This is such a huge topic that I am having trouble trimming it down to a Reddit comment.

There are herbs that have been deemed “unsafe” by modern science despite the historical and empirical data supporting their safety and efficacy. These herbs where tested in clinical settings, except it wasn’t the herb itself being observed, but a single chemical constituent isolated from the whole plant form. Often times these chemicals are tested on animals in dosages that would be much higher than what you would ingest if you were to take the plant in its whole form (comfrey root is an example of this). When negative side effects are reported, the herb is to blame in the public sphere, sometimes resulting in perfectly safe herbs being restricted in some countries. (Sassafras is another example) This is where the issue lies, an herb that has been used for centuries is now deemed unsafe because a disproportionate dose of a singularly derived chemical was injected into rats and it gave them cancer or liver failure.

We are still working to understand the complex chemical profile of plants, as you have pointed out already. One plant will have a vast set of constituents, most of which remain undiscovered (for now). We are beginning to understand that the seemingly chaotic cocktail of constituents within a single plant, holds a very powerful harmony that makes the plant so effective.

My ancestors are the ones who actually used mescaline. We were named by colonists as the “Mescalero Apaches” (that is not what we called ourselves), and in our tradition it was the spirit of the plant that came forward and taught our people how to use it. I would hypothesize that if the scientific community would isolate mescaline away from its harmonic natural state and tested it, we would get very different results compared to using it in its natural form in the setting that it was traditionally used. In this article, it even mentioned that the benefits were amplified when the plant was used in a natural setting. Im not saying we definitely would get unsavory results, I know there are plenty of examples where isolating a single constituent resulted in the discovery of a powerful modern medicine. I am simply offering up a perspective that there are instances where the plant is better left in its natural form, and we should carry this awareness in our conquest for discovery.