How Silicon Valley discovered LSD

.................A new generation of San Franciscans working in Silicon Valley believe that the ill-famed drug of the 1960s makes them more creative. Hannah Kuchler reports :

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Diane does not look someone who would drug your venison chilli. She sits on a San Francisco patio, her dewy blue eyes lucid, her blonde, subtly asymmetrical hair recently trimmed, her white jeans spotless. It is noon. I imagine she has enjoyed several fruitful meetings. Now, she will probably advise me on the meditation app keeping her serene. "I don't do coffee, I do acid" she says. The declaration that she takes a Class-A drug does not distract her from nibbling a chunk of salmon in her taco bowl. The 29 year old start-up founder began microdosing LSD - tiny does every few days - in January. At just a tenth of a tripping dose, she does not experience psychedelic efects. Rather than swirling in a magical universe with pink elephants, she says that microdosing has improved her creativity and helped her focus. On LSD, she is able to speed through user design sessions and sparkles when she's making new contacts. "When I'm microdosing at networking events or social happy hour mixers, they go well. I have a really good conversations as I am that little more 'on', more focused on what the person is saying. It enhances connections and heightens empathy", she says. Diane is part of a new generation of LSD users who believe it is a useful and harmless enhancement, like meditation or coffe. They meticulously plan their regimes, often taking 10 to 20 micrograms every three days. There is little research on microdosing, so they track how their bodies and minds respond, submitting reports to researchers and discussing effects with almost 18,000 other

microdosers on Reddit. Fifty years after the Summer of Love, they disdain their predecessors' Acid Tests (in the mid-1960s Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters took huge doses and even spiked venison chilli or Kool Aid with the drug), viewing them as rash and reckless. The generation obsessed with making every hour count, embracing Marie Kondo-style tidying binges and "inbox zero" email-clearing parties, is now co-opting psychedelics. "It's a sign of the time" says Diane. "LSD is a very flexible substance. It amplifies whatever is heppening in your brain. It is amplifying whatever is happening in our society. We are all productivity-obsessed, so that's our usage of it." Silicon Valley's microdosers want to overcome the drug's notoriety, harnessing the tech industry's talent at transforming global habits to make the psychedelics as acceptable as coffee. ( Illustration from the newspaper )

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San Francisco became the acid capital of the world in the 1960s, when hippies were inspired by Buddhists and Native Americans to alter their consciousness. Now, the city is spearheading the microdosing movement, with tech workers taking their cue from Steve Jobs, Apple's co-founder, who said LSD was one of the "two or three most important things' he did in his life. While some, like Jobs, take full-blown trips, LSD is increasingly consumed in does where the effects are subtle and don't interfere with everyday life. Several of Diane's friends started microdosing this year. Tim Ferriss, tech inverstor and author of the Four Hour Work Week, has said almost all the billionaires he knows take hallucinogens. The FT spoke to several microdosers, all of whom asked to withhold their real names because the drug is illegal. All highly motivated professionals, most work in the tech industry, often leading their own start-ups. They all reported using LSD as a tool to boost productivity under pressure, to come up with the cascade of ideas demanded from knowledge workers, and to improve their focus in a world filled with distractions (often created by the tech industry). "Being a CEO is so unbelievably demanding, you need to be superhuman", Gail, a 31-year-old start-up found, tells me on a bench in South Park, an elegant San Fransisco square favoured by venture capitalists. Taking LSD helps her keep calm. "As an entrepreneur, you are rejected by investors all the time" she says. Paul, a start-up found in New York, says he and his staff are less stressed since they started microdosing. But the couldn't be totaly sure about cause and effect : the thinks it may have also been project management app Asana, which they started using at the same time. Others self-medicate with LSD to treat mental health problems such as depression. Chantelle, 35, a food entrepreneur, was reluctant

to turn to conventional antidepressants. In a private members' club in San Francisco, she whispers that the awareness she felt while microdosing was 'amazing'. "It was almost like being your own therapist." Even when she didn't microdose for weeks, her mood was "extremely stable". "If I did gave a breakdown, it lasted like five minutes and I was done. Before, it would be two or three days in bed." LSD is not the only drug experiencing a revival. Studies are investigating if psilocybon, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms can be used to ease "end of life" anxieties in terminally ill petients, and whether MDMA can be used in therapy to relieve post-traumatic stress disorder. Some tech workers are making pilgrimages to South America to take *ayahuasca*, said to give deep insights while making you vomit prolifically. Many microdosers are horrified by the way the hippies abused LSD. They believe the Summer of Love set back understanding of the drug, because so little research on its effects has been done since. Dian says it was "ethically wrong" and "real violence" to drug people without their permission, as occurred in some the acid tests. Paul Austin, 26, founded the Third Wave organisation to encourage the cultural acceptance of psychedelic use. The first wave of psychedelics, he believes, was traditional use by native peoples from Ancient Greece to India. They were made illegal after the second wave in the 1960s, as parents panicked about tripping teenagers. Now, in the third wave, he believes that microdosers can undo the damage done by the baby boomers and make LSD legal again. Molly Maloof, a young doctor with many patients who are Silicon Valley execs, says she has observed increasing interest in "biohacking" - the idea that individuals can develop the best possible version of themselves using a combination of vitamins, exercise and drugs. Maloog cannot prescribe illegal drugs, but does advise petients who microdose on harm reduction. She believes that the future for psychedelics is "bright" - and that they could be legal within 10 years. "The hippie 2.0 generation is turning LSD into people pursuing their purpose and their highest potential, not wanting to go out and party and go crazy".

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Fifty years ago, Boots Hughston was 18 and lost. Driving in circles around the Panhandle, a stretch of grass below Haight Ashbury, he and his friends were searching for the "Human Be In", about a mile away in Golden Gate Park. It was early 1967, months before images of San Francisco's flower wearing, LSD taking hippies were beamed across the world. Psychedelics pioneer Timothy Leary rallied tens of thousands at the event with his exhortation to "Turn on, Tune in, Drop out". Hughston arrived late and followed the crowd to watch the sunset. There, he shared a joint with Leary, the former Harvard psychologist who President Richard Nixon once described as th "most dangerou man in America". "[Leary] was touting acid at the time," Hughston tells me. "He said something like, "That's a pretty nice sunset, pretty wild. Don't you realise it's the only time you'll ever see it ?' Hughston went on to take LSD 20 or 30 times - and learnt the importance of measuring doses the hard way. "One time, everything was just melting all around me," he says, describing a Grateful Dead show on New Year's Eve. "One of the artists had a bottle of wine with a whole bunch of doses of acid in. The tabs were all at the end of the bottle, so my swig was mostly tabs. I got a little higher than I probably should have... It was a three of four days, or a week, to get myself back together". Today's microdosing culture illustrates hwo San Franciscans have gone from dropping out to climbing the career lader : a shift that has dismayed the city's old hippies. Where the Diggers, a group of perfomance artists-cum-charity workers, once gave out free fodd in the Haight, tech workers today pursue stock options to pay for $10 toast and $1m apartements. Where art, music and fashion used to blossom, boutique exercise studios and green juice makers attempt to fill a cultural vacuum. "As an artist, you could live existence pretty well. You wouldn't be hand-to-mouth", says Hughston, whose friends shared apartments paying $20 a month each, living on vegetables and brown rice provided by the Diggers. "Nowadays, it is $4,000 a month for a one bedroom. It's crazy, you can't just go out and hang out with your buddies, work your art. You have to make a living, get a job that pays real money - and fit in". Hughston still doesn't want to fit in. He has been battling for the right to memorialise the Summer of Love in Golden Gate Park - a plan that has been rejected three times. One morning in June, he and his entourage of greyhaired hippies - known as the "Coucule of Light" - filled a room at San Francisco's City

Hall to plead with the park's department for permission. The department claims that they are ill-prepared, despite the group having organised concerts for the 40th anniversaries of the Summer of Love and Woodstock. The tie-dyed crowd see the departement's intransigence as a rejection of their values in favour of events organised by corporations. Hughston is convinced that the permits officer does not like "hippie events". "I've done many shows there before with no problems at all, so they can't really say there's going to be a bunch of people trippin", he says. "We're 60, 70, 80 years old - we know how to take edibles without ending up in hospital". But the hippies's frustration goes far beyond this year's memorial event. They worry that the San Fracisco they made famous is losing its values. David Talbot, author of the 2012 book *Season of the With*, which looks at the city's evolution in the 1960s and 1970s, mourns the loss of the city to the techies. "The earlier social invasion of the city was all about expanding the of humanity, of what compassion is, things that later became San Francisco values", he says. "Now its like the old Gold Rush days in the 1840s. People are basically motivated by greed. People are coming to this city not so much for the kind of enlightened, benevolent and even revolutionary ieals, but to get rich quick." Talbot describes San Francisco as a "playground" for companies such as Uber and Lyft, whose ride-sharing cars have taken over the roads, with Airbnb colonising neighbourhoods. Everyone is asleep by 10 o'clock, he says. "There is no vibrancy. It's all work-orientated". Hughston gave up his dream for a reunion of hippie elders in early July. "This event would have been something our great city would have been proud of", he wrote to City Hall. "Thru [sic] the eyes of the world, San Francisco would have been seen as the progressive city it once was." (*Illustration from LeSoir.be*)

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To be continued : Read Part 2

It take a really long time to right all the article of the newspaper, so I thank you for reading this first part, and send you the second tomorow has soon as I recopied the text here.

Sources :
Text from Life&Arts FTWeekend newspaper
First picture from freedomandfulfilment.com
Seconde picture from the FTW newspaper
Third picture from businessinsider.com
Fourth picture from pinterest
Last one from LeSoir.be

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