I had the full college experience with the line also drawn at needles. I cannot recommend MDMA on a weekly basis for 10 months unless it’s all an elaborate scheme to end up winning a national award for a column about your first suicide attempt.

The middle part was fun … I alternated my home base in Seattle with a girlfriend in Victoria, had dropped out of college for the second time to work at a startup, and quit that six weeks in at the end of a meeting at which it was disclosed we were discontinuing all of the projects that differentiated the company.

We met on the NWTekno message board and enjoyed each others’ company sufficiently for me to head up there for the first time and miss the final ferry for the day from Port Angeles by five minutes. So I did what any reasonable person would and chartered an international flight. Unfortunately, my sole threesome ended poorly, and the only solace I could find was in buying my groceries one last time with an extremely strong U.S. dollar.

Never really made a habit of anything but E, though I turned 21 less than two weeks after waking up in the ICU with a collapsed lung, allowing me to fully explore alcoholism for 20-plus years.

I did shrooms for functionally the first time (I don’t count mixing them with other things once as a comparable experience) in December, and wow, had that been exactly what I needed to fully give up drinking. I never liked pot, despite my second ex-wife being always stoned, but I’ve found D8 to be perfect for the remaining low-grade body aches and irrational anxiety that the shrooms couldn’t help on.

I’ve rolled twice in the past decade, both times with dating partners, and I would do so again if a connection opportunity presented itself. But I’m well past getting fucked up beyond recognition for its own sake or trying to interact with strangers while high.

Drugs are tools. The manner in which they’re used is what makes them good or bad for the user.