Amid his newfound role as unelected government wrecker, Elon Musk's use of the powerful tranquilizer ketamine is once again in the press.
As The Atlantic reports, research into the effects of sustained ketamine use may offer some insights into the increasingly bizarre antics of the South African-born gem mining scion who's admitted to using the drug to treat depression — and who's allegedly indulged in it for recreational purposes, too.
Back in 2010, English psychopharmacology researcher Celia Morgan, then a professor at University College London, published a study in the journal Addiction that tracked 120 frequent recreational ketamine users for a year.
As Morgan told The Atlantic, everyone in that cohort — from those who used it three times a month on average to those who did it 20 times per month — had "profound" short- and long-term memory issues and were "distinctly dissociated in their day-to-day existence."
Along with those unsettling side effects, the psychopharmacology researcher and her team also found that regular users scored very high on delusional thinking scales and seemed to be convinced that they were receiving secret messages sent to them alone. Sounds kind of familiar, right?
Delusions of grandeur are not, obviously, the sole provenance of ketamine users, and there's little doubt Musk had an outsized opinion of himself long before he discovered "Special K." But his behavior in recent years has grown more and more erratic, especially in the since his purchase of Twitter, in ways that seem to track with those descriptions of frequent ketamine use side effects.
In a 2023 exposé for The New Yorker, journalist Ronan Farrow revealed that people close to the billionaire had grown concerned about his alleged ket habit, which those unnamed sources claimed had grown in then-recent years. Paired with his increasing self-imposed isolation and the stress from the many businesses he owns, those associates were worried that Musk may have been self-medicating.
Less than a year after that article dropped, Musk revealed to former CNN host Don Lemon that he does, in fact, use ketamine — but as he claimed in the March 2024 interview, he has a prescription for it and only used it every other week. Though there aren't studies into the long-term effects of prescription ketamine dosages, that would put him within the threshold that Morgan, the English psychopharmacologist, described as "regular" use that can lead to memory impairment and delusions.
Between then and now, a lot has changed for the multi-hyphenate drug enthusiast — and if he's still using his special medicine with any regularity, it could very easily be affecting his work as Donald Trump's hatchet man.
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