Indeed.

As someone that likely has more experience as a psychonaut than anyone that reads this thread, I would never ever recommend someone dip their toe into the waters of psychotropics and to be honest I wish I'd never have dabbled with them for the several years that I did. Being introduced to them in high school and continue that on into my early 20's is something I absolutely wish I could undo.

People like to go "I microdosed and had a great day of work!" or "man I did some acid/shrooms/dmt and felt connected to everything, my depression is gone!"

Not so much the bad experiences though. In 'another life' I did lots of things... LSD, DMT, MDMA, some synthetic tryptamines that not a lot of people have used, mushrooms, salvinorian a extracts...

Was I Santa once on a heroic dose of LSD? Sure and it was awesome, I was also a dragon on some alien planet in that trip, I was gouging bedrock with my talons and it felt so real and satisfying. Cool, right?

Did I have some alien head with octopus tentacles for a beard fondle my face and make me laugh and feel loved while on DMT? Sure.

Did I feel music on a subatomic level and taste electric happiness while on mushrooms, you bet.

Did I have tons of good times just hanging out with friends while we were on this or that while camping/floating down a creek or river, listening to music, hiking, hanging out at the mall, sure.

I also had some really, really, really terrible experiences back then.

Did I see my putrid, bloated, corpse that had massive bruising around it's neck staring back at me in the mirror on a DMT trip and manage to get up and stumble to the toilet and force myself to vomit because "I had to get death out of me" to the point of managing to throw up a baseball sized lump of bile trying to get death out of me because I wanted to still be alive. You bed.

Did I get stuck in a glitching 8-bit video game loop for what felt like the better part of a year while on a salvia trip one time, pleading to God that if he made it stop I'd never do anything harder than caffeine again as long as I lived only to come out of the trip and be told by my friend it had been less than 10 minutes. Oh yeah.

Did I have multiple experiences on DMT where I was a corpse in a morgue drawer, in a crematorium oven, with the feeling that I'd totally screwed up and it was my fault I was dead. Yes.

Did I have multiple experiences coming up on DMT hit hard out of proper glass where I 100% believed that I'd screwed up, that by inhaling I'd done something so incredibly wrong and I now had to suffer the consequences. That something knew I'd broken some rule and that I now had to live in 'reality' and that my prior existence had been a complete lie and I ruined it and it would never come back and everything and everyone i knew was gone and I was now fully awake in some horrible existence where malevolent entities reigned supreme and were quite unhappy with me. Oh hell yeah.

Did I watch a Star Wars film on 'penis envy' mushrooms once, watching an entire planet being destroyed, and know 100% that I was on that planet and was witnessing my own death and feel such pain and sadness like nothing I've ever felt in my entire life before or since. Yup.

Did I do DMT and salvinorin a on various occasions and have 'machine elves' tell me to kill myself so I could stay. Demand that I kill myself so they might share with me while my brain screamed "they're lying, they're lying, get out of here, snap out of it, they're lying to you, get out of the trip". Yyyyup.

Did I forget how to talk, lose the ability to even form words in my head/have an internal dialogue, for 10~ minutes on a very mild DMT dose once while showing someone how to hit the glass for their first experience, becoming quite scared at one point that it wasn't going to ware off and I'd seriously screwed up and caused brain damage? Yes, not something I'd ever want to happen again.

There's a reason I long since stopped doing these sorts of things. They can do far more harm than they can good.

Will they someday have valid medical applications that are effective and pleasant more oft than not? Maybe. Should we absolutely research them in very controlled clinical settings, sure!

Should people be randomly conducting self-experimentation in non-clinical settings without the ability to be sedated if stuff goes sideways and without trained individuals that can calm and control the situation and even restrain them if need be? No. Not at all. Not even microdosing because we have no idea what mid to long term consequences are.