(This is a somewhat lengthy post, but I hope it will be interesting to those who are curious about some of the reasons why some people make rational decisions to use drugs, and even to adopt drug use as one aspect of their lifestyle, particularly when that person is on the autistic spectrum)
I approach all drug use in an experimental frame of mind, with regard to the drug's potential for use as a personal development tool.
Long before diagnosis, I vaguely recognised that I had certain social and perceptual problems when compared to other people, and so (while I didn't mind being regarded as a little 'odd', and indeed actively encouraged such perceptions on occasion) I determined to investigate these on my own, and perception-altering drugs seemed the ideal route through which to mount such an exploration.
This started out (as most drug use does) with smoking cannabis, at the age of about 18 (when I was just embarking on my adult social life).
It was common in my social circle and so I had easy access to it and frequently used it in social settings, the most enjoyable of which were the long evenings (sometimes extending to the next morning, depending on how energetic participants were). spent hanging around someone's house, with wine on the go and music in the background, chatting about life in general.
Such prolonged chats occasionally got quite philosophical (of course, with the benefit of hindsight, a lot of it was very immature, and sometimes complete nonsense, but it was useful experience in the art of abstract discussion) and during them people often felt comfortable with revealing some of the more private aspects of their personalities, which was useful to me in the sense that it enhanced my perspective on other people's 'depths' in general (even though they might not be readily observable) and made me more prepared to engage with people in general on a deeper level when the situation arose.
(I hasten to add that I didn't approach such experiences on a purely calculating level -- I also enjoyed them for what they were on a personal basis and sometimes developed personal friendships out of them (indeed I met my first proper partner this way)).
I found that cannabis use tended overall to make me more relaxed and empathic in my interpersonal skills, so I continued to use it off and on over the next decade or so, until for some reason I started having adverse reactions to it, meaning that my experience of being 'stoned' developed an overwhelming tendency toward the negative -- paranoia, strongly delusional thinking, anxiety, panic attacks, etc -- and so ultimately I stopped using it, because it was too much risk. (I wonder now whether that change in my reaction was due to some change in the psychoactive qualities of the cannabis that was available at the time (this was during the period of scare-stories about 'super skunk' in the British media), but I suppose I'll never know).
It served its purpose in helping me to develop as a person, and I'm glad I did it.
During this time, I also went through an acid phase while I was an undergraduate. I had always been highly curious about LSD (not least because I had read about its experimental application in psychiatry and psychoanalysis, but also because it sounded very 'out there' (and fun)). With a suitably acid-experienced housemate as 'guide' during my trips, I found LSD use very enjoyable for the altered perceptions it created, often involving sudden and profound insights into the workings of my mind and social interaction in general.
Again, this was generally explored in a social way (groups of trippers sitting around and chatting) and conversation under its influence provided further understanding of how I perceived and reacted to other people. One particularly memorable occasion involved a long session of music-accompanied chat, during which one of the trippers suddenly expressed some severely racist viewpoints: No-one reacted with horror or outrage, or became in any way hostile to that person, but the conversation continued smoothly and the opinions were taken up as a general area of discussion, with most people simply being curious about why the speaker held such extreme positions, and after it was explored at length the original speaker expressed his sincere puzzlement at not being able to justify his stance, said it now seemed a bit ridiculous to him, and said he would try to 'get over it' -- this (to my mind) was a very good example of how LSD use could have a directly-appreciable therapeutic value.
This LSD phase was highly useful in my personal development: Not only did it provide me with direct experience of exactly how much 'personality' was a social construct and could therefore be altered by other people's reactions to it, and how fluid and changeable personal perceptions could be (which I put into practice during my 'sober' life by adopting a practice of interrogating my initial perception of something or someone, which was highly suited to an occasional introvert like me), it enhanced my personal appreciation of the sheer artificiality of some social structures (particularly the law and the capitalist system), and my understanding of how unconscious processes could occasionally be observed in action (if you paid attention to your own chains of thought), one practical aspect of which was that I began to counter my tendency to be unable to maintain conversations by engaging in techniques broadly-describable as 'free association'.
It also led me to perceive and engage with the strongly homosexual side of my personality, which became obvious to me under the influence of LSD, and which I had only previously experienced fleetingly (frequent but unpursued homoerotic 'crushes' for example) and had never begun to explore, and this had longterm effects (lasting to the present) on how I subsequently lived my life (I didn't experience any sense of shame or guilt over this, and 'came out' to family and friends as soon as I realised it was true, even though I had not at that stage had a single homosexual encounter).
I stopped using LSD after I had a seriously bad trip, caused by a stupidly ill-judged decision (it was a friend's idea, and I naively went along with it) to 'come out' as bisexual while tripping with a group of friends. It never got as far as that stage because the anxiety and paranoia I experienced reduced me to mute terror, while everyone else carried on in complete ignorance. Those who have never been through a 'bad trip' can have no idea of the hellish dimensions it can assume, and I still remember the experience shudderingly. I haven't touched LSD since.
My drug use dried up for a bit after I had abandoned cannabis and LSD, although I tried amphetamines (useful if you want to be highly interactive in a social situation, but which I judged to have little or no use as a personal development tool) and cocaine (which is highly enjoyable, but leads to very shallow personal perceptions during use, and tends to make users into boring self-obsessed a***holes, and is therefore similarly of limited use).
My discovery of ecstasy in my 30s was a bombshell. Since I don't dance, and because it was generally regarded as a 'clubbing drug', I had never bothered with it. Now I had access to a drug that made me highly-empathic while simultaneously heightening the pleasurableness of personal interaction. Although I know it was illusory, I frequently experienced social situations as being permeated by a sort of 'force field', within which I felt greatly aware of the invisible social threads that connect people and the vast potential for social encounters within that 'force field', and I assume (from discussion with NT ecstasy users) that this is somewhat akin to the perception of social situations by sober NT people -- i.e., they appreciate on an instinctual level the quality and character (you might almost say the 'spirit') of a social context, something which is normally not a perception available to a person with ASD, who tends to regard such situations as chaotic but tolerable (at best) or as overwhelming and distressing (at worst).
Since ecstasy use greatly enhanced the optimism with which I approach personal interaction, and directly-increased my perception of (and spontaneous reactions to) the emotional states of others (not least because of heightened responsiveness to the unspoken cues of others, such as fleetingly-observable types of body language or briefly-passing facial expressions that reflect unspoken thought-processes) -- this being learned while under the influence of ecstasy and that learning then being applied during sober experience in day-to-day life -- I regard ecstasy as being the most useful drug I can imagine as a personal development tool for people with ASDs and would strongly recommend its use by others in such situations.
I realise that this is perhaps not a very responsible attitude to hold toward the use of class-A drugs, but it is my sincerely-held opinion.
I continue to use ecstasy on occasion for reasons that now tend toward the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, and cannot foresee a time when I might discontinue use (although this could obviously happen at some unforeseeable point in the future, perhaps because I will simply 'grow out of it').
TLDR: Drugs can be both fun and useful for an ASD person, and can provide portals (not available to the drug-naïve) to the greater understanding of one's social self, and how one's personal interactions may be modified or adapted, bypassing the often strictly-logical approaches taken by people with ASDs toward their own social development.
19 Nov 2013, 5:30 am
