Hello Mycopreneurs, today’s newsletter is written by guest author Skye Hawthorne of Drug Cultures Podcast - * the perspectives and opinions contained herein are solely representative of the guest author).

An invite to today’s Mycopreneur Incubator at 3 pm East Coast U.S. / 12 pm West Coast U.S. is at the bottom of this newsletter.

Part of the Mycopreneur mission is to platform emerging voices and high quality journalism relevant to the growing profile of mushrooms in global society - and one of the most powerful people on the planet allegedly being under the influence of psilocybin mushrooms and other substances while performing top level United States government duties certainly warrants discussion here. Please let us know what you think of this piece by replying to the email or sharing and adding your own perspectives on social media.

Elon Musk: A Fascist Tim Leary for the New Millennium

By Skye Hawthorne

When Elon Musk stepped into his role as a “special government employee” in charge of DOGE - the department of Government Efficiency - he was accused of many things: Gutting the administrative and regulatory state. Cutting funding for critical government programs from pediatric cancer research to the national weather service. And, of course, the multiple Roman salutes at the Trump rally that, to Trump’s fascist base, were really more foghorns than dogwhistles. Throughout these first few months of 2025, as he established himself as a hatchet man (and fall guy) for President Trump’s deeply unpopular agenda, many of us have speculated that he might be high on drugs, likely far more frequently than the twice-monthly prescription ketamine he admitted to using in the past.

On May 30th, a bombshell report from the New York Times confirmed everyone’s suspicions. He was taking ketamine daily, alongside Adderall, MDMA, and psilocybin mushrooms. The erratic behavior and slurring of his speech that we all saw in his public appearances, it seems, was only the tip of the iceberg. His communications with his closest friends and allies were becoming increasingly inscrutable: he wrote to one person close to him in October of last year that: “Tomorrow we unleash the anomaly in the matrix … lasers from space.” This article is deeply alarming, for many reasons. It’s terrifying to think about someone with so much power and influence could be so detached from consensus reality. But it’s also terrifying for everyone who cares about psychedelic medicine, drug destigmatization, and an end to the war on drug users. Elon Musk’s drug-fueled humiliation tour has probably done an incalculable amount of damage to the anti-drug war movement, maybe more than 30 years of DARE. In fact, I can only think of one other human being in history who has done this much to negatively polarize the general public against psychedelic drugs: Timothy Leary. 

There are a wide array of reasons that the psychedelic enthusiasm in the 1950s and 1960s came to an end. But none catch quite as much flack as Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychology professor turned psychedelic evangelist and quasi religious figure. Roland Griffiths, the pioneering psychedelic researcher who, among other topics, studied the impact of psilocybin on end-of-life anxiety, confidently declared that “the antics of Timothy Leary really undermined the scientific approach to studying these compounds.”

Leary, who began his career as a professor of clinical psychology, ran psilocybin studies at Harvard for several years before getting the boot, and is often blamed for psychedelics breaking containment from the more respectable circles in which they were initially used - academic research, psychiatry, and the soirees of intellectual elites - into the mainstream. Once in the mainstram, their use by unkempt anti-war hippies is widely believed to have given rise to the cultural backlash that eventually forced their use back into the shadows. 

Scholars describe “three waves” of psychedelic literature. The first took place in the 1950s, focusing on journalistic accounts of the psychedelic experience and its potential applications. It is in this wave that Humphrey Osmond coined the phrase “psychedelic”. The second wave of psychedelic literature began once drugs like LSD, peyote, and psilocybin mushrooms jumped containment. Literature in this wave, typified by Hunter S Thompson or Carlos Castenada, interweaves the psychedelic experience into cultural and spiritual narratives. These substances changed our culture to its very core, shaping art, music, prose, cinema, and social movements. And because Timothy Leary was a prominent figure who can be blamed for that transition from first to second wave psychedelia, he likewise provides an easy scapegoat for the cultural chaos and backlash that ensued. In 1970, Richard Nixon called him “The most dangerous man in America.”

The third wave, which began in the 1990s with Rick Strassman’s DMT studies, has been understandably cautious not to associate itself with the social movements that led to psychedelic prohibition. Scientists and journalists who have chosen to write about psychedelics in the last 30 years, and particularly during their explosion in popularity the last 10 years, have focused their quills on the mental health benefits of psychedelics. This third wave is often called the “psychedelic renaissance” for its attempt to bring psychedelic drugs back into a place of social legitimacy. While spiritual or mystical effects of these substances are sometimes explored, they are generally only discussed in terms of the techniques used to induce or quantify them, or their mental health impacts, rather than the character of the experience itself. And the potential cultural and political impacts of the psychedelic experience are ignored almost altogether. 

The goal of this article is not to bash 21st century psychedelic research, or the potentially life-saving implications of psychedelic medicine for conditions like PTSD. But the psychedelic renaissance, for all its purported lofty ideals, has always sought to excise the cultural baggage from the drugs themselves.

Sure, every so often we see headlines about some psychedelic pharma startup that has pledged to give a percentage of its proceeds to indigenous reciprocity initiatives. But even authentic narratives about the ceremonial use of sacred plants in indigenous cultures are twisted to meet the narratives of third wave psychedelic literature. Ceremonies involving psychoactive plants have been used around the world for countless reasons - to build or preserve community, attempt to see the future, recover lost goods, prepare for battle - and yet writers so often write about these ceremonies as if they are performed for the exact same reason: healing or betterment of the individual. That’s the only way in which mainstream psychedelic communicators of the 21st century know how to frame the psychedelic experience: as a tool for personal growth, mental health support, and individual healing. 

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So what does any of this have to do with Elon Musk? He is, unfortunately, the perfect distillation of the extremes of this third wave of psychedelics. Modern psychedelic writers love elevating the stories of people who don’t fit into traditional boxes associated with the counterculture. This includes veterans, martial artists, and, yes, tech CEOs with ostentatious wealth. It’s easy to see the allure of a massively wealthy corporate executive who takes psychedelic drugs, especially for a journalist who feels favorably about those drugs. The existence of that person seems proof positive that drugs are not antithetical to success, but may in fact be a part of some peoples’ success formula. Musk was the perfect avatar of the professed values of a lot of these people, someone who took drugs and did something meaningful with his life. Most importantly, he was never a countercultural figure: for all his visions of colonizing the galaxy, he did not threaten the capitalist status quo here on earth. He did not even threaten the practice of drug testing as a tool to discipline labor - as I wrote about back in 2018, he continued to fire employees for failing drug tests even as he smoked marijuana on Joe Rogan’s podcast. His drug use, until recently, was treated as an eccentric novelty, something in between a nootropic and an anti-depressant that has helped Musk build his empire. 

And his descent into madness - and political extremism - perfectly represents the logical endpoint of a psychedelic renaissance that has sought to sever the benefits of psychedelics from the cultural container in which they’re used. The benefits speak for themselves. Look how well Elon has done for himself - clearly something’s working! But reading that New York Times article, it’s clear that the very thing that might have kept his drug use in check is having some kind of community, some sort of cultural framework. Instead, he made his own. Taking MDMA before board meetings, magic mushrooms before state dinners, ketamine, it seems, whenever he felt like it. Adderall when he needed to focus. Depressants when he needed to “tranq out”. Nobody who uses MDMA in the traditional cultural contexts in which it’s been used for decades (as part of a therapeutic practice, or a club/rave scene) would ever, ever, in a million years advise Elon to use it in this way.

Maria Sabina, the Mazatec shaman who first gave psilocybe mushrooms to the ethnomycologist Gordon Wasson, is probably rolling over in her grave looking at Musk’s use of the mushrooms she considered sacred medicine for the sick. Even ketamine, a drug whose recreational use is comparatively recent, has dosage guidelines, best practices, and principles like set and setting that have been established and propagated by the subcultures that use it. Yet when you have nation-state level wealth and an ego to match, there’s no need to ever come in contact with any of these cultural roots. Musk will never need to participate in a Native American Church ceremony if he wants to try mescaline. He will never get a rambling lecture from a well-meaning drug dealer about the proper set and setting to take LSD, because he will never have to buy his own drugs. A man with his wealth and power gets to make his own set and setting, and drugs that were once a social experience become just another object of consumptive avarice.

Musk is the perfect avatar of the psychedelic renaissance because his drug use is fundamentally cultureless. The psychedelic renaissance holds at its core the assumption that the reason for the prohibition of psychedelics is that they developed a cultural use at all. The fact that LSD became associated with countercultural movements that sought to radically restructure our society is seen as its tragic downfall. And this downfall could easily be blamed on poor decisions made by thoughtless, proselytizing individuals like Timothy Leary. The psychedelic figures of the 60s who sought to tear down the pillars of our social order did so from the outside, because the consciousness-expanding drugs they used to fuel their delusions of grandeur were not a part of that social order. But in this third wave of psychedelic open-mindedness, the technocratic establishment has allowed for the integration of psychedelics into its own power structures. In the 21st century, narcissists with psychedelic delusions of grandeur are no longer exclusively outside the power structure; the call is coming from inside the house. Timothy Leary told young people to drop out of school. Elon Musk cut funding from the department of education. Timothy Leary was fired from Harvard for advocating that students take psychedelics. Elon Musk, meanwhile, has argued that Harvard’s federal funds should be eliminated, on account of its failure to kiss the ring. In some ways, they’re strikingly similar. In others, they’re polar opposites. Yet both of these figures will be remembered for helping to turn public opinion against drugs that, when used responsibly, can have tremendous medical, mental, social, or spiritual benefits. 

I don’t claim to know the future of the psychedelic renaissance. It’s possible that Musk has done less damage than Leary did; after all, business interests might see his fascism as less dangerous and destabilizing than Leary’s left-wing radicalism. But if the court of public opinion counts for something, I expect to see a major setback for psychedelic advocates who want to win the support of liberals. Psychedelic advocates used to celebrate the news of anyone famous and successful who came forward to talk about their drug use, but now, I suspect a lot of us wish he’d never tried them at all.

(From the editor: Thanks for reading this edition of the Mycopreneur Newsletter - please let us know your thoughts on it by replying to the email here or sharing the post on social media and adding your own perspectives)

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DW