>There is no doubt, in my personal case, that acid and mushrooms (that I often hand-picked in cow pastures after rainstorms here in central Florida) gateway-ed me into harder, destructive "escapes", and for that reason, I cannot fully endorse this sort of thing.
A drug may be a gateway, but you are the one walking through it. If you are using drugs irresponsibly it is your fault, not the drugs'.
Absolutely, I agree...I tried to be very careful in my post(s) not to condemn drug use in any way, and understand that 90% of people who do drugs have no long term issues with them.
I've come to learn, after intense inpatient treatment, that my "irresponsible" drug use almost surely developed from deep emotional scars inflicted on me in my very, very early childhood.
Over the past two years, since I've cleaned up, I've studied the neuroscience of addiction quite deeply, and there are some rather enlightening studies that pretty much prove, beyond most doubt, that addiction is a brain disorder and not a "will power" (whatever that really is) issue.
In other words, people with a certain type of "neural initialization", created in very early childhood, will almost certainly become addicts of some sort, while others without those disorders, won't (or are far less likely).
All I was really trying to say was this; giving mood-altering drugs to everyone might create problems and should continued to be studied carefully.
Sure, but if a drug was truly harmful, we shouldn't encourage it. And if we discover activity X leads to doing something else harmful, it's cause for considering restraint. After all, cigarette ads don't harm anyone directly, yet we make the tradeoff to limit them in order to limit smoking.
(Not that it applies here. Everything I've read and seen indicates the world would be far better off if access to opiates and psychedelics was legal, easy, and well understood/educated.)
A drug may be a gateway, but you are the one walking through it. If you are using drugs irresponsibly it is your fault, not the drugs'.