Elon Musk’s Real Drug Problem Is Much Worse Than You Think

In the previous few years, the thoughts of Elon Musk has dramatically moved in two instructions, one lateral and the opposite vertical. Ideologically, he has shifted from a reasonable big-business centrist who supported Barack Obama to a far-right partisan of Donald Trump, a White House adviser whose contentious tenure ended final Wednesday. Cognitively, Musk has gone from being hyperbolic however nonetheless grounded in actuality to being—or so it could appear—nearly completely excessive as a kite. That metaphor may be too dated for the high-tech Musk, the futurist behind Space-X and Starlink. Perhaps it’s extra correct to say he’s as a excessive as a satellite tv for pc circling within the exosphere—and is sometimes on the verge of leaving earth’s orbit altogether to go careening out of the photo voltaic system fully.

The proven fact that Musk is a person of ketamine and different mind-altering substances has lengthy been identified. As I identified in March, Musk’s “use (or abuse) of illicit drugs—including LSD, cocaine, ecstasy, and mushrooms, as well as ketamine—has been reported by such reputable outlets as The Wall Street Journal.” On Friday, The New York Times printed an extensively documented article that made clear that Musk’s drug makes use of is much more intense and undisciplined than the sooner reporting had outlined:

Mr. Musk’s drug consumption went properly past occasional use. He advised folks he was taking a lot ketamine, a strong anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a identified impact of power use. He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a every day remedy field that held about 20 tablets, together with ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall, in accordance with a photograph of the field and individuals who have seen it.

This account largely focuses on the months earlier than the final election, though there is no such thing as a motive to suppose Musk has moderated his drug consumption extra just lately. The Times article is personality-focused. It additionally frames the drug use when it comes to Musk’s more and more “erratic” conduct, together with his convoluted private life. This “erratic” conduct consists of giving a fascist salute at a Trump inauguration occasion. As an outgrowth of his “pro-natalist” ideology which argues that individuals of superior intelligence have to populate the earth, Musk has 14 “known” youngsters from a number of ladies resulting in ongoing custody battles (there are stories that the precise Musk brood is far bigger, since there are quite a few as but unacknowledged progeny). Ashley St. Clair, who gave start in February to the newest little Muskling, says he advised her “would be willing to give his sperm to anyone who wanted to have a child.”

Obviously, Musk’s weird character is a think about his freaky conduct, together with his epic drug consumption. But it’s a mistake to deal with Musk as an remoted oddball or to disassociate his actions from their political context. Musk’s urge for food for mind-altering substances and his more and more strident assist for far-right ideology in reality go hand-in-hand. On April 28, Jules Evans, of the Psychedelic Challenge Project, printed an intriguing essay in The New York Times arguing that “a once left-wing psychedelic movement” has develop into “tightly intertwined” with the Trump administration. The proof Evans supplies is revealing: Silicon Valley Trump supporters reminiscent of Peter Thiel are investing in psychedelics and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (who reportedly bought cocaine as an Harvard undergraduate) is an fanatic for utilizing psychedelics as therapy for trauma.

But the historic narrative Evans presents—that psychedelics had been as soon as the provenance of left-wingers curious about hippy beliefs of peace and consciousness growth, however at the moment are embraced by right-wingers curious about earning money—is fake. In reality, mind-altering medication are a software and have for a lot of many years (if not centuries) been utilized by the best in addition to the left.

In the early nineteenth century, essentially the most distinguished drug customers in British tradition had been excessive Tories reminiscent of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey (creator of the vivid 1821 memoir, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater), who had been rabid haters of Jacobins and pro-democracy actions. Their imaginations deep in opium reveries, these literary giants penned essays wealthy in gothic imagery to specific their reactionary disdain for modernity.

In his e-book Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany (2015), the historian Norman Ohler highlights the truth that Hitler’s regime had a robust affinity for methamphetamine, generally referred to as meth. The drug (which was authorized at the moment) was an necessary gas for the Nazi warfare machine, which used meth as an energizing agent for troopers (because it decreased each worry and the necessity for sleep).

Closer to dwelling, some American libertarians have lengthy been pleasant to drug tradition. As Brian Doherty paperwork in his entertaining e-book Radicals for Capitalism (2007), within the Fifties a gaggle of militantly libertarian businessmen related to the Foundation for Economic Education grew to become unlikely experimenters with the newly found drug LSD (then authorized). This group included William C. Mullendore, a former assistant to Herbert Hoover and onetime vice chairman of South California Edison in addition to the high-powered lawyer James Ingebretsen. In the early Fifties, this group—usually given to union busting and pushing for a rollback of the New Deal—fell beneath the sway of the New Age guru Gerald Heard (who additionally from time to time served because the non secular mentor to cultural figures just like the poet W.H. Auden and the novelist Aldous Huxley). Perhaps as a result of they felt so alienated from an America the place Social Security grew to become unassailable and union density was excessive, they turned to mind-altering medication to supply a path to another actuality.

Under Heard’s celebration of non secular growth, Doherty notes, “this squad of spiritually seeking high-bourgeois industrialists and professionals lived out a first wave of psychedelic adventurism, before the more populist one of the mid-to late 1960s.” Of course, the wealthy are used to seeing the world as their playground, one the place they’ll take dangers they wouldn’t essentially wish to share with the plebes. In that spirit, as Sam Tanenhaus describes in his new biography of William F. Buckley Jr., within the late Sixties Buckley and fellow National Review editor James Burnham (each fierce elitists) experimented with LSD.

San Francisco within the Sixties was dwelling to each the counterculture and the burgeoning tech sector. In 1961, the engineer Myron J. Stolaroff began the International Foundation for Advanced Study in Menlo Park, California, to advertise using psychedelics as a software for creativity. As the author Malcolm Harris notes in his 2023 e-book Palo Alto, “acid was marketed to Bay Area knowledge workers as a productivity aid from the beginning.” Harris observes that this custom lives on within the latest “surge of interest in ‘microdosing,’ now a popular performance-enhancing method in Silicon Valley tech circles that involves taking tiny amounts of LSD before work.”