Did Diplo Make Acid Mainstream?

“I’m so curious, what’s the most conventional place that you’ve done LSD?” CNN host Andy Cohen asked DJ and producer Diplo on New Year's Eve live on air.

“Right now,” Diplo replied placidly. “I did some on the helicopter, on the way here… I’m not even lying.”

Cue pandemonium. “Wow,” Cohen said, despite presumably being aware Diplo was on LSD. Surely this can’t have been a coincidence, right? Fellow host Anderson Cooper, meanwhile, had a coughing fit of laughter and took time to blow his nose.

“But it's a light trip,” Diplo added. “I think I might have macrodosed earlier today, though.” 

“We don’t recommend [doing] this at home,” Cooper said. Diplo — who, along with producer Skrillex, comprise the dance duo Jack Ü — performed three separate shows in Los Angeles on New Year’s Eve and drank a few small glasses of liquor during the CNN interview. Once he had left the broadcast, Cooper marveled at Diplo. “I wish I was Diplo,” the CNN anchor said. “I got to say. I just think he has a fun, cool lifestyle. Can you imagine his lifestyle?”

Now, it's not news that Diplo enjoys altered states of consciousness. He infamously ran the LA marathon while under the influence of an unknown quantity of LSD. “I did what any normal person would do and took LSD,” he wrote on Instagram after his sub-4 hour, LSD-assisted marathon time. Meanwhile, guests at his creative retreat in Jamaica can order mushrooms and cannabis to their rooms. 

What is perhaps more striking is how it is suddenly acceptable — commendable, even —to be high on psychedelics live on TV, something that would have been unthinkable 20 or even 10 years ago due to the demonization of LSD. 

“It's like the idea of the hedonic treadmill,” says Andy Mitchel, a neuropsychologist and the author of 10 Trips: A Psychedelic Adventure, referencing the idea that one’s level of happiness tends to revert to a baseline after positive or negative events. “Just as the things that give us pleasure run out, the things that scare us run out of power, too.”

So when did it dawn on people that nibbling a quarter tab of acid isn’t the worst thing one can do? The moral panic over LSD has gradually faded. The mainstream “is now enculturating it in more acceptable ways,” Mitchell says. “It was never bad in the first place; it was just different, alternative, it was ‘other.’”

Whether specific musicians ever stopped taking acid despite the backlash is another question. But now, it seems almost unremarkable. “Microdosing acid or other substances like psilocybin has almost become an industry standard across various styles of electronic musicianship; from creative inspiration in the studio to live performances,” says Graham St. John, a cultural anthropologist and the author of the forthcoming book Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna. 

“We've come a long way if we're virtually normalizing acid on the CNN cork popping commercially sponsored New Year transition special.” However, given that Diplo confirmed that Cohen and Cooper did not look like they were melting from his vantage point, “it may be a good example of controlled dosing that effectively lubricates the status quo rather than shatters and dissolves its foundations,” adds St. John.

Still, celebrity endorsements of psychedelics continue to build their cultural cache. This growing acceptance makes reform seem inevitable. However, LSD remains noticeably absent from the conversation about decriminalization and medical research, likely due to the lingering stigma from the drug war and its long-lasting effect. 

For Jeremy Gilbert, professor of cultural and political theory at the University of East London, the shift in mood in mainstream culture has one chief explanation. “Psychedelics are part of the culture of Silicon Valley,” he says. “And Silicon Valley now is what we would call the hegemonic force in American culture: They're the people in control of the technologies having the most transformative effect on the way we live.”

Despite psychedelic censorship on Meta platforms and a regearing of Google’s algorithm to boost government sources over independent news outlets, Gilbert says that Silicon Valley leaders' private tastes and preferences have serious cultural capital. “They really define what people think of as the present and the future,” he says.

But for the uninitiated and the psychedelic naive, Diplo’s careless approach to taking LSD could be risky, depending on the dose. People have been live-streaming themselves taking massive doses of psychedelics recently, and there are concerns that it might set a poor example.

“Recreational drug culture has always been defined by excess,” says Mitchell. “That’s part of its point. That now overlaps with a culture that is obsessed with endurance. Putting the body through things is a bourgeois upper middle-class executive lifestyle choice. There’s an intersection of two cultures for the first time: Life’s intolerable, we need to risk something to feel something.”

💌 If you loved this email, forward it to a psychonaut in your life.

Editorial Process

DoubleBlind is a trusted resource for news, evidence-based education, and reporting on psychedelics. We work with leading medical professionals, scientific researchers, journalists, mycologists, indigenous stewards, and cultural pioneers. Read about our editorial policy and fact-checking process here.