlights several cases of individuals experiencing seizures or seizure remission following psychedelic use, with the overall trend being that psychedelics are safe for use in a controlled, supervised clinical setting. We also suggest future research directions for this field.

Abstract We would like to thank authors Reece and Hulse (2022) for their three-part article titled “Geotemporospatial and causal inferential epidemiological overview and survey of USA cannabis, cannabidiol and cannabinoid genotoxicity expressed in cancer incidence 2003-2017”, in which the authors infer that cannabis use has a causal role in the development of various cancer types. While the authors use reputable datasets and a well-established epidemiological methodology, the authors’ conclusion of a causal association is limited due to biases inherent in ecological epidemiological studies. Though the researchers attempt to overcome these biases through validation and statistical manipulations, their approaches are insufficient to create conditions suitable for causal inferencing upon examination. There are also concerns in the practical and conceptual application of the studies’ dataset that further question the validity of the authors’ inferences. Further research exploring the potential benefits and harm of cannabinoids in the context of cancer must be performed before a distinct relationship can be defined.