Yeah, that was my experience. All those stories made me more curious about drugs than anything else even back in elementary school. Also, having people that used to have addiction problems come in to talk about them showed that you could get through them.

Also didn’t really help that the one guy’s description of things going wrong for him was basically a bus ride with a hangover where he needed to puke out the window. And that he still did it after that, implying that there was something good about it.

It wasn’t DARE exactly but some Canadian equivalent. I hadn’t really thought about drugs that much before that and didn’t shy away when I had an opportunity to try weed a few years later (thought it was interesting but not worth the money at the time).

Also it only took taking psychedelics a few times to figure out the real problem authority has with them: they can help you break down your preconceived notions and see through the leaps of “logic” that the current system depends on.

Like the first time I did mushrooms, I realized that authority figures (like doctors, police, etc) were just people like you or me and included people having bad days, people not focused on the current task, people who cheated their way through school or got to where they were via corruption, people who think they understand something better than they really do or base their knowledge on outdated information, trolls and bullies, as well as people trying their best in good faith.

It was so obvious in hindsight, but I realized that up until then I had this implicit trust that even if there were times I didn’t fully agree with them, they were generally “different” in a “better” kind of way instead of a spectrum of the same kind of people you went to high school with, just with a selection process that is supposed to filter some out (with varying degrees of success).