Thanks, your story of what led you to chemistry is interesting. As a child I would get an intense tingling in my stomach whenever reading chemistry, or rather, each time I learned a new fact which explained an aspect of our world. The highest and purest form of excitement, a feeling similar to "being in love" is the closest analogy I can think of.
Knowledge really is a thrill.
From around the age of 10 or 11, I knew for certain that chemistry would be my career. That didn't work out due to my parents having different plans for me but that's another story.
Sometime in my mid-teens I was in religious education class, which was mandatory when I was at school and on the walls of this class were various information posters for young people, probably because religious education also incorporated "moral education" and a bit of philosophy.
So, the one that happened to be right next to my desk was a drug information poster, warning of the dangers of various substances and their effects.
My parents had taught me nothing about drugs, other than "they're bad", "only bad people do them", "if you take drugs you will die or go crazy". There was no chance of me taking drugs due to the utter domination I lived under as a child but back to the point, this poster blew my mind.
Ostensibly it was anti-drug but reading the description of LSD gave me that tingling/butterflies feeling in my chest and stomach, much like chemistry did.
I read how LSD could allow the user to "see sounds and hear colours", I found that so incredibly fascinating that it triggered a lifelong interest in these substances, in that possibility, something so "other-worldly" in nature. Just that simple short description, intended to discourage teenagers from experimenting with drugs, raised so many questions about existence, the influence of substances on perception, about what is actually real, etc. although I knew that I couldn't take a drug because only "bad people" do that and my parents would be very disappointed, my father would give me a beating etc, my mother had also conditioned me to be scared of "chemicals" (she's neurotic and scared of just about everything.) The poster acted in the exact opposite way it was designed to.
Anyway, rambling story cut short, my interest in chemistry and specifically pharmacology never left me throughout the years and eventually I couldn't take it any longer and did my first straight-to-base extraction of DMT last year, experimented with mushrooms and a variety of other drugs. Now I realize that if I had simply tried mushrooms all those years ago, when I was still at school, I would have saved myself decades of misery in the iron-grip of OCD.
For me, nothing can compare in terms of excitement and raw visceral ecstasy, with the rush of wonder which accompanies the acquisition of a new piece of understanding about the world. Learning about man-made fields is enjoyable too but learning a new insight into computers or electronics or engineering just lacks the intensity of discovering about the world itself.
Mushroom culture started millennia ago, it was forgotten in Europe, perhaps destroyed by Christians. Wasson simply rediscovered it
"Cave murals in Spain 'show man may have used magic mushrooms 6,000 years ago'"
archive.is/W1rH
We also have the Eleusinian Mysteries, destroyed by Christians. The festival likely involved a drink containing ergot or mushrooms.
Man has grown up with psychedelics, interrupted temporarily by Abrahamic religion.