May I add here that I agree with ufology rather that Chris. As I've said already, I've taken huge quantities of psychedelic drugs. And I mean HUGE. If that gives me the authority to argue with Chris on an equal basis, well, fine, bring it on, Chris! Because I have exactly zero belief that any of the extraordinary things I saw under the influence of LSD (or any other drug - I wasn't especially fussy) were actually real, however real they may have seemed to me at the time. Just like Chris, I don't take illegal drugs any more. Why not? Because I got bored with them. Since I did at least have the sense to steer clear of seriously addictive substances like heroin, I always had the option of giving them all up any time I wanted to, and one day I realized I was spending too much time in smoke-filled rooms talking incoherent shite with boring people. So I walked away and never went back.
Does that make me a better person? No. I simply made a lifestyle choice. Are you a bad person if you want to take recreational drugs, legal or otherwise? No, of course not. I did it to a downright ludicrous extent because I was young and foolish and it seemed like a good idea at the time. My friends did it too, and they were basically nice people. Absolutely nobody I knew turned evil because we took drugs (though we never went anywhere near heroin, which was obviously something quite different from what we were doing, and no fun at all). So I will not be a hypocrite and say that any young folks reading this shouldn't take drugs because it's stupid. Actually, it is stupid. But no more stupid than anything else you do in the 18-25 age-bracket, and considerably less likely to kill you than some.
So, guys and gals younger than me, you have my blessing to experiment with any drugs you feel attracted to that aren't hideously addictive. I can say from personal experience that if you're going to smoke anything, tobacco is vastly more addictive than marijuana, and LSD isn't addictive at all. Also, having taken about 3,000 times the recommended minimum dosage just to see what would happen, I can safely say that it's very difficult to OD on LSD. And since I only know one person whose sanity was irreversibly damaged by taking LSD because he had the bad luck to be a latent schizophrenic, it's a lot safer than Russian Roulette. And if you have the extreme bad luck to damage your brain in irretrievable ways on your first trip, you won't actually die, and you'll probably get a disability pension for the rest of your life.
So, basically, at my old fuddy-duddy time in life, taking LSD is about as sensible as jumping off the Chrysler Building wearing a parachute. It makes you, as the young folks say, "awesome", and if you're that young, maybe the risk of death is worth it. Though with LSD, you don't actually risk your life - merely your sanity.
As you will all have gathered by now, I don't think that the subjective experiences created by psychedelic drugs have anything whatsoever to do with objective reality. I should know - I've had enough of them. And you know what? I could tell you about a drug so extreme that they never even bothered to ban it, because the hallucinations it induces are so horrific that nobody who knows what it really does would take it for fun. I never took it myself, because several of my friends said "I took this stuff out of sheer ignorance based on the assumption that since it wasn't illegal, it must be pretty mild, and I nearly lost my mind!" One of them genuinely went mad enough to spend the next 6 months in a psychiatric hospital. I won't tell you what it's called because there have to be a few people on this forum stupid enough to try it, even though it would guarantee them at least 3 days in Surrealist Hell, and give them maybe a 10% chance of an absolute screaming mental breakdown. But if you want want to spend the next 72 hours seeing every object in the world bisected, including every person you know cut down the middle with their internal organs hideously pulsing, there's a legal herb that will do it, so long as you utterly ignore the instructions for safe usage. A good friend of mine told me so in terms which I have no reason at all to doubt.
Frankly, as a psychedelic experiencer, I must be up there with at least 90% of all the shamen who have ever lived. Yet for some reason, I'm still an atheist. Why? Because I take it as a rule of thumb that if I take substances which I know will cause my brain to malfunction, and immediately thereafter I experience very weird things, this isn't objective reality. Let's be honest here. If flying saucer people from another star, or another dimension, or whatever, are supposedly real, yet they only appear to you personally, and only when you take drugs that you know in advance are going to make you see things, maybe they aren't really real!
Of course, as both an atheist and a skeptic (in the true sense of the word), whatever you choose to believe, if you're doing no harm, I will defend your right to believe it - well, probably not to the death, because I'm just as much of a coward as you are. But I think I should point out that, if you take any psychedelic drugs at all, your chance of gaining massive insights into what is really going on, and being granted amazing yet rather vague psychic powers, is massively smaller than the risk of permanently damaging your sanity. Just saying.
