Hmm, I quite like drugs and do think they can be used with a net benefit. I secretly think any adult would be better off having a strong mushroom trip. Though obviously drugs can be the subject of an addiction - which is often detrimental to starting and running a business. I will give my experience and thoughts on psychedelics, since they are what I know best.
Introspective and meditative use of psychedelics can provide the user with powerful, objective, self-knowledge.
The first time I took a psychedelic was psilocybin mushrooms in a casino when I was 19. Just for a bit of context, up to that point in my life I saw no reason to try in school or to go to university. I didn't care about my future and I never thought about it. I had a basic job that I hated and was saving to buy an old japanese car. That was my goal, the car.
I ate a bunch of mushroom power capsules, it was supposedly about 3.5 grams but from subsequent mushroom trips I would guess it was closer to 2g. Down in the casino I didn't bet, drink or talk, just observed really. I couldn't explain how I felt at the time but in reflection it was like I was free of my ego for the first time. This mask I had built to withstand the pangs of teenage life had lifted and I was viewing life as it was. All my teenage angst and fear was removed temporarily - as if to show me how I could be.
I quickly got on with living the next day, I had a music festival to go to. I hadn't given myself the time to stop and think of what I'd just experienced.
Months later I had been thinking about life. Thinking about how I fit in, who and what I am. I had bought a bunch of books on eastern philosophy and spirituality, I was so open to the world for the first time. I began to meditate and think. I read the ideas on all the great philosophers and probed the minds of anyone who I thought understand what was going on. I felt that I was absorbing information and creating a real understanding of myself and the world for the first time. I felt smart, like I could know anything that another man could know. I enrolled in university, to study financial planning, economics and investment, I rationalised this decision based on the fact that it would make me money. I still expected no joy from work.
At this point I was struggling with the idea that a drug may have produced the most profound and positive change in my life's path. I thought about my trajectory plotted over a chart, "surely now I am aiming far higher than I was before" I thought, "and even if I fail, and fall short of my goals, I will have learned". At this point I was full of confidence and vigor, I knew it in myself that if I worked hard I could achieve my goals.
I was still intrigued by psychedelics and wanted to try mushrooms alone and in nature. It seemed I would understand more in this environment. I ingested 3.5g of dried mushrooms and tried to calm myself for what was to come. After about 40 minutes of games and music I felt nothing. I sat and meditated, each breath I felt my body calm, waves of energy flowed from the top of my head to where I sat. It was odd, I got the same feeling when I meditated usually, but the feeling was usually fleeting. But now each wave grew bigger and more obvious. I was in 'psychedelic space' for a 2 hours, just sitting, alert by completely inside my head. Imagery was projected into my mind's eye as associated with thoughts. I remember red tendrils of light reaching into the middle of my minds black canvas when my thoughts turned to an act of sexual abuse from my childhood, it was something I hadn't thought about in years. I guess this is what trauma is? I don't know, I never felt as if it affected me. In any case, I relived the whole event, in incredible detail, but from the perspective of something that wasn't me. It was like a lucid dream of a real event in my life. I experienced it again but it with compassion and pity for the perpetrator. Immediately after that thought was complete glorious blue and white light shone through a great wave of pleasure ran through my body, I was ecstatic. I sat for a while longer and enjoyed the seemingly infinite access I had to my knowledge. Facts and concepts combined within my mind without direction to form understandings and ideas. I can only analogise this with the part in The Matrix where Neo asks for guns..
Anyway, I've done psychedelics since and always find something different. Once I took mushrooms and sat on a quiet beach under the moon. I got lost in a train of thought that took me right to the essence of the universe. From their my mind took me through different levels of 'what I know' to rebuild reality. All the essential bits were explained from the bottom up. The infinite space and mass of the universe, the dynamics of our world and solar system, life on earth in all its forms, human life and society and finally my friends, family and self. All explained internally more eloquently and succinctly than I ever could externally.
Much of what I wrote are personal accounts and probably uninteresting to people. I take modafinil and weed irregularly and i'm working on a business - probably should have gone into those more. Though I think psychedelics can be profoundly beneficial for entrepreneurs and anyone really. And the stats agree, check out MAPS and the research of psychedelics, there's some strong data for one-time use life benefits. It's just mind-opening stuff.
If I could give any advice to anyone thinking of doing psychedelics it would be to just let go.