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Read the following article first. It is well worth your time:
https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/marijuana-to-the-glory-of-god
Similar to Jeff Lacine, the man that wrote the article linked above, I smoked a lot of marijuana and got high over a period of several years in my youth, along with many of my friends and acquaintances.
I can verify that the article's author really knows what he is talking about, both from my own experiences and those of people I have known, as well as other authors and educators throughout the years.
At the heart of the article is just one old stoner who kicked the habit giving good, old fashioned, practical advice about pot not being a good drug to indulge in from an "insider" to that world, just like I was.
He also seems, at first blush, to be quite well educated, and to have a reasoned and balanced worldview and presentation.
I can also attest all too soberly that psychedelics like psilocybin (magic mushrooms) and LSD (acid) are even more dangerous and tragic. Everyone I have ever known that has repeatedly used them ended that usage after one or more bad trips, and there are many, like me, who never came out of those bad trips.
Even though it has been several decades since my last use of any of these kinds of drugs, I must daily take a cocktail of pills with difficult and sometimes torturous side effects to remain sane. Much of my adult life has been a horrific nightmare of unimaginable suffering: a hell on earth inside my own mind, sometimes given over to an insanity so profound I lost my very self, the mental integrity that makes me who I am.
Tragically, when my mind was broken, it not only broke me, but broke my family and friends, and affected all whom I loved profoundly and painfully, especially my parents, wife, and son. All who are touched by such situations cannot come through unscathed: it is not just the sick one who suffers, but all those in his sphere of love and fellowship.
It has only been the last few years, with the help of doctors and medication, but especially through the lovingkindness and tender mercies of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and the answered prayers to my Father in Heaven, who worked His healing through the Holy Spirit in me, and to whom I go now immediately in prayer and scripture reading at the hint of any return of brokenness, that I have finally significantly recovered to the point of being more mentally sound and functional.
I do not know Jeff Lacine's entire story–good, bad, or ugly. However, I do know from my own adult life of 40 years of agony and brokenness of unutterable proportions, which was directly caused by my own use of marijuana and eventually other psychoactive substances, especially psychedelics, that leaders and influencers who champion the use of such chemicals leave behind them a trail littered with human wreckage and death that is a widespread (post) modern phenomenon of horrific tragedy, akin, in both numbers and devastation, to some of the worst ravages of war, tyranny, and oppression throughout the long, all-to-often brutal history of mankind.
Just don't do it.
What I was, now I am not,
Drinking, cursing, smoking pot,
Prideful cynic, know it all,
Reason cast o're all it's pall,
Pride we know leads to a fall,
Crushed I was and lost it all,
Falling headlong, dashed below,
On the rocks, sledgehammer blow,
Then I reached up bloody hand,
Trembling, crying, "help me stand,"
Crumpled shell of former man,
He did hold me in His hands,
Repent did I of all my sin,
Crying, Abba, come within,
Spirit came and dwelt in me,
Now my soul lives endlessly,
Pride it got me, Satan's sin,
In the end it did not win,
Nothing now can shackle me,
Free in Christ's humility.
I leave you with a Bible verse that speaks to how the above rhetoric is not overstated. Indeed, I intentionally use the strongest rhetoric I can to communicate some semblance of what the experience is like. The truth is, all words utterly fail to express the true horror and tragedy in even one life touched by mental illness as profound as I have suffered:
Romans 8:26 (KJV 1900)
26 Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.
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