Ideas and psychotropic/Entheogenic drugs:

It's relatively easy and safe to assent to a view, an idea or ideology half-grasped, to *agree* with something; it's quite another to reason and come to know something to be so by weighing, assessing by tooling through something; to believe is also different from "assention"; simple assenting does not lead to Ascension, to Redemption (there's some implication of the Baal T'shuva experience/Ger experience, but also all forms of "Conversion"). There is a level of "commitment to the consequences" when one begins with reasoning, with deliberation instead of belief or assent (to a degree, there is a base point where there is unmediate 'belief', where the "Givens", Dooyeweerd's Ground Motives, something like Plantinga's Properly Basic Beliefs). There are mind-expanding ideas (among many other kinds of ideas; many are derivative from more powerful, stupifying or expanding ideas, but these are just two kinds), and there is some corollary to "drugs" in this sense. There are also at times and places (in species as well as individual life), where certain seemingly destructive ideas (destructive in that they may challenge contingent ideas or beliefs, or states of mood or mind, whether comfy or in need of weeding), that, taken properly, can have mind-expanding consequences *when certain circumstances exist*; certain drugs thatm with proper "concentration" (Kavanna, jewishly speaking), can do amazing things FOR someone, not against them, in deconstructing what existed before in their mind or body; antibiotics, certain psychoactive drugs in the minds of Psychotics, anti-depressant drugs, etc. But also remember there was a time when sucessful and promising research was being done in the use of Entheogenic substances and chemically-derived ones (LSD is a now-infamous example), in treating some of the above-mentioned mental afflictions (Cleansing the doors of perception, Huston Smith).
Throughout history various animals, vegetables and minerals have been used to affect prime changes in mind and mood, and ideas theories and beliefs (in no particular order; also regardless of their coorespondence to objective reality), work on a very similar level. Jewishly speaking, there's sort of an Alchemy or magic of action and word in this world, that is acknowledged to have affects in the inner worlds in society and other people (and in changing the deepest innards, it reverberates to the furthest "outards", to the more substantive spiritual worlds where we are nested); improper/proper speech, thoughtless or thoughtful action, is considered to have Concrete affects in higher, more "existing" worlds. Maybe more later