My tuppence: I was an average student, perhaps an underachiever - I was the youngest in my class... Anyway around about the closing years of high school I discovered the recreational joy of LSD, which I took despite superman comics warning me of the dangers. For a while I dropped out (3 years) and enjoyed a life that was devoid of computers (until that point I had spent all my time on 8bit then 16bit computers, leading up to an 8086 pc). I lived in a bedsit and had no outlook or any desire to "get a life". At some point during an acid trip, I found myself alone and spent a long time in introspection about where I was and where I would like to be. Long story short, fast forward 20 years, I'm married with a beautiful daughter, a great senior technical job with a very public FTSE 100 media company, a couple of irons in the fire with personal software projects I'm writing (in fact, I'm actually procrastinating here, I should be coding!) and a generally great life. If I had continued on my "wastrel" route those years ago, my life wouldn't have been as rosy (though perhaps less stressful). I attribute my conversion from waster to nerd entirely to my experiences with LSD. I thoroughly recommend it to others (though I will caution that I have seen downsides in some of my comrades, not deaths you understand, but longer lead-times to achieving their goals). This article (though lacking in specifics) does resonate very strongly with my life experience. Final question (to myself) would I use LSD again? Answer... not sure, I've done a whole lot of living in the last 20 years, not sure I want to reprogram the grey matter at this stage - maybe again in 10 years...