Many artists imagine mind-altering substances are a help to their talents.
I say, if that were true, we would have already heard about it from Chazal. If anything, we learn the opposite (פסחים קי”ג א’ לא תשתי סמא).
The following is based on Gary North:
William Blake’s wrote: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: Infinite”. Aldous began experimenting with psychedelic drugs in 1952. In 1954, Aldous Huxley published a book defending the use of psychedelic drugs titled: “The Doors of Perception.” Jim Morrison, who died a heroin addict at the age of 27, named his group “The Doors,” in honor of the Blake/Huxley phrase.
Huxley died on November 22, 1963. A week before he died, under the influence of a sedative, Huxley spoke into a tape recorder operated by his wife. He admitted:
. . . When one thinks one’s got beyond oneself, one hasn’t. . . . I began with this marvelous sense of this cosmic gift and then ended up with a rueful sense that one can be deceived. . . . It was an insight, but at the same time the most dangerous of errors . . . inasmuch as one was worshipping oneself.
[Quoted in R. C. Zaener, Zen, Drugs and Mysticism (New York: Pantheon, 1972), p. 108.]