Hallucinogens worry me

Sure, it's interesting that certain hallucinogens (most notably, DMT) produce similar types of peculiar results with most people (see machine elves), but after having the Algorithm send me to a bunch of YouTube videos from Comedy Central (of all places) in which "cool" people tell light hearted stories of their DMT trips, I am increasingly worried that cultural promotion of recreational tripping is going way too far.   (The videos seem to be 5 years old now, so I am late to notice them.)

In comments on any video about trips, there will be hundreds of people recommending how to do it right, so to speak.   There will be the occasional cautionary one, and there's a Joe Rogan clip of a guy who explains how it took 18 months to fully recover from his DMT experiences; but overall, it seems clear that there are too many people promoting it as an interesting or fun thing to do.

This just doesn't sit right with me.

People's mental health is something to be valued and treasured if it gets them through life on an even keel, so to speak.  To know a person with serious struggles with their mental health is to know how good it is to enjoy not having that problem.  Why risk it for mere recreational purposes?   

And it doesn't necessarily carry clear spiritual truths or lessons, as someone argued on Twitter recently:

Indeed, on that last point, why don't people just listen to what the members of the Beatles had to say about the empty promise of drug induced hallucinations?   

 

I have told the story before:  as a teenager I was impressed by Huxley's The Doors of Perception.   It's a cool idea to think that a drug lowers the brain filter to let you see a numinous world as it really is.  But it also becomes clear when you read more about the experiences of drug users that it is not really what is going on.

 

That said, I am not totally against the experiments in use of certain drugs by properly trained psychiatrists to see if they can help certain traumatised people.  (Although I am also already convinced that there is a great deal of hype around that topic,  too.)   

 

But I do have more and more sympathy as I age to taking the old Republican line on "this is your brain on drugs - just don't do it"  than the soft "do them, but just carefully, it will open your mind, man" experimental lines of the likes of Joe Rogan and whoever owns Comedy Central.