I fully intend to retire in SE Asia and use heroin to self-medicate on tropical beaches before death. I don't think that opium/morphine was put on Earth for young people to use recreationally, but I do think that Nature gave us strong painkillers for a few reasons, and a good argument could be made that they could help one fade into the darkness of death without the psychological hell. They do, after all, work just as well on psychological pain. Granted I am still young and may overcome my fear of death before that time comes, but if not, the drugs will always be there for me. So this comforts me that even if I don't use today, I don't have to give it up forever.
Regarding psychedelics and empathogens, well I acknowledge that my desires to take empathogens are not spiritually pure. I want to chase euphoria, and I want to chase it without the process necessarily having a spiritual reward. Empathogens are the most euphoric drugs in my opinion, and this is what I think about before I think about any human bonding, mindfulness benefits, and whatnot. I also know that after them, I would crave downers because most of them have crashes. Perhaps Ambien alone could take care of it and I could avoid reaching for benzos or opiates, but perhaps not. It's difficult to predict the severity of the crash, and because of this unknown, it's best to avoid them indefinitely. With certain psychedelics, there is no crash and the focus is on spiritual growth, so it's much more difficult to use rational recovery thinking to decide not to do them. If anything, rational thinking would make me want to use them, as (particularly) mushrooms reinforce a lot of the thing I use to keep me off of the hard stuff. Psychedelics are used a lot within my spiritual community. And I have a lot of post-traumatic stress from the hell I've been through in the heroin game, and I think that responsible use of them could help heal my mind. I am peeved to no end with how recovery communities and fellowships treat psychedelics as "drugs" and view then with such a narrow mind.