Why I Stopped Taking Psychedelics

In my early college days, I loved talking about psychedelics. And I also enjoyed taking them. I must have done LSD about 20 times. And I experimented with other psychedelic drugs as well.

But after a few negative experiences, and the realization that I don’t have much else to explore from psychedelics, I told myself that I won’t be touching them anytime soon.

And it’s been a few years. So, let me tell you why I changed my mind (to borrow from Michael Pollen’s book title).

Attention is your true source of wealth. — Sam Harris

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

There are a number of ways to train the mind to think in a way that I wanted to by taking psychedelics. So, the main reason I stopped taking them was that I saw that I could gain the same cognitive adjustments from other sources, like meditation for example.

You can meditate or take psychedelics to achieve some personal healing or exploration of your consciousness. In my view, however, there are numerous problems with recommending psychedelics in order to achieve that aspiration.

We instantly stumble on the problem of discussing psychedelics in the category of “drugs” when really they are not like other drugs or what we think of when we use the word ‘drugs’; we need a new lexicon to describe these “drugs” since the experiences and lasting positive health effects are much different than that of heroin or cocaine, for example.

But there are some positive aspects of psychedelics.

The research surrounding the use of Dimethyltryptamine (DMT), Psilocybin, and Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) has had revolutionary effects on medicine.

Patients with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and the study of addictive behavior as was eloquently expressed by the New York Times best-selling author Michael Pollan in his latest book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence.

Currently, all of these substances are illegal in societies that are aware of their existence. With the recent legalization of marijuana in a number of Western democracies, we may be seeing progress with regard to our acceptance of…