LET'S ALL GET BATTERED AT WORK
“Going shop, want anything?" "Oooh yes, pick me up a wrap." People are fretting over Elon Musk's alleged drug-taking. But sometimes drugs at work are a necessity and nowt to do with addiction.
The farrago of the Musk’s on drugs story is perfect attention ‘stack fodder. A few words on Musk’s pharmocopia and how helpful it might be at work.
Yay, it’s numéro six of my promenades de concentration.
In terms of influencing people’s opinions on drugs, the Jan 6 Wall Street Journal story about Elon Musk’s drug taking has been counterproductive. The expected and desired response is shock horror, the shareholders are terrified, the man in charge of Space X, X and Tesla is a drug-addled megalomaniac, he’s out of control. All of which may or may not be true.
But the story, actually, begs the questions whether some of us might also benefit from getting high on the job. In the MAPS November 2021 Bulletin, founder and executive director, Rick Doblin, announced that their new employment manual includes, “details about a concept called ‘smokable tasks’. These are work tasks, different for each staff person, that they think, and their manager agrees, they do better while under the influence of marijuana, such as working on complicated spreadsheets. For me, smokable tasks primarily include strategizing, protocol design, and editing of regulatory submissions.”
I have committed a thoughtcrime and it is that the drugs, used wisely, do work - even at work.
We can safely assume Musk works pretty much 24/7. Is he ever not working? Musk said that to him, holiday is just “email with a view”. Anyone who has ever emailed work in an altered state from a dancefloor or festival will know that just because you’re off your box doesn’t mean you aren’t keeping an eye on work. While you may not be fit to operate heavy machinery, you probably can, say, make a creative decision on a low dose of ketamine. People climb rock faces on low doses of psychedelics, so they can probably perform some engineering tasks in a way, say, someone on three pints of Stella cannot.
So while the WSJ wants us clutching our pearls in horror, my only reaction was, is he making a mint despite of or because of his drug use? And why don’t we drill into some this seam of potential self-improvement/life-destroying tools. Yes, I have committed a thoughtcrime and it is that the drugs, used wisely, do work - even at work.
The drugs don’t work, they just make things worse. Or do they?
Richard Ashcroft was wrong, or more accurately, he was taking the wrong drugs, or the right drugs all wrong.
How do we process the old prohibition axiom “Only losers use drugs,” when it applies to a man whose businesses are worth a trillion or so and he personally has an estimated $230 billion, the GDP of Qatar, on paper at least (OPAL) he is by far the world’s richest person. In a world utterly fixated on capital, that makes him a winner, who uses drugs. Which is in itself, an ad for drugs.
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