If I were your friend, I would say, quite honestly, that I cannot, almost as a rule, trust anybody who has not tried a variety of mind altering substances. The insight that they provide is, in my opinion, essential to developing an open mind and a deeper perspective on life. Moreover I would be wary of anybody so, to me, risk averse.

Disagree strongly. I won't discuss personal experiences (real name) and my own usage history is actually quite moderate and I haven't used any (including alcohol beyond one drink) in 4 years, but I've known some heavy users, studied a bit of psychopharmacology, and probably know more about these drugs than you do.

It's true that most people who use psychedelics have positive experiences. These drugs probably shouldn't be illegal (even though I think it is extremely unwise, for most people, to use them). Some of them are probably safer than alcohol.

Still, I think you exaggerate the insight you get out of drug use. You had that creative and spiritual potential inside of you. It's just that most adults are too uptight to unlock it without a chemical crutch, but it's there and people have been experiencing it for centuries without using psychoactive substances.

People who start using drugs regularly start attributing everything that is interesting, creative, or spiritual in their life to the substances they ingest, the "plant teachers". I'm not talking about addiction because the most interesting drugs are generally non-addictive psychedelics, so much as a kind of subtle reliance that creeps up on a person. It can be very destructive in the long term, and yes, I've seen people destroy their minds with psychedelic overuse.

It's important to separate artifacts (visuals, strange thoughts, perceptions of paranormal ability) from the real stuff-- insight, clarity, spiritual experience. Drugs provide a lot of artifacts and some insight. Meditation provides almost no artifacts but more insight. At my age (29) I'm pretty solidly convinced that artifacts are not desirable. Some are beautiful, some are terrifying, but all involve divorce from reality. What we should be doing is diving into reality and figuring out ways to improve it (mostly through mundane processes like being better people, learning, and treating each other better). Karma's real, and the better your actions are, the better your experiences will be.

Psychedelics seem to be karmic accelerators. They seem to speed up time 100-1000x in that regard: months or years of psychological change, growth or decay, and karmic fruition in a few hours. That might seem like a good thing, but it's often dangerous. You might be "3 months away" from a psychological crisis that, if you actually had that much time to address and resolve the issue, you could weather.

I'm not saying no one should use drugs-- indigenous Americans who use low doses of psychedelics for spiritual purposes seem to have no problem-- but if you do it, you're on the bleeding edge of something that no one understands very well, and in a very demanding (if you're a typical drone, you should never go on a trip on a normal weekend; you need at least 2 office-free days on each end) and intolerant society like ours, it can lead to some really bad outcomes. Worse than the drugs themselves is the way society reacts to them and the changes in people who use them. I've seen people lose jobs because of otherwise manageable HPPD and spiral out of control from there.

Finally, drugs are unnecessary. You can have interesting experiences without them. Most of what makes a good shrooms trip great is spending 6 hours in nature in a somewhat meditative state. How many adults go out into park and sit and think for 6 hours? Almost none, and if they had the mindfulness skill to do this, we'd have a better world. If you learn how to meditate (I don't want to trivialize this because spiritual growth is a lifelong effort, but you can become basically capable pretty quick) you can have experiences of similar quality-- if it's important to you and you make the time. No, you won't get many artifacts through meditation, but I've seen enough people go actually insane not to want artifacts.