Like a few others here, I used to be a hardcore pot smoker for a couple years. I quit when I realized that it was sapping my energy and my social skills. But, I still am glad that I did smoke, and I still do it once in a while.
I agree that experiencing altered states of consciousness affect your perceptions long-term, and that's why I think having those experiences are so valuable.
The way I look at it, our perceptions of reality are not reality. Sometimes you find new information or have a new experience that changes how you look at the world from that point on. This can involve "drugs" or not. An example I like to use is that what we see with our eyes is not all of what is available for seeing. Imagine if you had another set of eyes that could see the infrared spectrum, and a third set of eyes that could see the ultraviolet spectrum of light. What we percieve as "reality" - what is really actually there, is only a small part of what we know from science to be actually there.
There are obviously unanswered questions in science, and we may never know the full nature of reality because we may never develop instruments that can detect all of it (either evolved in our bodies or second-hand through man-made objects).
The way I feel about alcohol, marijuana, and especially halucinogens is that they truly do "expand our consciousness" by showing us how we would percieve the world if the arbitrary configurations of chemical levels in our brains were different, and thus get us closer to the ever-elusive "objective reality" that so many people think they already can see.
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