Is Our Government on Drugs ? Elon Musk ?

 Is our government on Drugs ?

Elon’s K-hole…and ours

https://the.ink/p/this-is-your-government-on-drugs?

Psychedelics were supposed to open hearts and create connection and heal trauma. Jefferson Airplane vocalist Grace Slick even plotted to increase the peace by dosing Richard Nixon with LSD. So why is what may be our first psychedelic regime slashing government and spreading inhumanity?

Elon Musk has been open about his use of drugs at least since he lit up a blunt with Joe Rogan back in 2018. But most recently he’s been an advocate of the anaesthetic ketamine. He’s talked at length to Ronan Farrow and Don Lemon about his use of the drug as a treatment for depression (which is very legitimate), and he has waved off mounting concerns about abuse, despite reporting that alleges he’s also a recreational user. 

And that’s what raises red flags. Researcher Celia Morgan has pointed outthat ketamine can make regular users “distinctly dissociated in their day-to-day existence.” Musk has said repeatedly, after all, that his “mind is a storm.” But it was seeing Musk onstage at CPAC in dark glasses, barely able to string sentences together, and practicing questionable chainsaw safety, that had a lot of people asking:

Are these people high, man?

It’s an attractive explanation for the chaos. As Shayla Love wrote in The Atlantic this week:

Frequent, heavy recreational use—say, several times a week—has been linked to cognitive effects that last beyond the high, including impaired memory, delusional thinking, superstitious beliefs, and a sense of specialness and importance.

That sure rings a bell.

Now we’re not doctors, and would only ever offer a political diagnosis. So we suggest that our collective concern might be less about the direct effects of Musk’s drug use than about how he and other Trumpworld fixtures mix psychedelic adventurism — something we expect to be countercultural and progressive — with right-wing politics.

Share

But how surprised should we be?

After all, the psychedelic 1960s merged into the Me Decade of the 1970s and the greed-is-good 1980s (if you weren’t there, you can catch up by bingeing Family Ties). The anti-establishmentarian strain of hippie utopianism turned libertarian, and fed into the Californian Ideology — the market-fundamentalist techno-optimism that has made Silicon Valley the center of the financial world. It wasn’t the join-together sense of collective purpose that stuck, but the DIY anti-establishment spirit — and perhaps the drugs.

And psychedelics have their authoritarian history, too. Some early users saw LSD and psilocybin as tools by which elite researchers could unlock the secrets that could direct society to utopia. The CIA experimented with LSD as a truth serum. The Summer of Love was something of an afterthought.

The far right has brought those strains together under an all-encompassing and market-first faith in DIY self-invention. Some of Ketamine’s appeal right now has to do with its loose regulation and looser marketing, capitalizing on that spirit. Like others in the Trump orbit — Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (himself a story of 1960s promise gone wrong), for instance — Musk is famously opposed to traditional medications for depression, namely SSRIs (like Prozac). Both men are on board with better living through chemistry, but not if the man sticks it to him. And as with so many far-right innovations, it’s a terrible, anti-social response to a real problem: you’re not paranoid — the pharma industry is out to get you! 

Musk’s positions aren’t so far from denouncing vaccines and embracing ivermectin, or giving kids cod liver oil (as Kennedy now advises) rather than vaccinating them against measles, or drinking raw milk, or belief in the curative power of raw water — all articles of faith on the far right.

Yes, think for yourself, question authority, by all means. But when you question everything, you’re sometimes left with nothing. And then you have to fill that gap. The problem with this particular K-hole is that we’re all at risk of falling in.