I am not really a drug user and even though I was a teen in the 60s, never met any true hippies. It was more than just sitting around all day smoking pot. Many mind altering experiments were done in the sixties by Timothy Leary with LSD.
Here is a little about altered states using various drugs.
"Throughout the tenure of the human species on Earth, certain mushrooms, extracts from cacti, various roots and herbs, and other unlikely substances have been chewed and ingested, not for the purpose of sustaining life, but for the physiological and psychological effects that they have on the body and the brain. Cults of mystical expression have grown up around the use of these mind-altering substances, for many shamans and priests believed that they could open portals to higher planes of consciousness and even to other worlds by ingesting certain plants. The ancient Greeks held the mushroom sacred, and some contemporary researchers have postulated that the famed Oracle at Delphi may have ingested some form of psychedelic drug, along with the fumes the entranced woman inhaled. Other cultures have also held the mushroom or the cactus sacred. The Mayan Indians of Central America erected stone monuments to the mushroom earlier than 1000 B.C.E. These monuments have been found in the tombs of the wealthier citizens of the Mayan culture, and for many years were thought to be fertility symbols.
Such drugs as mescaline from the peyote cactus, ibogaine from the root of a rain forest shrub, and the so-called "magic mushrooms" came to be known as psychedelic, because they cause people to hallucinate, to see and hear things that are not really there. Dr. Humphrey Osmond (1917– ) began studying hallucinogens at a hospital in Saskatchewan in 1952 when he was examining the similarities between mescaline and the adrenaline molecule. It was Osmond who coined the word "psychedelic" to describe the effects of the mind-altering drugs, and it was also he who supervised the author Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) in the well-known series of experiments with mescaline that Huxley recorded in his book The Doors of Perception (1953).
While modern research techniques focus on psychedelics for purposes of learning more about the human brain, relieving pain, finding antidotes to drug overdoses, and other medical applications, the ingestion of such drugs in the past was most often done to achieve transcendence or to accentuate mystical experiences.
Dr. Sidney Cohen, a Los Angeles psychiatrist-pharmacologist, author of The Beyond Within: The LSD Story (1972), commented, "It is hardly necessary to invoke supernatural explanations for the mind's more exceptional activities.…Intuition, creativity, telepathic experiences, prophecy—all can be understood as superior activities of brain-mind function.…The experience called hallucinogenic will play a role in leading us into the future. It points out the existence of unique mental states that must be studied and understood.
LSD was found to create such primary effects as the following:
a feeling of being one with the universe;
recognition of two identities;
a change in the usual concept of self;
new perceptions of space and time;
heightened sensory perceptions;
a feeling that one has been touched by a profound understanding of religion or philosophy;
a gamut of rapidly changing emotions;
increased sensitivity for the feelings of others;
such psychotic changes as illusions, hallucinations, paranoid delusions, severe anxiety."
http://www.unexplainedstuff.com/Mysteries-of-the-Mind/Altered-States-of-Consciousness-Psychedelics-the-mind-expanding-drugs.html
Therefore, I guess it would depend on what was used as to whether it would "exacerbate" the condition. My gut feeling though is that the idea of vampires didn't come from altered states. Many of the ideas came from the Roma and out of India. It is a thought provoking idea though and I guess very possible from what they are saying about mind altering drugs. I cannot guess from the use of more modern drugs or when you go farther back into antiquity.
