I'm a fairly recent college grad, early 20's, working at a Big-4. I don't smoke anymore and I'm extremely only social drinker, maybe a beer or two a month. Which is ironic because I used to love psychedelics (LSD, Shrooms, DMT), have smoked tons of weed, drank a ton in college.

I was mostly attracted to psychedelics. There were alot of various reason(s), but mostly because they allowed me to perceive the world in new and interesting ways. (I always laugh when I'm asked a question about recursion in a interview because theirs nothing like having a intuitive understanding what infinity feels like because I've literally transformed into the Fibonacci Sequence and rode it for an eternity in a DMT trip.) Psychedelics are different from other drugs, when you do a psychedelic it's an experience. You can have life-changing breakthroughs which completely alter they way you view your normal day-to-day life. I've had my fair share of them, and I think I generally owe alot of my success to falling down the rabbit-hole a few times. Those of you who've been there can probably understand...

There's alot of misinformation about drugs, some of the "harder" drugs you can do pretty safely without any physical harm to your brain. Some "normal" drugs like alcohol can quite easily cause "brain damage." I'll leave you with the same advice my mom gave me: "It's your body you can do whatever you want to it." It's true, you can very much do drugs (almost any sort of drug) and be not cause much or any damage to your brain assuming your smart about your dosage, timing, frequency etc but you can also very much ruin your intelligence if you decide to not be smart about them.