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Link to the full study: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/08/08/384412

I have not read it completely yet, but it seems it lacks any sort of blind trial and control group; hence, it fails to account for placebo effect. Given the nature of the experiment, I believe placebo effect could have significantly altered the results.

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Yeah, no blinding, no placebo, in the field, small sample size and at a drug related event.

At best, this falls into the "quite interesting should probably do a proper follow up" pile.

One interesting line from the study. It says "that we did not use a control group (for obvious ethical and practical reasons)". Practical I get, there were only 38 of them in total. But ethical? What are the ethical concerns with not giving people a micro dose of hallucinogenic truffles?

The control, in this case, might be giving people micro doses without telling them.

A properly designed experiment would be to tell everyone that you might give them the drug, and actually give it to half of them. The control would be the group of people that did not receive it. GP is right that there is no ethical issue.

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