Heinlein:
> I know of no work of art, essay, story, discovery, or anything else of value created as a result of LSD. When the acid-droppers start outdistancing the squares in any field, I’ll sit up and take notice.
Heinlein wrote some decent novels but I keep coming across pretty closed-minded, strong opinions in quotations of his. Many great musicians were known to have had LSD inspire their creations. The Beatles, Coltrane, the Beach Boys to name a few. Some of Huxley's work was influenced by it, and the biochemist Kary Mullis credits it with helping him develop the PCR method for DNA sequencing.
> drugs pay off in visible ways only for people who have already put in the hard work of figuring out how to make and do interesting things.
I agree with this. I’ve known a lot of people who have done a lot of psychedelics and most of them learned absolutely nothing from it if I’m being honest, and the few who had what I’d consider to be profound or interesting insights from it were deep thinkers anyway.
LSD and Ketamine were incredibly healing experiences for me that seriously broke through a lot of deep-seated trauma and helped me deal with PTSD that was debilitating my life beforehand.
They’ve also been incredibly great experiences for benefiting my poetry and musical compositions.
I believe they are great tools that require education to use. It’s a shame that education is more or less forbidden knowledge.
A worthy read on the subject of psychedelics: How To Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan:
https://www.amazon.com/Change-Your-Mind-Consciousness-Transc...
> Campbell believed that the real problem with marijuana is that a teenager who learns to doubt what adults say on the subject is likely to become equally skeptical when it comes to cocaine, heroin, and LSD
There's some merit to this, but by the time they were teaching us about drugs, teachers had already lied to us about countless other topics. I wish they hadn't lied about the severity of marijuana, but that alone would have hardly changed my skepticism regarding everything else.
Campbell:
> Marijuana ... is not an aphrodisiac ...
No, but it does improve sex.
It's a little surprising Dune isn't mentioned in the article, seeing as the spice is basically a proxy for LSD
On anoxia -
> In just a minute or two, you’ll discover a vast increase in your mental abilities—a sureness of thought, a breadth of understanding, and a rapidity and sureness of reasoning you never achieved before…Of course your brilliant realizations and mighty discoveries somehow seem to misfire when you come down off that jag
I believe this covers quite a lot of the amazing 'realisations' people have whilst on psychedelics like LSD, as well. And I'm not speaking from ignorance here, but as one who has tried around 10 different natural and synthetic psychedelics. They are beautiful, I'm not going to dispute that they can change the way we think of ourselves and the world around us. But...
The utopianist ideas of "If everyone just tried this, there would be no war, we could get rid of government and all look after each other, and the world would be as one!" are wishful thinking. As illustrated by the vast majority of the communal living projects started in the late 60s and early 70s.