You're Allowed To Just Get High

Curiosity is enough.

I’m sure you’re all too familiar with the now-popular narrative of taking ayahuasca or psilocybin or 5-MeO-DMT or any other well-known psychedelic drug for the sole purpose of self-betterment, self-improvement, trauma healing, or similar things. You can take ayahuasca to become a better leader! Hate your job? Try psychedelics — you won’t hate it for the next six months! It’s like X years of therapy in just a few hours — a troubling line that suggests two things: That X years of therapy are the minimum needed to become “normal,” and that psychedelic therapy is a miracle worker that saves both time and you.

The medicalization of psychedelics has been largely and loudly documented. Satirist Dennis Walker recently wrote a piece for High Times criticizing the psychedelic movement’s obsession with moving to medical settings and the “humourless” approach to the drugs stemming from it.

While recreational psychedelics are seemingly far from being legalized, psilocybin in medical settings has received legal status in Oregon, and, with it, such a high demand that the waitlist for legal psychedelic therapy services is in the thousands. Everyone wants a piece of the magic cure — and who wouldn’t? With the heavy branding and the fantastic words and stories, taking psychedelics to solve all your problems sounds excellent. The average person won’t fact-check too deeply. In fact, they’ll probably just read a headline or two and come to the conclusion that all they need to do to deal with their trauma is eat a few grams of mushrooms, hallucinate for a few hours, and they’ll be fine. What can’t psychedelics solve? By the looks of it, not much: Psychedelics are being touted and explored as a potential “cure” for everything from PTSD to anorexia to even migraines. Why not? Sounds great to me.

I’m not against these medical explorations. The fact that we can research these compounds and find new uses for them is a medical miracle. But psychedelics are more than that. While substances like ayahuasca have historically been used in ceremonial settings, whether to help one communicate with their ancestors or connect to the nature around them, others, like MDMA, now hailed as a “breakthrough therapy” tool for sufferers of PTSD, have a history of use in recreational settings — on dancefloors, in bedrooms — in settings that have no ceremonial context but that have provided a euphoric good time nonetheless.

But what happened to just taking drugs for fun?

I know, I know — in order to legalize them, we had to prove that there was some medically accepted use of them. I get it. But, like, we can still have fun, right? Right?

I rarely see people posting about their recreational trips anymore. Most people don’t even trip — they go on “journeys.” People aren’t giggling in the forest at the shapes of the clouds; they’re doing inner child healing.

Part of the reason for this shift, I think, is the psychedelic exceptionalism, a term coined by Dr. Carl Hart, that permeates the drug conversation. We have no problem discussing the benefits of psychedelics and revealing that we microdose, but mentioning a casual weekend use of cocaine or heroin is most often frowned upon, if not downright condemned.

I think that psychedelic exceptionalism has begun to bleed through the psychedelic world itself, and it’s begun to separate the recreational users from the more “serious” ones, the ones who are doing “work” and who are calling it “medicine” and not “drugs.” The divide grows stronger, and I see it all over social media and in the people that I meet when we talk about psychedelics and using them. I used to get someone’s hilarious trip story. Now I get someone’s trauma reveal.

I’m here to say this: You’re allowed to just do drugs to have fun. You’re allowed to experiment with a drug or substance purely because of your own curiosity — you don’t have to feel “called” to “sit with” it.

I do believe that some drugs and medicines have no recreational use. It’s hard for me to imagine anyone taking 5-MeO-DMT just for fun (though for curiosity, I do understand), and I do believe ayahuasca exists very much within the framework of ceremony and healing. But outside of a handful of substances, there are many, many others that are okay to experiment with just for the fun of it. You’re allowed to take a gram of shrooms to giggle at the museum with your friends. You’re allowed to smoke a bit of DMT if you find it makes your meditation deeper, or if you’re just curious about what the world over there is like. You’re allowed to take high-dose shrooms if you’ve never done it before just to see what it’s like. You’re even allowed to do cocaine! Hell, why not? It is your body and your consciousness, and, ultimately your choice.

The desire for fun and the captivating pull of curiosity are reasons enough, in my opinion. It is, after all, curiosity that got us access and information about these substances to begin with. Brave early scientists and explorers were experimenting on themselves, visiting these other realms and sensations and coming back with reports, writing whole books about hundreds of substances, describing them, even discovering them, all fuelled by the completely natural and human need for knowledge, all in the quest to answer a simple question: “What does this do?” (and, of course, its cousin — “How does this feel?”). Without curiosity pushing the research and work of Sasha Shulgin, we would never have the MDMA to do these clinical trials with in the first place. Curiosity is what provokes us to look behind the veil, what encourages us to open doors that have remained closed — I very much encourage it. It is the truest form of learning — knowing how something feels and exists for oneself. Theory and reading can only do so much. If that’s enough for you, that’s wonderful. If you crave a deeper understanding, that reason is enough to go forward.

You don’t need to be motivated by trauma or some healing narrative to experiment with psychedelics. If your psychedelic experience is motivated by a desire to have fun or just to know how things feel, I support you. I think the psychedelics space has become too serious in many ways, from the language to the consumption. I’m here to remind you to have fun — and that fun is valid.

(A small note on harm reduction: While I am a proponent of experimenting and whatnot, I do believe you also need to be careful when doing so. Please do your research on any substance before taking it and see if you are currently taking other substances or are on medications that might have counter-indications. When experimenting with psychedelics, please look into your medical history to see if this is something you might be better off not consuming. And, of course, always, always test your drugs. Consider grabbing a test off Qtests (Disclaimer: I receive a small affiliate kickback for purchases made through this link)).

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Sofie Mikhaylova is a psychedelics, pop culture, and travel writer, among other things. Her writing has appeared in Vice, leafie, Psychedelic Spotlight, The Washington Post, Fodor's Travel, Double Dot Magazine, and more. Find her on Instagram, her newsletter Sofieland, her podcast Sofieland, and her website.