Your writing expresses something I’ve encountered with psychedelics.

I truly believe that they have the *potential* to be absolutely lifechanging and spiritual and beautiful beyond belief. I have had those experiences, and I would never give them up, and I hope to have further experiences across my life.

However, the desire to regain “paradise lost” — to rediscover that feeling of “spiritual truth” (because so many of the revelations of psychedelics are forgotten once the high has subsided) is dangerous. Education rather than demonisation of the drug is important, I believe. Because for emotional, empathetic, spiritually searching people, psychedelics can be dangerous.

My fiance and I had some wonderful experiences on psychedelics. However after he went back to his home country, he continued to take magic mushrooms at a high dose every weekend. Because he was searching for that spiritual truth, and he believed that the feelings he was having on mushrooms were real. That he was exploring the astral plane.

And it finally culminated in the mother of all bad trips, where he completely lost touch with reality, trapped in a delusion that a loved one was an evil murderer. And thinking he was acting in self defence, he shot and killed this innocent person (who was also tripping with him). I witnessed his mental state leading up to the horrific crime, and I know it was not something he would EVER have done in his right mind.

Now a beautiful soul is dead, and my fiance, a loving, caring, sensitive man, is in prison for decades. Tormented by guilt and persistent hallucinations.

Psychedelics are the light and the shadow. Heaven and Hell. People must be VERY VERY careful with them.