This is fantastic, it really is, but I am uncomfortable with the idea that there has to be something medically wrong with you in the first place for you to be able to benefit from psychedelics.

Me and a group my friends take psychedelics regularly but not often. Every single one of us reports not only enjoying the experience but more importantly IMHO, we feel long lasting positive effects.

Our favourite thing to do is a `candyflip' which is taking LSD and then MDMA a few hours afterwards. You can read about what the drugs do individually elsewhere, but I will attempt to describe the combination briefly here.

One of the effects of LSD is that it makes your emotions very slippery, and what I mean by that is that you can very easily and quickly transition from feeling intense happiness to intense feelings of negativity and anxiety without apparent cause. I describe the MDMA as propping up the emotions you experience during the LSD trip so that they are entirely positive. It allows you to access and talk about memories that are usually repressed, in my case childhood bullying, without fear or dread^1. LSD on it's own can produce intense euphoria with the right set and setting, but it is certainly easier to achieve it with a little bit of MDMA ;-) .

Since taking psychedelics I have noticed that I have become more open minded, more accepting of who I am and have a greater ability to appreciate the time I am living in now as opposed to waiting for 'life to get good'^2.

One of the long term effects I have enjoyed the most is a greater ability to empathize with others, I am not only much more aware of my own mind, it's fallibility, emotions and thought processes, but when in a crowd, I can't help but feel awe at the hundreds of minds surrounding mine that are all equally complex as mine. Everyone has emotions, difficulties, hopes, dreams and desires as I do, this is something I had never really thought about before.

Finally, I am now at peace with the idea that I will in all likelihood not be a silicon valley billionaire or even wealthy at all^3. I understand now that success is not just measured by economic and social status. A normal person living in a normal house with a normal family could very well be more `successful' in my opinion that anybody else in the world, so long as they are happy, and content with their situation in a way that I am finding difficult to put into words. I am reaching here to describe such a person and the word that is coming to mind is enlightened.

Unfortunately, if I had come across a post such as this a year ago, before trying psychedelics, I would have dismissed the author as a hippy, somebody who is making excuses for their own failure or even perhaps somebody with mental illness.

Psychedelics are really something that must be experienced to be understood, we do not yet have the language to accurately describe to an outsider the happenings of ones own mind outside of a strict subset of feelings and emotions such as happy, hungry or sad.

Prohibition is a terrible event that is forcing people to live without ever experiencing these things. Your brain is normally limited to the inputs it receives from your senses. Psychedelics allow you do disconnect from such a sober world and invent your own inputs to an extent and it is wonderful. To think that most people never get the opportunity to do that is painful to me.

^1: This is characteristic of MDMA in isolation as well.

^2: Of course this is anecdotal and is difficult to distinguish from a placebo effect. I can't imagine a double blind experiment that could prove this, when asked about long term effects, the active drug group are going to be very aware what group they were in, but the question you want to answer is not did you notice the drug, but did it have a long term effect on you.

^3: I come from a moderately wealthy background and there was a huge amount of indirect pressure to have a stable career and earn lots of money.