The big difference between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, the latter suggested, was that the Apple king dropped acid in the ’70s: “I wish him the best, I really do,” Jobs said in 1997. “I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He’d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once, or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.”
Gates could point out that he’d never sacrifice his own life on a hippie altar, as Jobs did when he initially opted for quack holistic remedies to treat the cancer that killed him.
But now everyone in your firm, from Mel in Accounts Payable on up, wants to be the next Steve Jobs. What better way to prove you Think Different than to drop acid?
OK, just a little acid. These days in San Francisco, the fad is “microdosing” — taking a small amount of LSD, supposedly not enough to send you on a trip but just enough to uncage your creative beast. So if the guy next to you at the Mid-Atlantic Dental Sales & Marketing meeting starts softly singing “White Rabbit” or responds to a PowerPoint spreadsheet by saying, “Oh wow, oh wow,” you’ll know why.
The microdose is about 1/10 the usual amount of LSD or another psychedelic, such as magic mushrooms. Just enough to feel “a little bit of energy lift, a little bit of insight, but not so much that you are tripping,” Rick Doblin, founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, told Rolling Stone.
A little energy lift to start the day? What could be wrong with that?
It’s practically Maxwell House!
“How LSD Microdosing Became the Hot New Business Trip” (heh, heh) ran the headline of the recent RS feature in which a 25-year-old Stanford grad and Silicon Valley exec using the pseudonym “Ken” sang the praises of his sparkly new friend. Just call it Hacker’s Little Helper. Here’s a question, though: If acid is so groovy, why doesn’t “Ken” use his real name? Never mind — I’m sure his colleagues appreciate it when he tells them, “You’re making me feel like I’ve never been born” or casually explains how funny it was when he tried to tie-dye the cat.
Another cheerleader for Team Psychedelia, James Fadiman, author of “The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide,” suggests LSD as a cure for depression, migraines and chronic-fatigue syndrome, as well as, naturally, a stimulus to outside-the-box thinking. In other words, it’s good for whatever ails you, like those mysterious bottles of brown elixir Dr. Magnifico sold off the back of the chuck wagon in 1886. Fadiman recommends taking a baby-aspirin microdose of LSD every fourth day. Soon San Francisco bookshops will be sold out of “The Tibetan Book of the Dead” again.
There’s a reason why LSD use came and went back in the Age of Nixon (and it’s obvious that tuning in went all the way to the top: You’d have to be tripping to openly discuss political coverups in your office after you yourself had it wiretapped). Recreational drugs tend to make you lose interest in reality, while giving you a thirst for the new and the strange. If a little LSD is good, how can more LSD not be better? What about combining LSD with other drugs? Wouldn’t that be better still? We’ve been here before.
On a site called highexistence.com (heh, heh), a writer extols the virtue of microdosing with these words: “Today we are witnessing the birth of a truly remarkable epoch. With the psychedelic renaissance well under way, consisting of new fascinating research, the coming out of thousands of individuals and the introduction of many, hitherto unknown, psychoactive plants steeped in their cultural context of healing and initiation, we are now facing some new and interesting questions. [Such as] what types of consciousness are possible, and how are we to navigate these?”
Oh dear. Those notions are about as “new” as your granddad’s Peter, Paul and Mary records. But that’s how drugs talk: Drugs say that nothing that came before has any relevance, that old ways are dead, the slate is clean and everything can begin all over again. It’s “Yes, let’s all win the lottery!” thinking.
But at least Powerball costs you only two bucks — not your grip on reality.