> my wife who spent the best part of a decade dealing with drug addicts. Here's the problem with the experience of your wife (or anyone in medicine): selection

> my wife who spent the best part of a decade dealing with drug addicts. Here's the problem with the experience of your wife (or anyone in medicine): selection bias. She only sees drug users whose use is a problem. Even if positive drug experiences outnumbered negative ones ten-to-one, a hundred-to-one or even a million-to-one your wife would still have the same subjective impression: that all the drug users she sees are people who can't handle it. Same thing with the police officers. If somebody does drugs a few times and finds it a positive life experience, they probably don't go to a hospital or deal with cops. Steve Jobs claimed taking LSD was one of the most important experiences in his life - he took it a dozen or so times (and smoked pot weekly for about 5 years). Many other people have made major creative breakthroughs or used these drugs to successfully deal with PTSD or depression. There is an upside. Your wife's experience by its very nature will never encounter that upside. So what she tells you is data, but not definitive data. You need to put it in a larger context to reach conclusions...which is where large-scale studies, Portugal and the rest comes in.