I was really into psychedelics for a time and in the Grateful Dead lot scene/druggie festival scene. This includes the big ones where fratty college fucks go and buy drugs at inflated prices and weird ass events in the woods that nobody outside the scene really knows about. The people involved are uniformly troubled, have an unfortunate tendency towards heroin, hubbas (crack), and booze. This is generally attributed to, as in the words of one of the psychedelic pioneers (I forget who, not Leary, maybe McKenna) that "once you get the message you should hang up the phone." The idea of drugs having a "message" though is a problem in itself, one and the same with being enlightened/reaching samadhi/ego death/whatevber they want to call it.
This is absolute nonsense (although I believed it for a time and then acted like I did for longer because I wanted to stay in that scene basically), the drugs just dock with these appropriate parts in your brain that exists for some reason by design or evolution create this feeling of disconnection basically (in various ways) from ordinary perception and the fact that you're seeing things in a slightly different light just like the poster said above a person can mistake for enlightenment/a message from the Aztec plant gods (the ayahuasca people are among the most fucking insufferable in the world) or whatever just because it highlights subjectivity of things in a different way than your day-to-day thinking.
This really fucks with peoples heads who do it a lot and they wound up "spun out" to "burnt out," usually these like autist levels of social interaction but usually very kind and gentle although some people get extremely grandiose and manic and even dangerous. The scene can be really scary sometimes. Even when Jerry was alive it was totally fucked and now it's basically just an open-air drug market with a sideshow of music not the other way round and a way for degenerate kids to live on the margins of society. Mostly too-smart-for-their-own good white trash kids with a dash of preppies slumming it...really not that different a demographic from marginal Internet scenes tbh.
I have shittons of stories about these people that could probably go in the Personal Lolcow thread. I left the scene before social media really took off in the extreme so idk about their internet presence but I am certain there is a whole herd of lolcows and lolcalves out there. There used to be a really primitive bbs type site for Phish tour which used to have some really funny threads.
There is also this really long apocryphal story by some guy named
Chinacat72 on the Shroomery (here:
https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/1427364 about getting LSD "thumbprints" (i.e. sticking your thumb in crystal LSD; remember that a good dose of LSD is like one quarter of a milligram. So we're talking a huge dose) and being initiated into the "Grateful Dead Family" and such. He is lying his ass off 100% as someone who's traveled in those circles but really contributed to this grandiose myth of "spreading the love/enlightenment by selling LSD" that the gypsy freaks at shows and festivals buy into sometimes. It's bullshit; there's no such thing as "crystal lines" (white fluff, silver, whatever) it's all marketing and all capitalism; the kids on the top are living in fancy houses out in Northern California and now usually getting shit from overseas (getting the precursors to LSD domestically attracts attention and it is not an easy synth to do you need probably at least the equivalent of a BS in Chem's worth of knowledge to even start to begin to pull it off; it's not like cooking meth or simple cathinones or even MDMA) but make this whole heroic story about themselves. And they take a lot of their own product which in their own minds increases the grandiosity (supposed ego death lol) and everyone down the line gets caught up in the hype and delusion.
It is, as I said, a sad and utterly frightening place sometimes. A lot of the low level people are total gangsters. Yes, people do pull off armed robberies on each other and beat people up and forcibly dose them with sanity-destroying amounts of LSD. It is an incredibly insular world that the outside world really knows next to nothing about. There was one documentray, I believe it was called
Dreadheads or something like that that sort of shows a little bit of the total madness but really, you have to have been there. I could go on for hours about this stuff. Now that drugs are available easily for stupid people online things are a little different, that scene was dying when I left and that was before Silk Road et al. (although secret online forums for selling drugs were a thing...
that was a scene with some lolcows and scammers and flying accusations of pedophelia and just a lot of wtf.) So I am sure stuff is different now. To a degree. But I'm sure the lot lizard degens are still doing their thing.
There are also a lot of really exceptional people on the drug boards like Bluelight and DrugsForum and they show their exceptionality even more in their general/social/talk forums/threads and in the way that the equally drug-deranged mods run the show. DrugsForum used to have a members-only board for selling drugs, I think that's gone, Bluelight is super strict about not selling drugs online but they have a big cast of spergs and weirdos. Sites like the Shroomery and another hippie site that I forget the name of have even more.
Earth & Fire Erowid OTOH are great people online and off. Very smart and pretty moderate at least days in their own consumption and they make a lovely couple. Way too many West Coast hipsterpie Burning Man vibes though honestly for me to fuck with them a lot but we've met (I've met and hung out with most of the celebrities including Sasha Shulgin...who was a really great man but you could tell on the inside looking at the culture that his inventions/discoveries lead to was full of WTF IS THIS SHIT) ... and all the guys like Rick Doblin from MAPS and Neal Goldsmith in NYC are huge hedonists who like weed cocaine and starry eyed college aged young women and are a #MeToo waiting to happen.
