Psychedelics

I will admit that I've tried psychedelic drugs, but only on three occasions. I haven't since college, I don't plan on doing them again, and given my addictive personality, that's definitely for the best. My stints with mushrooms and acid were just college experimentation and nothing more. That being said, each time was definitely an interesting experience. The visions I saw, the flashes of light, and the pulsating and vibrating walls and floor of the room that I was in were all, well, at the very least interesting. However, I constantly remind myself that as fantastic as the psychedelic trips were, none of it was real. It was nothing more than the neurons in my brain being overstimulated by substances. What I experienced was no manner of magic or miracle, it was me ingesting substances into my body that shouldn't be there. I'm not going to lie, before I took that first hit of acid, I wasn't sure what was going to happen. I was hoping to see something along the lines of those old Beatles cartoons, but that wasn't the case. That's not to say that the experience wasn't interesting. It felt like the entire room was vibrating, and while I wouldn't consider what I had to be either a "good" or "bad" trip, there were a few things that unsettled me about the whole experience that are the reasons that I won't be going back. First of all, I entirely lost my grasp of time. I took my first hit at, I believe, 9 at night, and while I was swept up in the experience, before I realized it, it was seven in the morning. When my friend who I shared the experience with eventually said it was time for my other friend and I to go, I was confused because I thought it was only midnight. Then I looked out the window to see the sun was shining and my heart sank into my stomach. I thought that the sun was shining in the middle of the night and I didn't know what to make of it. In my bugged out mind I thought we were experiencing some sort of cosmic phenomena, and in the back of my head, my mind went to a place where I truly thought what I was witnessing was some sort of herald of the end of the world. Good lord, just writing that reminds me of why I would never touch anything like that again. Psychedelic drugs scramble your brain. They're on schedule one for a very good reason. I came to that realization not too long ago when I was attending a support group for people with addiction problems. It was there that I met a man who had abused psychedelic drugs consistently over a period of years, and the damage it had done to his psyche was painfully apparent. He couldn't focus to save his life, he spaced out constantly, and half of the words that came out of his mouth made absolutely no sense. I swear, I actually understood what he was talking about, maybe 20% of the time. While others in the support group laughed and thought it was funny, I found no such enjoyment in seeing a human being in such a state. This man had done damage to his mind that I'm not sure if he'll ever be able to repair. There's absolutely nothing humorous about that. It made me glad that I never made a habit out of psychedelics, because at that moment I truly came to understand the extent of damage that they can do to your mind. Appealing as the idea of tripping may be, you need to remind yourself that none of it is real. It's simply abusing substances in order to trick your brain into observing phenomena that isn't really there. The way I look at it, using psychedelic drugs is somewhat like putting a magnet on a television; sure it's amusing for a few brief moments, but if you don't remove it immediately, permanent damage will be done. In my eyes, that just isn't worth it. That's not to say that I'd pass judgement on those that choose to partake. As an adult and as an independent human being, such choices are yours and yours alone to make. If you feel that you find some sort of enlightenment or enjoyment from such experiences, I'm not going to judge or try to stop you, it just isn't for me. And, like the decision to use, the decision not to is also mine alone to make.