The idea you need synthetic, mind-altering drugs to "be yourself" is tautologically absurd on its face, and this kind of discourse is pushed by manufacturers of those drugs.
I use marijuana to break out of loops of anxiety and repetitive, intrusive thoughts (blessedly legal where I live), and there are some modest downsides, mostly that it's expensive and only works if used in moderation. It helps snap me out of anxiety attacks and shorten the duration of depressive episodes but it isn't magic, I still have to confront my issues and work towards making my life better.
Virtually everyone I know has struggled with anxiety and/or depression and has had success going to therapy and taking some sort of antidepressant. Many of them had to go through several therapists & medications until they found a therapist they meshed with and a prescription/dosage that worked for them; it's a difficult and frustrating process, but I've seen it really work for people in my life.
Like I said, I'm not a doctor, I can only give the most general advice, but it is my belief that if you want your life to be different, it's a real possibility, it's something worth working towards, and if you feel that you use alcohol in excess, it's worth considering whether a professional can help you to identify a different strategy/medication.
There are many states of mind that are unpleasant. Anxiety, grief, doubt, jealousy, anger, and so on; and many behaviors that we may engage in that we rationally realize we should not, various forms of self-sabotage, unhealthy habits, and so on.
I don't think saying because we don't like these things, these things aren't really your true self is helpful. They don't need to be part of us, but if we can't face the fact that they are, they will remain.
And mind altering drugs can help overcome those - or they can push you deeper into them.
Both are true feelings, but my point was, that I don't think a general baseline anxiety is something that is part of ones personality. I feel limited in myself, when fear is dominating and free, if the fear is gone and I am no longer blocked to do the things I want.
We are both our best parts and our worse parts, and to take an analogy further if one felt their ‚best self‘ on MDMA‚ that wouldn’t meant to say that taking it every day would make them feel their ‚best self‘ in aggregate.
If a recovering smoker avoids cigarettes are they avoiding their ‚true self‘? I retort both are their true self, and anyway your true self no doubt changes.
'no man steps into the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man'
I do think it's a helpful framing to say, "my intrusive thoughts are not me; they're weather that passes through my mind, no more meaningful than the shapes I find in clouds or the static between television channels." Like, if I'm feeling anxious, I might get a vivid fantasy of bizarre self harm; that's just some weird shit that happened, it doesn't mean anything more than that I'm anxious and that my mind is capable of producing some whack imagery. Before I had this framing I'd have concerns like, is there some deep dark part of me that's trying to harm me? But no, it's just that I'm a very complex machine, my sensory apparatus produces all kinds of weird signals and some of them are just noise; they can be ignored, I don't have to identify with them, and doing so would be dangerous.
What I was getting at was more that sometimes people invoke a naturalism fallacy, sometimes in combination with a "just suck it up" sort of mentality, which I reject for a few reasons:
1. We don't have to accept things because they are natural; we don't have to accept cancer, or our inability to fly, or depression.
2. There is nothing morally superior about being miserable ("just sucking it up"). Improving your life is a small way of improving the world; I think that's a moral good.
3. Consciousness is a reflexive process between you and your environment. You take in input which changes your inner world and you produce output that changes your environment. Your thinking can't be separated cleanly from that environment. For example, the people you regularly turn to for advice provide feedback you use to regulate yourself; they are part of your process for thinking and coming to decisions. If you take in input in the form of a substance that changes your thinking - that can be dangerous, it needs to be done with care, but it isn't actually "unnatural" in the first place. If there's a failure mode of your consciousness and taking an antidepressant helps you to avoid it, that's just a feedback mechanism you've discovered & adopted from the outside world.
Yes, scare quotes intentional. It seems to me more like the phrasing of "be yourself" and be your "true self" in this comment and parent is the issue. What if that "true vs false self" is an illusion anyway? You can still "be better", be what you want to be, be happier and more capable, be a better self, that you like more.
It doesn't require any claims that "this point on the graph is truly me, and that point is not". That statement might not just be false, but be actually meaningless. Drugs are mind-altering for sure, that's the point of them, but so is learning a new skill or reading a good book.
Then, one day, he went to see his dentist who asked him if he wants to take nitrous oxide. My friend agreed but that day something strange started happening to him. When he was telling me it seemed like serious paranoia. He lost his job, he was seeing things that weren't there, day and night. It lasted more than two years and doctors weren't able to help him. He is more or less normal now but won't even touch anything intoxicating, not even alcohol.
Later I saw some articles about that and it doesn't seem so uncommon:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1684523/
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-...
The second time I ate the bread, I made sure I had no activities for the day, was alone at home, and observed my behavior prior to taking the cannabis. When it was time to eat, I got a timer and took note of when the effects kicked in, which parts of my body became relaxed first and how the general transition from stress, /micro pain/anxiety to peace, and clear thoughts happened. I loved the discovery I was making. After a couple of months I quit the cannabis and switched to meditation, yoga, ice baths, and CBT to deal with the anxiety. It has worked. These days I don't meditate or do yoga daily, but I have better control of my life, and very grateful for the experience that led me here.
At the same thing I doubt this article is some output of "big MDMA".
I can definitely say the authors experience chimes with my own, talking to people openly at after parties sorted out a lot of things for me - with apologies to anyone that became my adhoc therapist at the time.
Of course there are downsides; one upside of feeling terrible on a Wednesday is the realisation that it was vecause of going out on a Friday.
What's worse is feeling terrible and it's during a time where you haven't been going out partying.
You also don't need a nice winter walk to find a deepened sense of feeling alive.
You don't need a nice house and car to feel like you are worth something.
The truth is, external things impact our lives. The substances consume, food we eat, landscapes we move through, people we talk to, objects we use, architecture we work and live in influences us more than we would like.
Nobody would say "It is sad that you need that glas of Prosecco to celebrate New Year's with your friends." Because strictly speaking you don't really need it — it is just nicer that way. (Edit: unless of course you are an alcoholic, which is a real thing)
This is the way that kind of party drug can work as well. You don't need it to be happy, but it is nicer that way.
Of course, some people feel that they do actually need it and that is the rub with expressing positives about drugs or other externalities. Some people become addicted and those addictions can have incredibly negative effects on the people around them.
That being said the same is true of a lot of things as well. People can become addicted to social media, expressions of material wealth, porn, food, ... Literally everything that provides a dopamine boost in some way.
The question depending on the specific object of desire is always how much of the addiction is in the "substance" and how much in the mind of the addicted person.
There are actually quite a large number of people who would say exactly that. It’s a minority position, but there are still quite a few people in the US who are opposed to alcohol consumption and have exactly the same concerns about it as other drugs. (Often, but not always, based in religious convictions.)
I think a realistic stance towards drugs like alcohol or MDMA demands that we do not ignore the problems these drugs cause, but also see with how many users they don't cause any problem at all.
Personally I was too scared by the Leah Betts type thing (mentioned in the article) at the time to try E and I was had a perhaps irrational fear that drugs would affect academic performance and basically lower my IQ so I never did them.
Of course the main thing I should have been scared of is my first year of driving a car, statistically!
That is not irrational, but very real. Not from taken once or twice, but from excess. Same with alcohol, though.
"the main thing I should have been scared of is my first year of driving a car, statistically"
And the statistics of those doing excessive drugs while driving are considerably worse.
I can understand the “true self” narrative, when one loses their constant anxiety for on a trip for example, those feeling suddenly start to feel different in sober life, as if they are no longer a part of you but instead are with you. Hence why you discover your “true self”, who does not have such negative feelings.
Or you could just watch a movie, you know? Or, god forbid, use some imagination.
It's absurd, especially in the US, how a crazy amount of people is put on anti-depressants for years instead.
I'm not sure where it comes from, and there are some pretty concerning inconsistencies with the notion if you scrutinize it.
This is a very odd and misinformed take. I can't believe you could have had much contact with MDMA users and still say this.