> For those who tried above substances did it change your brain for the better?

That's a tough question to answer, but I can share my story and maybe you can glean from it. The truth is, drugs can do incredible things for the mind, body and soul, but the person must be able to handle the intensity, and their own craving.

My upbringing was pretty rough: parents divorced when I was young and I was raised by my southern-Christian grandparents since I was five. My parents were very poor and my grandparents had already raised two kids on low income. I was fairly depressed growing up for many reasons related to my natural life. I'm first generation in my family to graduate University, let alone with a STEM degree, and my career provides a better salary than anyone in my family has ever had. It was a pleasant surprise for my family, and you'll understand after the next couple of paragraphs.

I had stated smoking pot in middle School, alcohol came next, then ecstacy, codeine, mushrooms, and Acid, all before I graduated high school. College had shown me MDMA, DMT, cocaine, various opiates, and some research chemicals my friend kept around. Recently (late twenties) I had experimented with ketamine for the first time.

In high school, when some friends and I started getting into ecstacy, it didn't take long before some of them became habitual users. At one point my friends would be taking it at school. I took this as a cautionary red flag, and reigned in my ecstasy use at the time. Sure enough, those friends became addicted to the sensations, and took life paths that would lead them to misery. This was a vital learning moment in my life.

Around that same time in high school, I had arranged with other friends to take mushrooms together at their house. I ended up taking about 7 grams, which is -plenty-, and about twice as much as the most I've ever taken. The effects were good when they were good, but really bad when they were bad. Most of the time I couldn't arrange proper sentences, regular body functions seemed like foreign operations within myself, and everything I looked at had a Kaleidoscope-esque effect on it. At one point I summersaulted into my friends wall on the way to the bathroom, where I proceeded to fail to remember how bathrooms work, and pee all over myself. This experience has since kept me distant from mushrooms.

Right into college, I had joined a political activist group and started making friends. While driving together to an overnight rally at the neighbor University, some friends in the group revealed to me that they regularly consume large amounts of psilocybin mushrooms. I didn't end up getting to know them well, but they seemed like nice and well-intended hippy-types attending college.

A month ago, I went to an epic-level music festival where the only thing more prolific than music and water were drugs. While walking to find a restroom at sunrise, I came across a guy hanging in his campsite mumbling to himself. We started some conversion and he came back to our camp to hang. Later he revealed to us that he was coming down off a twenty strip (20 hits of LSD). That guy made for some interesting conversation.

For me, more than any other type of drug I've tried, psychedelics do best at opening my mind. Other drugs have their purposes, but from these drugs, the effects are truly interesting. I feel like I'm able break down mental structures that exist in my mind, and recreate them in different ways, either for a real goal (relief from depression), or just for fun (hallucination, creative outlet). Once I found my footing with psychedelics, my experience became centered around allowing weird and non-conventional thoughts to take over my mind, until I I'm rethinking how everything workes and why things operate in today's life the way they do, and how with some wild creatively, we could have an entirely different reality that's more beneficial to us all. That, and dancing.