[pseud0r]

Objectively useless and destructive drug is quite a statement, when there is a lot of research that suggests it can have positive effects.

It doesn't kill you, nor does it irreparably alter your personality in a completely senseless way. There are studies that suggest people who has tried LSD has their personality altered in a positive way, in that they're more open to new ideas afterwards. It is true though, that some people get very enthusiastic when they first try LSD, some overly so.

I know a lot of people who do LSD now and then and the vast majority of them are successful upper middle class people who's had no ill effects and lots of positive ones.

There are also many people who's successfully used LSD as a problem solving aid http://archive.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/01/70...

That's not to say people don't have negative experiences though and I don't think LSD is for everyone. Some people freak out completely by even small changes in their perceptual experience for example, though usually not if they know the basic of how LSD works and how the mind works. A very useful thing to know is that what we experience as reality is basically just one view of the underlying data from a set of sensors (our senses), there's a neural net with multiple layers that starts with simple things like edge detection or whatever and builds up the 3D model we consciously experience from a mix of the external data, but also internal data, etc., there's no right or wrong view of this data, we could have evolved to experience it completely different and we can make computer program to visualize data in numerous different ways and on psychedelics you can experience things a bit differently from what you're used to. The reason it's useful to know some of this is because if you experience something strange when doing psychedelics, you'll know you're not being kidnapped by aliens, going insane, talking to god or whatever weird thing that some people sometimes seem to think.