In my life I’ve tried over 30 recreational drugs. Why?
Well at first I wanted to know, “what is all the fuss about?” Particularly with psychedelics. People will rate psychedelic drug experiences up with having a kid or getting married. And then others will lose everything to addiction. Why the huge variance? Why are they illegal? What are these drug induced mystical experiences? What causes addiction? Despite a drug being the particular arrangement of a handful of atoms without a motive or agenda; the effects are felt wide and far in society. We ascribe all kinds of moral judgements to the people who take them, people who don’t, and to the drugs themselves. I grew up being told what to think about these things, but a lot of it sounded like bullshit and contradicted the science. So I wanted to go to the source, with psychedelics being the obvious “interesting” class of drugs.
After the first few times trying some psychedelics, I no longer cared too much to the answer to, “what is all the fuss about?” Mostly because it was fun to try something new. I started wondering, “what is the next thing to try and what is it gonna be like?” Like the excitement of visiting a new country, it takes a little courage to go and you’re not exactly sure what you’re going to get yourself into.
Drugs made it obvious that the pathways in the mind are mixed together in something like an audio mixing station.
These audio mixing stations provide all kinds of ways to mix together the instruments and sounds effects used to record a song. The mixer can increase or decrease the volume of different instruments. Or the particular frequencies of the instruments can be modulated, to say, make it easier to hear the vocals or give the bass more punch.
And drugs turn the nobs and move the sliders, amplifying some parts of consciousness and dampening other parts. Since drugs bind to receptors in the brain modulating pathways that are already there, they are not putting a new instrument in the studio or enlarging the mixing board.
Drugs make it obvious that this mixing board exists and that profoundly different states of conscious thinking and experience are possible. They throw doubt that the current mix of your sober state of mind is the “correct” one. If you even attempt the slightest to integrate your psychedelic experience into your understanding of reality, you’re practically forced to question everything.
This is because the depth of drug modulation isn’t just so you see some pretty colors (while that can definitely happen). Drugs (particularly psychedelics) alter the way think about the world, the ways things are connected, your particular upbringing, your particular relationships, nature, truth, beauty, morality, society, identity, and really basically everything—including the way you think about thinking.
To me, trying and going into these new states of mind was exciting because it was new. I enjoy novelty and was curious. There is really no other way to so directly change the mix of your consciousness. A secondary reason was I was quite miserable at the time; I was hoping for a transformative experience to solve my life problems overnight. That didn’t happened, but I had little expectation it could happen and didn’t have a therapeutic environment to process my experiences.
The bulk of my drug experiences were when I was 19-20. Life went on to different and more personally interesting directions, and eventually, more therapeutic directions. Trying new things is still my go-to activity, I just “try new things” in new ways, versus doing another new drug. Perhaps after many years in the sober groove it would be wise to go back in an altered state and really process the experience.
Here is everything I’ve tried: 2C-B, 4-AcO-DMT, 5-MeO-DMT, alcohol, amphetamine, armodafinil, caffeine, cannabis, cocaine, coca tea, DMT, DXM, delta-8-THC, efavirenz, GHB, kava kava, ketamine, kratom (incl. 7-hydroxymitragynine), LSD, MDMA, mescaline, modafinil, mushrooms, naloxone, nicotine, nitrous, oxycodone, pharmahuasca (DMT + harmaline), phenibut, poppers, quetiapine, rapé, and salvia.
And some less powerfully/questionably psychoactive drugs: CBD, cocoa, fluoxetine, isotretinoin, melatonin, oxygen bar, and oxytocin.
I don’t want to sound too rosy, drugs have risks. I’ve had bad trips. You don’t need to try anything. If you do, take reasonable precautions. And although I don’t believe there is a “bad” or “evil” drug (they are compounds), I avoided anything that seem to pack extreme levels of risk with little to no potential for personal growth (ex. opioids [the oxycodone I had was prescribed], meth, benzos, deliriants, inhalents, etc.).