I want to interject an alternative opinion here, and clarify previous statements, but with the following consideration. No one should ever randomly take powerful hallucinogens thinking they are just for fun. They are life altering, and they are a deep part of many indigenous cultures worldwide. Our culture knows little of this history or their spiritual connections.. They should be used with good reason, in a controlled manner. I also do not believe any powerful drug, including THC should be accessible by kids either - risky business in my opinion, alcohol included at the top of the list.
What's the good reason? Personally, as discussed elsewhere on the forum I've explained how psychedelics once helped me to clear up a number of personal issues, including seeing through the b.s. I was selling myself, and i came away from that trip realizing, the person I was about to marry was wrong for me - it would've spelled disaster for us both. We might have figured this out ourselves years later in divorce court but this experience saved us a lot of misery and did put me on a much better path. Perhaps a good talking to could have achieved this as well but I was not listening at the time to any of my friends. The effects allowed me to see the specific lies I was invested in. I am appreciative of that event.
In listening to various learned and suspicious folk I have come to understand how ayahuasca can be used as a means to help narcotic addicts escape their habit by confronting memory moments that led them to their heroin addiction. I could see exactly how that would work and why you would never need to use it again after that. At my age I refuse to take any strong drug that would potentially interfere with my personal future, family etc.. Priorities are priorities, and I needed many sober decades to understand that. Though growing up with alcoholics did colour a lot of my thinking around state sponsored drugs.
Trained - I agree with so much of your posts that I feel I need to respond in a more detailed manner to your concerns. All addictions take us down. To add to your personal stories I would also cite a personal family friend who after smoking one joint and taking one hit of acid spent the remainder of his teen years convinced that his parents had hired the mafia to kill him. He was never really right ever again, and as far as i know is still institutionalized twenty years later. You make important points about drug abuse, criminality and misery. We should all heed them.
However, drugs are medecine, and when used correctly can heal in different ways. Our culture does not understand the power or place of psychedelics and so we intersect with them in terrible ways. However, there are other potentials for them that are not recreational:
Psilocybin for Anxiety and Depression in Cancer | Psychology Today
The idea of drug therapy as a means to aid long standing anxieties or as a means to confront and/or establish better personal truths have been attributed to these powerful psychoactive agents. We just have not been able to use them in proper medical studies to fully understand their use or how they could be legitimized in society for good until quite recently. And while DMT sounds like it's the quickest way to find out if aliens really are crypto terrestrials, I have no interest or need to take that risk. However, I do see the benefit of recent controlled medical research into using it if it could be used to heal others of underlying psychological conditions that current synthetic drugs are unable to.
Personally I have more faith that we will find more healing through proper medical and scientific inquiry into psychedelics than all the supposed good that injecting 'mad' people with lithium or haloperidol has done to date. So far I've seen a lot of good friends destroyed by state sponsored pharmacology, as those drugs deprive and harm more than they heal. Perhaps through research into this other natural drug class we may be able to help instead of harm? Just my alternative two cents.
