I take illegal drugs for inspiration

I don't agree at all. Many people's brains are "broken" without drugs--depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, etc. The default state isn't always perfect. Who's to say the drugs are the bug? Maybe they're a patch.

Some people like to eat for the taste, not the sustenance. Some people like to get high for the shift in perspective, not to get high. Some people like to drink wine for the taste, not to get sauced.

And some people do go to strip clubs for non-standard reasons. When I was going through my nude photography hobby phase, I went for inspiration and ideas. Of course, I met my wife there so I went for that as well.

Some of the most "beautiful" code I've written has been under the influence. The document and video encoding system we used at massify, a self-scaling multi-format disconnected conversion cloud, was designed and built in a very stoned haze. It's been running by itself with 100% uptime and without human intervention or maintenance for 3 years now.

If you haven't done drugs, then you can't really comment on them. That would be like me having a strong opinion on a topic I've never studied or have practical experience with. In fact, probably everything you know about drugs is wrong.

What I've seen is a LOT of false enlightenment in a certain subculture. Hang out for a few hours with the drugged-out burnouts in Williamsburg, Brooklyn to get a sense of it. There's a certain arrogant, self-congratulatory nihilism in the "hipster" culture, and if it's taken more seriously than it deserves, it leads to some very bad places. Is it the drugs or the casual sex alone? Of course not, because drugs and sex are generally harmless (if not possibly beneficial) in moderation. It's a certain self-centered experience-chasing mindset that, for a variety of reasons, is very attractive to young people whose personalities and ideas haven't yet formed.

If people want to use drugs, then I have no problem with that. Certainly I think these chemicals should be legal and that their possible benefits should be researched. But the false enlightenment that I've seen some people fall into is dangerous. It kills a person's work ethic and leaves that person prey to mental illness. Does everyone who uses drugs fall into this pattern? Obviously, no. Do a lot of people who don't use drugs fall into it anyway? Certainly. I think that drugs make people who are exposed to that mentality and culture a lot more susceptible to falling into it, and that's the primary danger.

For the record, I think drug prohibition (which is immoral and should be ended) makes these drugs a lot more dangerous. A lot of people have to be connected to a depraved culture even to have regular access to these drugs. I've often thought that less dangerous than the chemicals themselves are the sorts of toxic people you can end up surrounding yourself with if you want regular, frequent access, due to the drugs' illegality.

Then I have to ask, on what do you base your opinion?

Some people take drugs as enhancers; perhaps that's like your analogy (though I'd replace "wheelchair" with "bike" or "car").

Some people takes drugs as normalizers. For example, people who have insufficient levels of serotonin or dopamine and are prone to clinical depression. That's like someone with broken legs using a wheelchair. Or like a diabetic taking insulin.

It's hard for people to know quite where they stand. To the best of my knowledge there's no good way to determine if someone has low levels of dopamine. Judging people as if they are taking drugs for the sake of enhancement presumes that person isn't in fact trying to compensate for a deficiency.

Curious that some people dislike the idea of chemical enhancement but have no problem with mechanical enhancement.

If taking drugs is like riding a bike or driving a car (or even using a wheelchair) instead of walking, why don't people disparage bike riding, etc.? I mean, you could have travelled that same distance without it, right?

No one gets upset because someone rides a bike for the fun of it, but somehow taking drugs for the fun of it is suspect, something you have to (gasp) admit to.