I was raised pretty sheltered, the oldest, and my first experience with the concept of drugs was in 5th grade DARE class. I thought of drug users as almost a different breed, they were
criminals. I was taught you could die the first time, and all that stuff. I thought drug users must be insane. I won an award in DARE for best anti-drug poem. 8) My friends and I never encountered drugs, we were kind of our own little dorky group. I didn't really think about drugs at all after that, until I was 16, I had been working at a grocery store for a while and made some friends who were a year older, and gradually found out that they liked to smoke weed and drink. I was like, hmmmmm... these people are cool, they're my friends, they don't seem like scary criminals. I decided it sounded fun and wanted to try.
Previously to drugs I always was kind of obsessive/addicted to something, video games, Magic: The Gathering (which made me a lot of money later on actually), and AD&D. I waited until my 17th birthday because I knew I was going to get a yearly physical from the doctor and I always had to pee in a cup, which was just checking for kidney problems but I was scared they'd see weed in there. So on my 17th birthday I smoked and drank. Got drunk but didn't feel weed until the 4th time and OH MAN did I get high, it was wild, and I fucking loved it, and almost immediately started smoking every day. From there, after I graduated high school, I started using Coricidin sometimes, didn't even know what it was but some girl we all thought was super hot and cool was always telling us how great it was. I had fun with that but then had a bad experience, which got me into actually reading about what I was going to take, which got me into Erowid, which got me super interested in psychedelics.
In college I tried MDMA, then mushrooms, had a life-changing experience. Then after college I discovered the world of Internet RCs, started writing trip reports, joined Bluelight and gradually realized that a lot of drug users really are pretty crazy and self-destructive, myself included.
DARE is the wrong approach but I do think it's pretty important to wait as long as possible before starting using drugs. Starting them without being an adult can easily establish negative patterns.
I'd say it's was worth it, but just barely. Sometimes I wish I could just be back in the matrix as an unknowing, care-free cog. But I can't do that any longer, and it was probably inevitable anyway. I would say that psychedelics to me are totally worth it and have been good for my life. All the other drugs have had a net negative on my life (I include weed in psychedelics). I started using drugs out of curiosity, not because of wanting to mask problems. And in the process I created a lot of problems for myself. I almost lost myself in opiate addiction for a decade, and I still struggle to maintain a balance, especially with stimulants which I think are really not a good thing (although I enjoy them a lot).
Didn't mean to turn that into such a long story.
