Anyone else have a somewhat negative view on psychedelics?

I'm going to preface this by saying all drugs absolutely should be decriminalized, and the thought of someone going to jail for possessing or selling LSD is absolutely bonkers. Also, psychedelic drugs can have amazing therapeutic abilities for many people. What I am about to share is not everyone's experience, so please don't take this as a blanket statement.

I did a fair amount of acid and shrooms in my late teens and early 20s. And at that point in time, I treated it like some sort of enlightening/spiritual experience. I felt like I was connecting with some sort of higher power to guide me through life. I eventually realized this was just my own brain tricking itself into believing my own bullshit. But it's such a vivid experience, that it's really hard to see that when you experience such an indescribable trip.

Maybe part of it was the context of where we were and who I tripped with (grew up in the sticks in northern MD), but a lot of the thoughts and conversations that were had on my trips were a mix between spirituality and conspiracism. There was always an air of anti-intellectualism and "don't trust the media" type of thinking. Most of those people who I tripped with went full Qanon later on down the line. And from what I've seen, so has a large portion of the psychedelic community.

Psychedelics have a bizarre way of destroying your ego, and then rebuilding it tenfold. The conversation about them often centers around the ego death part of a trip, but rarely about how when you come back from that trip, you sometimes develop what I've heard referred to as a "spiritual ego." For those who are unfamiliar, this is the concept of someone thinking they're above everyone else because they stepped outside the confines of normal human consciousness. It's such a bizarre oxymoron, and it's an easy gateway for nasty stuff like alternative medicine, anti-intellectualism, anti-education, a whole slew of Qanon related garbage. Just look at Joe Rogan for evidence.

Robert has talked numerous times on his show about how many neo-nazis got their inspiration through psychedelic trips, and although I personally haven't known anyone who went down that branch of the alt right pipeline, I have absolutely no trouble believing it. They have such a bizarre way of confirming your own pre-existing biases, while convincing you you're discovering something new. And while the drug war and suppression of these substances is probably directly responsible for the "government and media are lying and controlled by <insert mildly antisemitic stand-in boogeyman here>" aspect of psychedelic culture, I honestly don't know what the correct answer is moving forward. But I am so scared by how RFK and that specific branch of the right is now embracing psychedelics, after Republicans spent more than half a century pointing the finger at them and lumping them in with the "radical left."

I'm not completely opposed to psychedelics. If a good opportunity presented itself to me, I might consider taking shrooms again, after not tripping since the beginning of the pandemic. But I just think they need to be seen as what they are- the very definition of chaotic neutral, which can easily be swayed in a multitude of different directions.