Silicon Valley Avant-garde Have Turned To LSD in a Bid To Increase Their Productivity (1843magazine.com)

Every three days Nathan (not his real name), a 27-year-old venture capitalist in San Francisco, ingests 15 micrograms of lysergic acid diethylamide (commonly known as LSD or acid). From a story on 1843 Magazine: From the start, a small but significant crossover existed between those who were experimenting with drugs and the burgeoning tech community in San Francisco. "There were a group of engineers who believed there was a causal connection between creativity and LSD," recalls John Markoff, whose 2005 book, "What the Dormouse Said", traces the development of the personal-computer industry through 1960s counterculture. At one research centre in Menlo Park over 350 people -- particularly scientists, engineers and architects -- took part in experiments with psychedelics to see how the drugs affected their work. Tim Scully, a mathematician who, with the chemist Nick Sand, produced 3.6m tabs of LSD in the 1960s, worked at a computer company after being released from his ten-year prison sentence for supplying drugs. "Working in tech, it was more of a plus than a minus that I worked with LSD," he says. No one would turn up to work stoned or high but "people in technology, a lot of them, understood that psychedelics are an extremely good way of teaching you how to think outside the box." San Francisco appears to be at the epicentre of the new trend, just as it was during the original craze five decades ago. Tim Ferriss, an angel investor and author, claimed in 2015 in an interview with CNN that "the billionaires I know, almost without exception, use hallucinogens on a regular basis." Few billionaires are as open about their usage as Ferriss suggests. Steve Jobs was an exception: he spoke frequently about how "taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life." In Walter Isaacson's 2011 biography, the Apple CEO is quoted as joking that Microsoft would be a more original company if Bill Gates, its founder, had experienced psychedelics. As Silicon Valley is a place full of people whose most fervent desire is to be Steve Jobs, individuals are gradually opening up about their usage -- or talking about trying LSD for the first time.

Comments

Re:We covered the dosing morons in an earlier arti

[thebullshitpatrol]

Is the use of tools and technology not the key motivation behind human evolution?

Psychoactive drugs can be tools, and are most definitely technology.

So they're going to be arrested now right?

[H3lldr0p]

Last I checked, it's still a Schedule-I narcotic which makes it unobtainable even with a prescription. What more does our anti-drug leaders need? It's a confession made free and clear in a news article. That should be more than sufficient grounds for a search warrant for house, car, and office.

Re:So they're going to be arrested now right?

[gnick]

Last I checked, it's still a Schedule-I narcotic which makes it unobtainable even with a prescription.

I think you need to review your definition of "unobtainable".

Re:So they're going to be arrested now right?

[Kiuas]

Last I checked, it's still a Schedule-I narcotic which makes it unobtainable even with a prescription. What more does our anti-drug leaders need? It's a confession made free and clear in a news article. That should be more than sufficient grounds for a search warrant for house, car, and office.

Actually, I'd argue the exact opposite. Sure they could probably use the article as a grounds for arresting these people, but they'd be weakening their own position on the matter. You see, the only reason drugs, especially psychedelic drugs, have remained such a taboo and illegal for so long is that once people realized the 'reefer madness' -level claims about weed were BS, the same arguments were moved to psychedelics. To those who haven't tried it or haven't done any reading about it, which I'd say constitutes most people outside the psychedelic community, mind altering substances are still mythical in nature.

This has fed into the drug-war propaganda and fears that people have. It's created this dichotomy in which people are divided into 2 categories of 'proper hard working people' and 'druggies', and the claim in the propaganda is that there is exactly no overlap. Because of this, people who actually use these substances responsibly, for personal gain or just for pleasure, have not typically come forth about it as they're afraid of losing face and being labeled lunatics. This allows for maintaining the control. If people - even the people who never have and have no desire for ever trying these things by themselves (which I can understand) - would understand how many of the 'decent' people they know and rely on have experimented with stuff other than alcohol, their image of the entire spectrum of drug use and drug users would start to change to a less black and white direction.

Any drug, alcohol included, can lead to a person becoming a problem user or inflicting damage on themselves or their psyche. Think about if we only judged those of use who drink alcohol on the merits and state of alcoholics. I mean if you take someone and you give them the idea that 'alcohol use' is synonymous with, and will always lead to. alcoholism, then they'd obviously be likely to oppose the substance altogether, which is how prohibition was justified in many western countries back in the past. The culture of secrecy/silence allows for the continuation of this myth that all psychedelics-users are out of their mind raving eraserheads that've had their mind melted by a psychosis, and that while it remains okay and acceptable to inhibit/alter your neurons with ethanol doing permanent physical damage to them or now cannabis in many places, temporarily altering their action with other kinds of mechanisms is somehow heretical and must be kept illegal.

What makes this all the more absurd when you get right down to it is that everyone, even those of us who use no substances whatsoever, are used to having experiences of a psychedelic nature every night while we sleep. Dreams are not obviously identical to the way psychedelics work, but they most certainly are an altered state of mind.

Compare these 2 scenarios, a person has some kind of a problem, personal or work-related, and they do one of these:
A) they think about it for a while and go to sleep. In their dream, they come up with a new way of approaching the problem as their unconscious mind develops an angle on it that they did not consciously see before. They wake up and proclaim to have solved the issue. Someone asks how they did it and they say they had a dream where they saw the solution.
B) the same person takes a tab of LSD or some mushrooms and has a similar outcome for similar reasons. Someone asks how they solved it and they reply that they took some psychedelics.

A) Will not cause any sort of uproar. There are quite many prominent scientists who've said openly that solutions sometimes 'appear' to them while sleeping and it's more or less generally accepted that sleep can have a positive effect on problem solving,

Fools

[gurps_npc]

1) This isn't new. Creative people have been doing this since the discover of drugs. It's a common trope of the drugged out artist. Tech people have always had more in common with artists than businessmen, so it's no surprise that techs prefer the artistic drugs over the businessman's drug (cocaine).

2) It doesn't work the way people think it does. You are not more creative under the influence of drugs, you are actually less creative. But you stop asking yourself "Is this a good idea?" and just do it. It's basically brainstorming for one person. They also make you stop worrying about outside distractions (failure, your marriage, etc.)

Drugs do not add anything to your mental capacity. Anything you do under the influence is something you could have done anyway without it, as long as you did not let your own personal demons get in the way.

But some people are ruled by their personal demons, so they do better work on the drug than off. Sad really.

Steve Jobs Emulators

[ErichTheRed]

The article summary says it right there -- everyone in startup land is trying to be Steve Jobs. Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos fame even wears black turtlenecks to try to complete the look.

It's just the personality version of cargo-culting. Plenty of business types do this but most don't have the degree of success they think they will:
- Tons of people try for the Jobs personality, or the Linus Torvalds personality, etc. Most end up only picking up the mannerisms and not the intelligence part. (Linus acts like a jerk, but he's usually correct and doesn't seem capable of being nice about it.)
- Go into any airport bookstore and look over any of the books aimed at MBA types. Since most of the customers are consultants, it's a pretty easy predictor of what "brilliant innovative groundbreaking paradigm shifts" will be tried at their customers -- and subsequently by tons of others.
- Similarly, any executive who starts using other executives' direct quotes is definitely wishing for similar success. My favorite of late, which I've heard come out of tons of "thought leaders" is the "2 pizza team" concept that Jeff Bezos talked about when he referred to keeping product groups small enough to feed with 2 pizzas.

If it requires taking LSD, they'll do that too. It's just a bunch of MBA weenies emulating their heroes.

Re:We covered the dosing morons in an earlier arti

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize that we already use copious amounts of drugs to "perform" in everyday society right? Caffeine, sugar, alcohol, nicotine, the list goes on and on. I find it equal parts amusing and disturbing when people harp on about drug users while sitting next to a pile of Monster drink cans or a week after they went balistic beacause the coffee ran out in the break room.

Re:This!

[gnick]

Disclaimer: I haven't dropped acid in over 15 years.

And you are proud of advertising that?

Not advertising. Disclaiming. I'm neither proud nor ashamed of trying psychedelics in college. Why should I be?

Drugs are "Spiritual"?

I didn't say "drugs" in general. I said LSD can be. The experience differs based on many circumstances and the determination on whether the experience was "spiritual" is entirely up to the user.

Sorry, but you are doing the same thing as TFA. Glorifying drugs!

Not all drugs are worthless. Not every drug experience is negative. Is that glorifying? I think it's just truth.

Will you next claim how I'm just a prude for being against drunk driving?

Nobody said anything like that. Obvious strawman is obvious.

Re:This!

[PCM2]

I'm sorry, but you just come off as kinda silly, uptight and naive. The reason your moral high ground feels so hard to cling to is because you don't actually have any.

Re:We covered the dosing morons in an earlier arti

[sexconker]

Caffeine, sugar, alcohol, nicotine, the list goes on and on.

Sugar is not a drug.
Alcohol is awful for society, as is nicotine.
Caffeine is mostly innocuous, and often mostly pointless. Once you become a regular caffeine user, you depend on it to get to your normal. People who drink x cups of coffee daily perform the same as people who don't drink coffee (or otherwise consume large amounts of caffeine).

Re:Explains a lot ...

[spun]

I'm not usually one to defend Jobs, but if that's how an acid-fried-brain works, give me some acid. The thing is, the kind of cancer he had, you don't get better from. My mom died from pancreatic cancer, and it's not a pretty way to go. Your whole digestive system basically shuts down.

Re:We covered the dosing morons in an earlier arti

[RightwingNutjob]

I like my coffee, but the answer to your question is that it's hard to say because around the same time, clean drinking water/better sanitation practices also became available en masse in the major cities, reducing the need for people to drink beer instead of water. Factories and scientific research tend to run better when everyone isn't a little buzzed.

Re:This!

[angel'o'sphere]

Claiming that certain drugs are okay because they "may" be Spiritual would be like saying loads of other extremely dangerous experiences are okay because they "may" be "Spiritual".
Most drugs are "ok".

Society/laws that outlaw them makes them not ok, unreasonable expensive, only available via criminal sources, polluted by substances to thin them out (and you can not go to the police and accuse your pusher "oh, he sold me 100% pure stuff, but it was not only just 45% but also contaminated with baby butt powder"), requiring you to become a half criminal as well, to acquire them, either because of black market or money issues or addiction, wich you probably would not have if you simply could get a nice shot every weekend from your pharmacy.

Sorry, but if you have no clue about drugs then stay out of the discussion.

Disclaimer: except alcohol and canabis I did not use drugs. But I don't know a single person that did not try LSD, mushrooms, Heroine or Cocaine. Well, now while I type this, I think I know one person who did not, perhaps two.

And guess what: none of them is an addictive drug abuser.

The idea about drugs in the US or mainstream european politics are just absolutely absurd.