Feel free to be loose with your definitions. "Not usually considered a drug" is fine to qualify as "non-drug", for instance. I'm not really thinking so much of "foods", though, but maybe "food ingredients" and substances found in food ingredients are fine, especially if they're quasi-drug-like or if you'd get a lot of the same benefits/enjoyment from it consuming it straight rather than in food.

Also ITT, tell other users why their substances actually are drugs actually.

Mine:

• Chamomile - good for my mood and gives me vivid dreams.
• Capsaicin - I and Wilbur Scoville are well acquainted.
• Cacao - I don't really do cacao any more because I've quit caffeine, but I include it here because I still miss sucking on unsweetend baker's chocolate daily.

Melatonin

Incense.

Music. It's mind-altering and mood-altering.

Tea tree oil, that's the good stuff.

English Mustard. A nice thick layer of it, as in, thick enough that you question the structural integrity of the result, and everyone else questions your sanity, in a cheese (other fillings are available) sandwich will light your day up. The heat is different to capsaicin, you feel it more in your nose and sinuses, but it has a similar effect. You get a mild, giddy, flying feeling for a moment, then settle down into a haze of sensation. The endorphin (I assume it's endorphins anyway) release feels great, all my muscles relax, and it's a pretty good painkiller too.

Something in sleepytime tea hits me almost like a good indica. I think it's the valerian root, because regular chamomile tea doesn't do it.

Kava. I like to mix it with lavender, chamomile and valerian root for a very mellow calm.

Giving my pets scritches.

Ginger and Valerian (interestingly Valerian is the component of most bedtime teas that's associated with vivid dreams. You might actually be reacting to that, check the ingredient list on your tea or supplement).

It is if you're specifically getting sleepytime extra (it's the extra). It's likely gaba active iirc the limited research correctly. The newly sober from sedating drugs often use it for insomnia during the post-acute withdrawal period.

Nice try Mr. DEA.

https://featureassets.gocomics.com/assets/9ebc38b08e4f012f2fe200163e41dd5b

(https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/1973/08/06)

Yes sameee

Lemon Balm, Passionflower, and Lavander (as tea)

im addicted to soda. so that.

sold! that's the calm I'm up for

Gobs of honey and bit of lemon juice in hot water. I find it soothing and stimulating at the same time.

I've heard that some people add hard liquor to this, but I don't drink.

Also, a hot chocolate with oat milk.

I find myself actually needing coffee in the morning as I'm getting older.

Seconded. I like to slather steaks in english mustard. My partner and kids think I'm insane.

Another annual tradition for me is leftover Christmas ham, in white bread, with loads of english mustard, while sitting on my ass watching the cricket.

I'll push the boundary somewhat and nominate bitters. I enjoy bourbon and bitters, as in an old fashioned without the sugar. Earlier this year I purchased some Orinoco bitters, which are spiced - think cumin and cardamom. I've been alternating the tropical fruit flavours of the more traditional Angostura with the Orinoco. I must get my hands on some citrus bitters too.

Cheese. One of its ingredients, casein, can trigger opioid receptors.

meditation and early hypnangogic sleep stages, just watching my brain do weird brain shit. sometimes I get this insane, intense sensation of being/observing something formless and simultaneously infinitely large and infinitely small. like my location/place neurons doing some kind of existentially overwhelming hardware stress test lol

Starch.
Specifically, potato.
More specifically, fried somehow.

I really liked coca tea when I visited Peru. It's no stronger than caffeine and really does help adapting to altitude. I wouldn't really consider it a drug.

Green Leaf Kratom

It's the only antidepressant that works for me.

(Cannabis too if that counts.)

I don't know if you get Oatley brand oat milk where you are, but they do a chocolate milk. Steamed up with an espresso machine, just a little bit of cacao, a squirt of cold whipped cream, and you have yourself a little cup of heaven, my friend.

https://erowid.org/experiences/subs/exp_Cheese_Blue.shtml

Chocolate

Sugar. Would love to get rid of but for one it's everywhere and if I minimise I will suffer and be insufferable.

It's not a drug but sure has identical properties...

Oh, favourite. Well, it's a love hate abusive relationship.

I once spent an entire summer giving up as much sugar as possible. No sweets, minimal added sugar, minimal processed food, pretty much my only sugar was fruit. I ran every single day.

I was miserable. Insanely depressed, grumpy, exhausted, moody, awful cravings and just so generally unhappy. None of this "I quit sugar and now I'm so full of energy and feel so healthy and happy!" Absolutely the opposite. At the end of the summer I had lost exactly 4 lbs and it wasn't because I had gained muscle mass either.

Said fuck that, life is about balance and if I can't eat ice cream once in awhile it's not worth being alive. But sugar is absolutely addictive and it gave me a new perspective on anyone trying to quit anything like cigarettes or heroin.

I'm dealing with what I'm pretty sure is SIBO and am basically currently on a no suger diet, natural or added, and looking at the extreme low FOD map diet of no sugar, no gluten, no dairy for a while. It's really hard to avoid all added sugars, they put that shit in fucking everything and you can't trust the nutritional labels because they can say 0 grams of sugar per serving if the serving size is small enough. (Classic example is tic-tacs, ingredients are basically just sugar, but per serving size they can claim 0g of sugar because the serving size is one tic and one tac)

All that to say, cutting sugar out of your diet is definitely doable, and honestly I've never felt healthier about my diet as much as I hate how it's being restricted.
There are infinite ways to combine rice and beans and meats with spices that are nutritionally complete. You probably wouldn't have any issues with veggies either so that opens up the diet considerably.

I am having a hard time finding passionflower tea. Like just passionflower.

Is it sold in bulk at herbalists anywhere, maybe I will try that.

that's where i had to buy it. they sell out all the time. in a 500g bag

How is Kratom not a drug?

Have you got anything against vivid dreams?
I want complete darkness until my alarm goes off.
Now it is the 2AM "Weeeeee! I lost my pacifier" and the 5AM "Daddy can I sleep in your bed"...

I think kratom would meet the quasi-drug-but-not-a-drug condition set by OP since it is a drug but is largely unregulated and not legally a drug in a lot of places.

Its status now reminds me a lot of betel nut.

I love that erowid is still alive and kicking.

I'd have died in my 20s without it. Like, literally.

I love some spicy food, oh yeah.

Music and movement, dancing can feel like a drug.

Nothing OTC or supplement

Oh my gosh. I get violently ill and can't stay out of the bathroom when I eat sugar. (I've told people, "yeah, sugar makes me sick so I don't eat it". And they're like "oh yeah, me too, the sugar crash in the afternoon always makes me feel so blah." And I'm like "listen...".) I basically haven't eaten anything sweeter than a tomato in 20 years because it's super not worth it. I'd never heard of SIBO, and I don't have any letters after my name, but this SIBO thing sounds very much like my experience.

Not that having a name for my symptoms would really change much to speak of. It doesn't seem like there's much of a treatment for SIBO aside from eating in ways that don't trigger it. But hell. At this point, if there was a cure, I don't think I'd take it. I've only had one cavity in the last 20 years (and I suspect that actually wasn't a cavity but rather a resorption). Keeping my weight in a healthy range is way easier without sugar in my diet. My taste buds have adapted a lot and things that wouldn't taste remotely sweet to anyone else taste super sweet to me, so I don't feel deprived in that way. I have a lot more appreciation for more complex and stronger flavors like bitter, sour, spicy, etc. And I appreciate having that "biofeedback mechanism" that tells me (and not subtly) "hey, that's bad for you; cut it out".

(I cut gluten out of my diet the same time I cut sugar out of my diet and my symptoms abated. I've had a couple of times when I've had sources of sugar -- granny smith apples and bing cherries specifically -- and my symptoms came back. But I haven't had occasion to experiment with gluten to see if having gluten would give me symptoms again. I just haven't tried it, so I don't know if I'm sensitive to gluten or not. I don't make restaurants break out the gluten-free deep fryer or anything. I just ask them to leave the bun off my hamburger or whatever. But gluten is another thing that I just don't feel deprived for lack of and don't see how my life would improve any by putting gluten back in my diet. Maybe some day I'll have enough bread to figure out whether it affects me the same way, but I don't have any plan to do such an experiment any time soon.)

And, yeah. I can attest to your point that cutting sugar out of your diet is entirely doable. I virtually never miss it, and in the very rare cases when I do, it's more of a mild nostalgia than anything you might call a "craving".

Good call, but the chamomile I do is just bulk "Egyptian chamomile". Not any kind of a "sleepy-time tea" or anything like that.

In the past I've done Celestial Seasonings Sleeptytime Vanilla. Love the taste. It doesn't have any Valerian either, though.

I have done Cup of Calm by Traditional Medicinals which is a mix (it doesn't have any Valerian, though) but it's honestly a little stronger than I'd like. It'd be fine on a once-in-a-while basis, but I wouldn't want to do it daily.

I honestly don't know that I've ever consumed Valerian now that you mention it. 🤔 Maybe I'll try some sometime.

Especially in the early days of the recent Kratom "boom", I definitely heard a lot of people call it "not a drug". I think kindof in the same way as there are lots of psychoactive substances that people don't consider "drugs". (Chamomile that I listed in my OP, for instance. People feed that shit to their little kids and don't think of it even slightly like they think of alcohol or hard drugs or whatever. But that shit's a GABA agonist just like alcohol, GHB, and benzos. There's definitely a sense of the word "drug" in which chamomile is super duper for sure yes a drug.) I think mostly those folks were in deep denial. It's not just a drug, but a pretty concerning one for its addiction potential if nothing else. But still, I've heard people say it's "not a drug". So, yeah. I think it counts for purposes of this thread.

Staying up until 1 to 2 am. I feel more creative in the evening, but in the night, I don't have the energy to commit to a vision, so I just kind of imagine a few different things poorly

Oh boy!

Cacao is done better as KokoSamoa. Roast whole cocao beans until the air smells like hot cocoa. Then grind in a mortar and pestle and scoop into a ball. Let the ball solidify, then later, put it in a cup of hot water with sugar. It tastes like pure heaven. Zero dairy, and has a solidly just above mild euphoric feeling.

A tea of a little mugwort, a little wormwood, and star anise is bitter as fuck but will send you on a 30 minute swirly ride where your paredoilia is cranked up to 11. You can sweeten with honey, but it's not exactly a sipping tea. (wormwood can be toxic in high amounts, this is not withccraft advice, see a shaman if you experience swirling lasting more than 4 hours)

OP, chamomile and lavender are a great pair for calming. Chamomile, hibiscus, lemongrass and rosehip also do a good job at that. Camomile, lavender, mugwort and hops will send you to sleep and you'll enjoy some fun, vivid dreams.

Breathwork alone can easily get you to a weird, fun place.

And, of course, the smell of rain in the desert and fresh cut grass. To quote Hank Hill, "Why would anyone want to do drugs when you can just mow the lawn?"

Breathwork alone can easily get you to a weird, fun place.

Oh yeah. I've heard lots of wild stuff about some of the holotropic kind of breathwork. I even did it once, but I don't really trust it. Seems potentially dangerous. Plus, I read How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan a while ago and he had a real scare of a near-medical-emergency from that. (To be fair, he's got heart issues, so that definitely contributed.) I remember reading that part of the book hearing the bit leading up to the holotropic breathwork and thinking "oh, god, don't do it Michael; you'll regre-... oh god he did it." Lol. He had a choice between MDMA and breathwork and because his doctor told him to avoid amphetamines because of his heart, he opted for the breathwork, and I knew that might not really be that much safer. It doesn't seem he had any long-lasting negative effects. Just a spell of irregular heartbeat or something (I don't remember more specifically than "or something"). But yeah.

All that happened the time I tried it myself was a bit of tingling and a lot of hand and face... I dunno. Cramping? Spasming? Like, my muscles seized up and I couldn't relax them. Not enough to be painful. Just enough to be weirded out. No psychedelic-y sort of effects or anything like that for me personally. I might have gotten into more of that territory had I kept going longer, but who knows. I didn't have any guide or trip sitter or whatever, so I got scared and aborted when something weird happened. I don't remember how long those effects lasted, really, but it wasn't all day or anything.

I do get Oatley, but it's expensive unless it occasionally shows up in Grocery Outlet.

I have a giant can of cocoa powder so I don't have to have a half-gallon box of chocolate milk hogging space in my fridge, and having to worry about consuming all of it before it turns.

Caffeine. It might be a self-medication thing but I drink it all day.

The reason why kratom users are like this is because the withdrawal effects are no worse than caffeine withdrawal. When I don't take kratom, I feel tired and irritable, just like someone who hasn't had their coffee. That's the worst of it. After a few days I'm back to baseline, even if I was taking it daily. (I'm currently two weeks into a break from it right now.)

Am I in denial? IDK; I can only provide my own personal experience from what I've seen in my family and myself when we use it. I just don't want to see it being lumped in with harder substances like cocaine and fent, cause I swear some of you act like it's all one in the same. But for me and the people I know who take it, it's no worse than a caffeine addiction. You want to talk about an addiction that's tough to quit? Let's talk about nicotine.

Sugar... mostly sugar. I baked a legendary citrus cake yesterday and I've had most of it in two sittings.

Sleepytime extra does (it's the extra).

Pickle, olive, etc