Ketamine and governance shouldn't mix

Psychedelic drugs hit the news last week just as Elon Musk, America’s unelected oligarch, started blowing up the government, because, chaos.

Musk, who is clueless about how government works, killed a short term spending bill that would have kept government open through March, provided money for cash-strapped farmers, and provided FEMA disaster relief, all while posting juvenile clues of his cluelessness.

Musk also regularly doses on ketamine. NYT calls ketamine a “life-changing psychedelic drug” used “for when life is ending.” Musk, whose life is not ending anytime soon, uses ketamine to reduce his “negative chemical states like depression,” and says he uses the drug once every other week “or something like that.”

Ketamine blocks existential angst, but what else does it block?

Ketamine is a powerful anesthetic used in psychedelic therapy, like LSD, and is often prescribed for psychiatric conditions. Increasingly, it is also prescribed to patients facing end-of-life or terminal diagnoses to help them overcome angst based on fear of imminent death.

One palliative care specialist reported that patients taking ketamine experience a profound relief from fear and anxiety, and that ketamine “provides an alternative perspective of the end-of-life experience they are having.” Another therapist reported that she was startled by the results when she began administering ketamine to patients facing terminal illness: although they were still dying, most lost their fear of it.

The use of psychedelic compounds like Ketamine has not been researched enough to know the long term- or even short term- effects. Most concerning, neuroscientists aren’t exactly sure how psychedelic drugs work to alleviate existential distress, they just know they do. MDMA, the first such compound to be reviewed by the F.D.A., recently failed to win F.D.A. approval due to an absence of data and clinical trials tracking short and long term effects.

Scientists know that persistent negative thoughts, angst and negative emotions can calcify neural pathways, and that neuroplasticity, or rewiring those pathways through the use of psychedelics, allows patients to see life from a completely re-wired perspective. Sometimes with just one treatment, terminal patients report that their fear of death disappears entirely.

But for people who are not facing imminent death, is it really healthy or even desirable to lose all fear of it?

During the budget fiasco, Musk posted 100+ feverish tweets with misleading or outright false claims to kill the funding deal. Among other juvenile rants, he posted, “Just close down the govt until January 20th. Defund everything. We will be fine for 33 days.” He posted in a separate tweet that a federal government shutdown “doesn’t actually shut down critical functions.”

He’s a complete governance idiot, but all Trump sees, because he is an intellectual midget, is Space-X. Trump assumes that since Musk works with rockets and technology, Musk is informed on all things; it's a dangerous assumption any teenage boy might make.

Ketamine, according to doctors who prescribe it, is wildly effective at suppressing fear of death, even in patients facing imminent death. But for people like Musk who aren’t facing death, I’m not so sure losing fear of death is a good thing. I’m not sure a giant national defense contractor should have an “alternative perspective” of what death actually means, because for the rest of us who aren’t on ketamine, death means we’re dead and it’s not a temporary condition.

A certain amount of fear is necessary

Fear of death is the healthy evolutionary guide that keeps us from touching the same hot stove twice. The implication of someone who has no fear of death setting national policy of any kind is comic-book cliché ominous.

I’m no neuroscientist. I’m no therapist either, I’m just a lawyer with a big mouth. But I do know that scientists don’t know exactly how these drugs work, because they’ve said so. They have no idea how ketamine effects different parts of the brain like receptors and neurotransmitters, or how it might suppress survival instincts along with fear. Most scientists acknowledge the need for larger, academically rigorous studies before psychedelic drugs are declared F.D.A. safe for consumption.

Just putting two and two together, if ketamine eradicates fear, wouldn’t it also eradicate compassion? Compassion comes from empathizing with the suffering of others, drawing from our own suffering. But if ketamine blocks fear and mental suffering, we don’t have those negative experiences to draw on to enable us to sympathize with others.

Only a pathological lack of compassion would allow the world’s richest man-- who will never need social security, VA benefits or Medicaid-- to cut those lifelines for everyone else. Only a lack of compassion would allow Musk to sabotage the budget bill, throw the government into disarray a week before Christmas, and demand that money for child cancer research be eliminated from the budget deal.

And, if my no fear/no compassion theory has legs, what’s the end game? Why would Musk, with the emotional maturity of a pre-pubescent teen, stop at axing government benefits for people who need them to survive? Musk has shown a complete lack of limits: he engaged in election fraud to get Trump elected, spread disinformation openly, and admitted that his million dollar a day “lottery” wasn’t even a lottery. He clearly suffers from the same above-the-law king complex infecting Trump, except his complex is heightened with psychoactive drugs.

Watching Trump and Musk playing at destruction just for fun and power reminds me of ignorant punks who put firecrackers in a dog’s mouth just to watch him suffer, egged on by other ignorant punks. They are the lowest creatures among us.

Unless Biden hides the nuclear codes, pretty soon we’ll all need ketamine just to stop the existential fear of what’s next.

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