Jaden Smith, the son of actor Will Smith and actress Jada Pinkett Smith, has claimed that his mom introduced psychedelic drugs to his family.

Smith made his claim while speaking at the Psychedelic Science conference in Denver on Friday where he said that the drugs made him a more empathetic person.

“I think it was my mom, actually, that was really the first one to make that step for the family,” Jaden said, as reported by USA Today. “It was just her for a really, really long time and then eventually it just trickled and evolved and everybody found it in their own ways.”

Jaden, age 24, did not specify when he started taking psychedelic drugs or at what age he learned that his mother had been taking psychedelic drugs. He praised the drugs, however, for making him more empathetic toward his siblings – sister Willow Smith (22) and half-brother Trey Smith (30).

“Siblings can argue so much and fight so much, and lord knows me and my siblings have done so much of that in the past,” Jaden said. “But the level of love and empathy that I can feel for them inside of the (psychedelic) experiences and outside of the experiences has been something that’s profound and beautiful.”

Jaden specified that the siblings doing psychedelic drugs together helped them to “open up our minds to get out of the old ways of thinking that got us into lots of these arguments and open it up so that it just releases and makes room for you to work it out and massage it out until it’s completely gone.”

As noted by Fox News, Jada Pinkett Smith and Jaden previously discussed taking psychedelic drugs during the now-canceled Red Table Talk.

“I was introduced to plant medicine 10 years ago to deal with my depression, and it knocked it out,” the actress said.

Jaden admitted to his mom that he tried mushrooms out of “curiosity,” only to learn “what ego was for the first time.”

“It was always in my head talking, telling me what I was and what I wasn’t, and for the first time I had like an ego dissolution where I was like, ‘That was the moment that really changed me,'” he said.

As Breitbart News reported, an article recently published this month in the journal Addiction found that the use of “magic” mushrooms by young adults has nearly doubled in three years along with other hallucinogenic drugs. Roughly 6.6 percent of young adults in 2021 (aged 19 to 30) used hallucinogenic drugs other than LSD, up from 3.4 percent in 2018. Psilocybin, a.k.a. “magic” mushrooms, stood chief among the hallucinogenic drugs used other than LSD. Roughly eight percent of young adults used some kind of hallucinogenic drug in 2021. Men experiment with such drugs at a higher rate than women. Per the Hill:

Public health officials face a growing societal disconnect over the risks and rewards of recreational drugs. Both marijuana and hallucinogens registered historic highs in young-adult use in 2021, according to federal data.

Therapeutic use of psychedelics remains rare. Most young adults who take hallucinogens are engaging in youthful experimentation, not unlike their baby-boomer forebears in the Woodstock era. And those experiments are not without risk.

Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, said drug users should be worried about a “bad trip,” which can possibly result in suicide.

Megan Patrick, a study co-author and co-principal investigator of Monitoring the Future at the University of Michigan, said the increase in hallucinogenic drugs raises potential public health concerns.

“It’s really difficult to explain these trends,” she said. “We have some guesses, but we don’t really know yet.”

Paul Roland Bois joined Breitbart News in 2021. He also directed the award-winning feature film, EXEMPLUM, which can be viewed on Tubi, Google Play, YouTube Movies, or Vimeo on Demand. Follow him on Twitter @prolandfilms or Instagram @prolandfilms.