Disclaimer: All readers should prioritize the warnings of medical professionals over this tripper’s suggestions. Drop with caution.

I was a nerdy, spastic, approval-seeking kid. I probably still am, but we’re all too good at deceiving ourselves into thinking we’re perfect at the present. My sweater cuffs had holes and snot stains, my glasses were already quite thick and if I was cool, I didn’t know it.

By no means was I any sort of bad boy or rebel, yet in the eighth grade I became a sort of outcast in my small, everyone-knows-each-other-and-word-about-everything-gets-around, upper-class-white, lower-class-Mexican maths and tech magnet school.

The catalyst: when I asked the sketchiest dude I knew where I could get some magic mushrooms.“Mushrooms are too much for you. Do you want to just smoke some weed instead?”

I was interested in mushrooms because they grew naturally and could be ingested instead of smoked. At the time, smoking something felt awfully intense, kind of like how now snorting something feels more intense than smoking it and injection takes the cake. What did I know? I had no clue about drugs on the street.

I was chasing an experience: the mind-expanding and perception-altering trips that I first learned of while reading that online staple, Erowid.com. I read that mushrooms could make you hallucinate and all you had to do was eat them. I was in, but if weed was all I could get, weed would do.

A few days later I skipped my PE class, went to “The Ditch” — a large, open piece of land in between the local hospital and some standard Orange County suburbs — and smoked my brains out using an apple. All I remember was laughing uncontrollably, branding and being branded by a friend with a burning twig and laughing uncontrollably again at Carl’s Jr.

I was hooked.

Fast forward a couple years and I finally got a hold of some mushrooms. I think I took around five grams. At some point during the upswing of psychedelic confusion, some bastard gave me a pill and told me it would make things better. The next thing I knew I was rolling around and screaming in the back seat of a car while my friends tried to convince me to have a good time. Everything was purple. I was in a perverted “Looney Tunes” universe. Then I suddenly found myself in Chik-Fil-A, staring wide-eyed at the cashier, trying to understand the difference between us.  I later realized the difference was gender, a concept that I lost hold of during that trip.

This is an opinion piece so I’ll say it plainly: If you haven’t yet, you should put this at the top of your to-do list. Buy a tab of acid, cut it into quarters and put one under your tongue.

I’ll get to the point now. What I’ve detailed above seems typical of the experience of someone looking for psychedelics. Confusing, intense, fun and trippy. Certainly there are other more tangible, coherent aspects of psychedelic trips that serious fans can attest to: experiencing divinity, unity, bliss, synesthesia, cool visuals and whatever. But not everyone is looking for that, and if they are, always lingering behind the promise of an educational experience is the possibility of a “bad trip.” So to those with ambivalent or skeptical feelings about psychedelics, tripping remains just not worth it.

Enter microdosing. Ah, microdosing: a true game changer. The missing link. No longer do psychedelics have to be exclusively for those prepared for an intense, mind melting experience. Microdosing is exactly what it sounds like: taking a small amount of some sort of drug (for our purposes, psychedelics).

You might have heard recent news about Silicon Valley techies or business/professional people microdosing LSD as a tool for focusing and enhancing their creativity. If not, you have now. When used at a nearly sub-perceptual amount, LSD can offer an experience quite different from what you’d expect out of a psychedelic, and people from unexpected places are catching onto this and trying it out.

So what’s it like? Well, there’s a feeling of buzzing, physical energy (like caffeine or maybe nicotine), improved focus and attention (like Adderall or Ritalin), an increase in creativity (like marijuana) and a lowering of social inhibitions (like, though much more appropriate than, alcohol).

Here’s why that should excite you: first because a quarter tab of acid will cost you much less in terms of health and finance than a concoction of pills, coffee, cigarettes, pot and booze; second because it includes that unique spiritual touch offered by psychedelics and finally because there is a nearly impossible chance of things getting out of control.

This is an opinion piece so I’ll say it plainly: If you haven’t yet, you should put this at the top of your to-do list. Buy a tab of acid, cut it into quarters and put one under your tongue.

Art by Arthur Nguyen / Daily Nexus

Am I wrong or does the zeitgeist of today contain a healthy amount of distrust for the drug regulations in our country? Maybe these regulations keep us safe, but it also looks like they help maintain a system of modern slave labor afforded by incarceration.

It looks like these regulations are put in place to give market priority to the highest bidder; it’s not cheap to join pharmaceuticals, and legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco are in the exclusive Top Killers in America Club. It looks like these regulations stifle individual freedom and subversive culture. And it definitely looks like these regulations ruin some good old fashioned fun.

I have a lot of faith in us as students, young shakers and movers. I assume that we consider those laws which tell us what we can or can’t do to our own bodies as flexible suggestions, understanding that a government issued “For Your Own Good” is often a two sided coin, the other, heavier side being “For OUR Own Good.”

I assume that one’s reasons for not trying psychedelic drugs are based on disinterest in the stereotypical psychedelic trip or based on the personal reason it might pose as a risk to one’s mental health. I hope that we don’t avoid it just because it’s illegal. I would love to pass on the message that a psychedelic experience is not simply what it has been stigmatized as, but rather a whole spectrum of experience.

Consider dropping a tab an act of defiance against the boring old geezers who have spent OUR money and livelihood building themselves castles made of sand.

Scientific and anecdotal reports have suggested that psychedelics can help treat depression, anxiety and alcoholism. Brain scans of people on psychedelics show reduced activity in commonly used neural pathways, explaining why people on psychedelics often find new solutions to old problems and feel relieved of the classic “Burden of Self.” I’ll attest to psychedelics personally, as they helped treat my ailments of taking life too seriously, worshipping money and status, seeing others only in terms of how they affect me and feeling separate from nature.

Our generation will soon be handed control over the world. It’s a simple fact; the old guys are all going to die soon and we will have to pick up the scraps and try to save our planet and souls. If you find yourself interested in taking a psychedelic but feel hesitant because of the laws against them, please say screw it and do it.

Consider dropping a tab an act of defiance against the boring old geezers who have spent OUR money and livelihood building themselves castles made of sand. Consider it a signature on a new petition to sign yourself up for a new experience and prioritize curiosity over fear of convention.

Even if you only feel interested in psychedelics for the purpose of increasing your focus and creativity, don’t write off feelings of divine purpose, love for all mankind and the sacredness of nature, because the voices telling you to hold other things higher are the same voices that created this shit show in the first place. They’re the voices of greed, money, power, conquest and self-interest.

Please don’t consider me crazy when I say that honestly, in order to save our world, we all need to get trippier.

Eden Loi encourages you, the reader, to get trippy.