Is ketamine to Silicon Valley what coke is to Wall Street?

Welcome back to The Drop In, DoubleBlind’s newsletter serving up news, culture, and independent journalism about psychedelics straight to your inbox. 

Today’s news stories are about ketamine “slumber parties” (or getaways) for CEOs and tech execs, and the psychedelic writings of iconic author Tom Robbins, who recently died at the age of 92. You can find those stories directly below! If you keep scrolling, you’ll find pieces on how to (safely) take GHB, our favorite coffee alternatives, and a concept called “neurospirituality” — have you heard of it?

Enjoy the brainfood 🌈,

Mary Carreón
Senior Editor

Ps. If you are receiving this email for a second time, our apologies! We noticed an error in the original send that went to a limited number of subscribers.

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Tech Executives Are Dissociating Their Way to Self-Optimization

Silicon Valley CEOs are finding peace from our cyberpunk dystopian reality by attending three-day ketamine getaways in the heart of San Francisco.

Did you see the story in Wired this week about "ketamine-fueled ‘psychedelic slumber parties’ that get tech execs back on track"? The piece profiles a Bay Area outfit offering “ketamine-assisted leadership coaching” for the upper echelon of Silicon Valley — because, apparently, traditional ketamine-assisted therapy wasn’t cutting it.

The story didn’t state what ketamine therapy organization was hosting the 3-day sessions, but executives, overwhelmed by the existential dread of success, gather in a candlelit loft in the Mission District in San Francisco, swaddled in blankets, eye masks strapped on, and stuffed animals within reach, to dissociate their way into self-actualization. Guided by facilitators under the pseudonyms Aria Stone and Shuang Shuang, these tech execs pay to essentially chase neuroplasticity and emotional breakthroughs through intramuscular ketamine injections, costing $2,600 for the weekend, plus a $350 medical evaluation fee.

The effects of ketamine therapy are no longer just a whisper among the Bay Area’s tech-wellness crowd — master tech loser Elon Musk said last year in an interview that “ketamine is helpful for getting one out of [a] negative frame of mind” thrusting the drug into mainstream consciousness. 

But ketamine has become the venture capitalist’s substance of choice. According to Stone and Shuang, their clientele consists of Fortune 100 CEOs, CFOs, and startup founders. A demographic of people Shuang describes as "the loneliest people,” in the story. Their solution? A guided plunge into the void, softened by plush seating, group intention-setting, and a trip sitter to ground them should a trip run awry.

Day one unfolds with a low-dose "psycholytic" session — just enough to loosen mental knots without fully unmooring the client. The next day, a mid-range dose takes them deeper, with facilitators standing by to ensure no one panics and bolts out the door and into the feral streets of San Francisco. The final day is for integration, where participants attempt to translate their chemically induced experiences into actionable insights. You know, for optimal performance.

We’d be remiss to not point out the irony of those who crafted our digital age seeking solace in guided disembodiment. These are, afterall, the same people engineering AI-driven workplaces, frictionless consumer experiences, and productivity-optimizing algorithms who are paying thousands of dollars to be chemically-induced into unproductivity.

"People are floating away at the end," Stone says to Wired. "They don’t want it to stop. They ask, ‘Can I integrate this way of being into my life?’"

No one should be surprised our tech overlords are finding peace through ketamine. It’s to silicone valley what coke is to Wall Street.

Rest In Prose Tom Robbins

The iconic author of Jitterbug Perfume, Still Life with Woodpecker, and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues has died at 92, leaving behind a literary legacy as electrifying as his psychedelic prose.

If you knew a book could rip you out of reality and drop you into a technicolor fever dream — where cosmic whimsy meets weird philosophical musings, and every sentence sparkles like a firework infused with LSD — would you log off social media and take the ride? Tom Robbins built worlds like that. His books aren’t just stories; they are psychedelic playgrounds where language back handsprings into meaning, fully expanding and contracting, like the universe itself. And today, we’re honoring him because he has left this earthly dimension.

Tom Robbins died on February 10 at the age of 92. He was a literary trickster whose words reshaped the contours of modern storytelling. He wasn’t just a novelist — he was a maestro of metaphors whose prose inspired a large swath of psychedelic writers. His work swirled like a paisley pattern through the counterculture era of the late ‘60s and ‘70s, and embedded itself in the minds of readers who were down to trade linear logic for linguistic acid trips.

His first LSD trip in the first half of the ‘60s, detailed in his memoir Tibetan Peach Pie, cracked open his perception, and from that moment on, his words shimmered with afterglow. In Another Roadside Attraction, a mummified Jesus ends up at a roadside hot dog stand. In Still Life with Woodpecker, a love story (involving TNT and outlaw chaos) unfolds inside a pack of Camel cigarettes. Robbins didn't just blur the lines between the profound and the absurd — he obliterated them.

His death marks the end of an era, but his influence and legacy endure in print. Tom Robbins was never just a novelist. He was a literary alchemist! A lifelong congregant of the ecstatic absurdity of existence! And a damn good sentence spinner. We are so grateful to have shared a timeline with him; to have existed in the same cosmic “dog dish of meteorology” that gave us his words. May his spirit rest in prose.

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Psychedelics and SSRIs: what you need to know

Roughly 1 in 5 people are on some sort of antidepressant medication. Many of these are SSRIs that modulate the serotonin system in your brain. This is the same system psychedelics work on, so they can interact with psychedelics. But there’s a lot of misinformation, confusion, and contradicting opinions out there, so we want to set the record straight. 

Here’s what you need to know about psychedelics and SSRIs: watch the video here