Recent coverage of heavy drug use among the young white men of Silicon Valley, as highlighted by Elon Musk’s ketamine news, has focused largely on narratives of innovation and mood optimization while leaving out things like major side-effects.

At high doses, ketamine may cause psychosis, a mental illness that causes a person to lose touch with reality. Frequent recreational ketamine use can lead to delusions that can last to up to one month after a person stops using it.

While side-effects may seem like an obvious omission, reporting on Silicon Valley’s institutional embrace of performance-enhancing drugs has another missing element — a complex and troubling history of chemically-induced exceptionalism that deserves proper examination.

The Nazi regime, notably, provides one of the most thoroughly documented historical examples of systematic drug culture. Under Hitler’s regime, methamphetamine (marketed as Pervitin) was widely distributed to his adherents to improve their mood, modify performance and stamina. Hitler himself, as well as many high-ranking followers, were regularly juiced on various stimulants and chemicals including Eukodal (oxycodone) from rather careless and selfish physicians like Dr. Theodor Morell.

This wasn’t merely incidental drug use, just like Silicon Valley narratives about exceptional elitism today aren’t incidental, because it was so integrated into Nazi ideology and narratives about the need for superhuman performance and “optimization” of human capability. Leaders simultaneously promoted an image of racial purity and clean living while systematically administering unclean drugs to differentiate themselves from “others”.

Today’s Silicon Valley narratives around ketamine and psychedelics frankly echo very disturbing historical precedents that seem to get left out of social channels as they endorse so much drug use they cause shortages. We should see more coverage of clearly problematic themes:

1. The language of human optimization and enhancement
2. Institutional normalization of drug use for performance
3. The gap between public image and private practice
4. The intersection of drug use with ideologies of exceptionalism

While Silicon Valley’s drug culture still occurs in a vastly different context than Nazi Germany’s “chemical enhancement” program (at least for now), both cases demonstrate how institutional drug use can become entwined with ideologies of discriminatory human “superiority” patterns. Adding historical context allows up to raise important questions about what’s really being discussed in news such as this:

Silicon Valley elites are reportedly taking ketamine and attending psychedelic parties to bolster their focus and creativity.

The article fails to touch any of the most important themes, like a herd of elephants in the room nobody wants to talk about.

• How does institutional drug use reflect and reinforce power dynamics?
• What are the implications of normalizing drug use for workplace performance?
• How do organizations reconcile public messaging with private practices?
• What are the human costs of institutional performance enhancement?

Understanding historical patterns is far less about drawing direct equivalences (Nazis really, really hate being called Nazis), but rather about recognizing how institutional drug use often intersects with highly toxic ideologies of optimization and performance enhancement.

The drugs themselves might not harm you as much as the drug promotion culture pushing it with a very hidden intention of harm to certain segments of society. As ketamine and other psychedelics gain mainstream acceptance, we must carefully consider the ethical implications of institutional promotion and distribution.

When major tech publications celebrate the rise of heavy ketamine use, even just passively giving it headlines of “bolster focus and creativity” without examining historical contexts, they miss an opportunity for critical analysis. The “innovation” and “output” story really is far more about power, institutional control, and the complex relationship between drug policy and organizational ideology.

We would do well to remember that any enhancement short-cut circling around high-performance communities deserves careful scrutiny, especially when embedded in groups that appear to be prone to science denial. We don’t actually need to open the door to harmful, even deadly, fantasies of magic “happy” pills.