I think this is a good conversation because both sides offer insights into the blind spots of the other and especially with psychedelics, when they can come with a lot of fluff, helps to balance everything out. That being said, I have to disagree with you on pretty much all fronts.
- Psychedelics have the capacity to make an even slightly mentally unstable person lose their mind. I have had psychosis in the past as a result of this and I notice it becoming more common. Yes you can have psychosis on stimulants but I notice that things like LSD induced psychosis seem to last longer. In my experience anyway.
What does losing your mind even mean? See, you've gone from an ascertainable marker to determine someone's mental state to immediately flying off into opaque language that only holds any context in social and cultural beliefs, of which all are ultimately spurious and hold no weight in empirical science. Psychiatry has never been able to determine what losing your mind means. There used to such thing called insanity or lunacy, but both of these words were simply used to demonize and stigmatize those who were labelled with them and so were pretty much eradicated, and for good reason too. So you're left with a word that has little meaning other than in it's out-dated form, which again, existed only to persecute people. If you can find any scientific literature on the evidence around losing your mind and it's recognition in mental health as being a genuine state, I will salute you.
Also psychosis is not losing your mind. Again, one is a definable mental state with very known characteristics, but doesn't mean you've lost your mind. How could you lose your mind yet still be psychotic? You need a mind to be psychotic in the first place. So it's whatever slips off the tongue of whoever says it and I bet their grandmother told them that's what it was who in turn was told by her grandmother. Just ask Barbara from down the road what she thinks. Now you've solved mental health forever. These were the problems we had when we let the imagination of our societies conjure up superstitious religious imagery of what having lost your mind really means. And we still, for the most part, live with that because it spanned the best part of several hundred years in terms of our understanding of what mental illness was. Although we tended to believe it was indication of demonic possession and of the supernatural. It's still very much supernatural today to lose your mind because it's completely down to who can tell the best ghost story as to how scary it really is!
- The propensity for having a bad trip that has long lasting effects. I've known some people who aren't quite right after tripping several months or even a year or so later. Some have even said they've ended up with permanent anxiety. Other drugs can cause long term changes in the brain obviously but it seems that psychedelics can disturb people in a profound way.
But that's like saying the propensity to die in a car crash is quite high. Yeah, but it's also just as likely you could be run over walking down the street or being shot by a policeman but we never use these very real mathematically based probabilities, only when it suits us. We refuse to look at the actual facts around many things, including drugs, because we have been conditioned over many generations to be fearful of their use. Psychedelics especially fall into this bracket and many people assume the risks are very high when taking them when in fact this isn't true at all. Psychedelics have some of the lesser harms to them, and this has been proven quite a few times with empirical research into comparisons with other drugs. Mushrooms have the least harms, LSD a little more. Obviously, if you're not well mentally then taking high doses of psychedelics is not a good idea (probably, anyway) but that doesn't mean that psychedelics are actually harmful.
And again, what do you mean by aren't quite right? There's a lot of spurious language in your points that only you understand based on your own social and cultural context. Aren't quite right compared to who? And are those who apparently are quite right, are they the ultimate projection of the most perfect state of consciousness? Do we know what that is? Psychiatry can't even tell us what normal is. It's changing all the time. Go figure. If you mean they experienced a difficult experience then that's understandable but having experienced a difficult trip and then not quite being right are two completely different things. One can be quantified, whereas the other is open to magical thinking, and often is part of the problem.
- If you take, say opiates daily, it will be a bitch to kick but after a while you can get back to normal with the right amount of exercise, eating right, etc. But if you were to say drop acid everyday you would wind up completely frying yourself. I knew someone who said he'd taken psychedelics like "party drugs" and he wasn't right at all. Permafried I'd say. Overall I'd say psychedelics have the most potential to really mess people up if abused.
Opiates and psychedelics cannot be compared at all.
Again, you're using loaded language; frying yourself, permafried.
Sounds like you're f*cked forever. No way out. Gone forever. Great.
What does it mean? Sounds pretty negative and self defeating, which is what helps to reinforce that reality onto those who really think that is what is happening to them. You're not helping the cause. If you were to drop acid everyday you'd drop acid everyday. You would probably end completely dropping acid everyday. Whatever happens happens and within that context you argue on the basis of harm reduction that such a choice is probably not the wisest to make. The risks will be higher, if you can even afford to maintain the high for an entire week that is. It can done and it's historically what many of the first psychedelic pioneers did during their experimentations in the sixties and seventies. I know Ram Dass mentioned he would be high on LSD for days, as did Leary. Both ended up fine. Then again, what IS fine? Many people would call both Leary and Ram Dass nutcases if by fine you go off the spirit level of mainstream societal beliefs. To many though they were, and still are, legends. How do you know whether Leary didn't 'lose his mind'? He often talked about it. His mantra was in order to understand the mind you have to lose it. All psychedelic pioneers followed very similar philosophies. None of them ended in an asylum. Most of them in fact worked in them, at least at the very beginning anyway. When you start to unravel much of this language based on the cultural neurosis of several generations engulfed in the pointless destructive war on drugs, you see that absolutely very little, if not at all, makes sense. You could argue that in fact the war on drugs is itself indicative of psychosis. All facts about it's inception and then absolute failure while we still seek to continue this war seems pretty psychotic to me. And the people arguing for it's continuation? Frightened to go near a f*cking peyote cactus in case it gets out of the ground and mauls them to death. Who is really crazy? Hmmmm...
I would look at what exists behind your reality because it seems like it comes loaded with all the key elements that persecute, stigmatize and dehumanize. Nothing that enables but lots of disabling. The very core elements of the establishment fear of altered states that have plagued our Western civilization forever. That's likely not your reality but it belongs to those who made you believe it is yours.
Psychedelics need to be respected. I think they are not respected (widely enough anyway) because we have lost our connection to ritual and ceremony. Psychedelics ARE medicine. Not just because you read it in a new-age spirituality book but because they have been so since time began. They have ALWAYS been used as medicine to transform and transcend. This isn't wishy-washy stuff. This is fact. In today's world we have lost that connection because our societies no longer understand the language nor have the correct frameworks in place. We have no want nor need for utilizing age old wisdom and knowledge for preparing people for states of consciousness that differ from our everyday waking one. We refuse to look what we have developed over millenia in understanding and facilitating these experiences. It's no wonder people disappear to farflung places in the world for ceremonies. It's not just because it's illegal over here in the West. It's also because we instinctively know we are coming back to our roots somehow. We know and trust in the old despite hating it with the other cheek. We always seek to bring back the old in all areas of life, fashion especially and yet we refuse to acknowledge the glaring flaw in our thinking. If we had the correct frameworks and had the language to understand these experiences respective of the sheer vastness of these universes discovered and the implications on the individual, the respect would be there. People walk that road on their own largely and without the social and cultural insulation for their experiences. And when it gets difficult, which it inevitably will from time to time, they refer to the social and cultural programming and call themselves crazy, or fried as you say. It's no wonder then why it's a problem. But it's got very little to do with psychedelics on their own and everything to do with the social and cultural context for taking them, of which is completely dry as a bone and devoid of depth and meaning.
im kidding - but it's not really possible - so in that regard, they are a bit safer on multiple fronts - what's not so safe, is you go out of your mind and who knows how somebody may react to that, that isn't prepared for it. So it's a double edged sword in that regard. We're all different so it's hard to say from one person to the next. For me, i feel like im a bit more built for it, and one of those reasons is that im very practical when it comes down to it. I don't believe in much and im pretty well-grounded, despite the contrary of what's seen on my outer surface. Im pretty logical, but there's millions of people that are just like me - they're here and they're everywhere but still probably not a large percentage of the population. Not that im special or anything, even though i think i am sometimes.....it's complicated 
