The Wall Street Journal: “Magic Mushrooms. LSD. Ketamine. The Drugs that Power Silicon Valley.”

There are millions of people microdosing psychedelics right now, said Karl Goldfield, a former sales and marketing consultant in San Francisco who informally counsels friends and colleagues across the tech world on calibrating the right small dose for maximum mindfulness. It is the fastest path to opening your mind up and clearly seeing for yourself what’s going on, said Goldfield.

Goldfield doesn’t have a medical degree and said he learned to dose through experience. He said the number of questions he gets about how to microdose has grown dramatically in recent months.

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When Musk in 2018 smoked marijuana on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, he and employees of Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, were subjected to drug tests for months after, Musk has said, without offering further details.

The CEO has told people he microdoses ketamine for depression, and he also takes full doses of ketamine at parties, according to the people who have witnessed his drug use and others who have direct knowledge of it.

Kirsten Grind & Katherine Bindley

Well, this certainly explains a lot about Musk’s erratic behavior… Also the anecdotes floating around about informal systems in place at Tesla and SpaceX designed to circumvent Musk’s terrible decisions.

Psilocybin gummies at Karl Goldfield’s home. Think of it as a smart drug, he said. Clara Mokri for The Wall Street Journal

Shulem, who lives in New York City, said the high expectations of venture-capital firms and investors in general can lead founders to turn to psychedelics to provide an edge. They don’t want a normal person, a normal company, he said. They want something extraordinary. You’re not born extraordinary.

The broader issues here are not the personal use of psychedelics per se, as some substances can have beneficial effects under proper supervision and various therapies based on LSD, MDMA, and psilocybin are in active research, albeit with controversial findings. It’s how people are self-medicating, which can quickly lead to addiction and life-threatening overdoses – and the fact that they are under this intense pressure to outperform at their jobs that they feel the need to resort to these unproven and dangerous alternatives to keep up. Say what you want about the USA economy outperforming European countries, but having employees burn out to deliver an illusion of greater output is not a sustainable strategy.