In 1973, in the middle of a national heroin epidemic, Dr. David F. Musto, a Yale Professor, published a comprehensive history of drug abuse and enforcement in the United States. His book, The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control, documented the cyclical history of tolerance and restraint that characterizes Americans’ views about drugs of abuse. A reviewer at the time commented that Musto’s book “would become mandatory reading for anybody who wants to understand how we got into our present mess.” Well, It’s 52 years later, and The American Disease remains part of our “present mess”.
Musto’s thesis was that the USA goes through historical cycles of forgetting and remembering the benefits and risks of the various classes of abused drugs. We all know what he is talking about. Whether you think of cocaine, speed, opiates, marijuana, or alcohol—it applies. Another class of drugs to which Musto’s thesis applies are the dissociatives, such as ketamine. I never imagined that information about dissociative drugs would become relevant on a political blog, but here we are.
Previously, I described how ketamine works, along with its known risks and benefits. The broad range of views in the comments from people who have actually used ketamine—knowingly or unknowingly, under medical supervision and outside if it—provides firsthand experiences to help us understand what we are talking about. One commenter in particular posted research that bears repeating: If a person with a prior history of schizophrenia (or are perhaps a young adult in the early stages of developing the disease) is given ketamine, the drug can trigger florid psychotic episodes resembling schizophrenia. In other words, If a person has a history of schizophrenia, they are predisposed to have a really bad mental experience from a single ketamine infusion, and the negative effects of ketamine can sometimes persist long after the drug wears off.
So is ketamine an angel, devil, or a bit of both? In the United States, ketamine is increasingly prescribed off-label, in clinics, under medical supervision, to treat major depression, PTSD, TBI, pain, and addiction. In recent years, these clinics have proliferated. Some ketamine-hawking websites even go so far as to imply that ketamine is a nootropic—a drug that makes you smarter. Let me translate that into Silicon Valleyese: ketamine improves the brain by removing cognitive and emotional rigidity, by shaking the snow-globe.
Mindbloom is a Silicon Valley startup built by the tech entrepreneur Dylan Beynon. Mindbloom is one of the largest providers of legal off-label ketamine therapy in the United States. Mindbloom’s founding Head of Engineering is Alexandria Beynon (AKA Ali Tobiasz), who happens to be Dylan’s wife. Ali is a highly accomplished software developer and engineer. Among Ali’s many accomplishments, she has been named as one of the 35 Muskrats identified by Propublica, who have collaborated with Musk to enable DOGE to bring anti-democratic chaos to our government. Ali ’s CV says she can program in 10 languages, but I don’t see Cobol. Anyways, Dylan is married to Ali, who works for Elon at DOGE. Perhaps they’ve chatted informally at social gatherings.
Mindbloom has grown rapidly, because the company features an approach to ketamine therapy that leverages convenient telemedicine visits with a doctor before and after the ketamine treatments. Talk-therapy is combined with ketamine therapy at home, which can be administered by the patient under the skin (subcutaneously). That’s right: they sell you a therapy package that includes a bottle of sterile ketamine with a needle, and teach you how to inject at home.
Patients say that they greatly prefer “self-guided” injections over pills under the tongue. This approach to off-label ketamine therapy has the benefit of a lower cost, and there is easier accessibility for patients. But the moment that ketamine leaves the supervised clinic and can be self-administered by the patient, the line between therapy and abuse can disintegrate—especially when one is ignorant of the past history of ketamine action, use, and abuse.
Turns out, ketamine therapy was not Beynon’s first-choice drug for his psychedelic therapy startup. He initially sought to build Mindbloom based on his own incredibly positive experience with the drug MDMA (ecstasy). Beynon’s ecstasy (and ayahuasca) psychonaut trips were so helpful that he discovered his passion—which is to share psychedelic therapies with the world by creating and building Mindbloom. Problem is, MDMA is not currently approved to be legally prescribed for anything, so it cannot be prescribed off-label. How’s an entrepreneur supposed to attract funding for that?
Beynon couldn’t really build Mindbloom by proposing to use MDMA. Instead he pivoted to ketamine—an approved prescription drug that can be legally prescribed off-label. At the time of Mindbloom’s creation (late 2018), reports about the benefits of ketamine therapy were in the scientific literature and (especially) on the internet. Ketamine’s a psychedelic drug too, right bro?
At this point, it is important to clarify some drug classes. Misunderstanding these definitions can muddy the waters. We need to distinguish 3 classes: Psychedelics (LSD, mushrooms, MDA, MDMA, and many others), dissociatives (PCP, ketamine, DXM, and nitrous oxide), and general anesthetics: (propofol, fentanyl, and many others). Although ketamine can cause experiences that one might describe as “psychedelic” or “hallucinogenic”—ketamine is a completely different class of drug and action compared to psychedelics like LSD. Likewise, while ketamine and laughing gas are extremely useful drugs in many medical situations (because they don’t depress respiration)—they are very different from other anesthesias used in hospitals, such as propofol or fentanyl.
With their shift from MDMA to ketamine, Mindbloom managed to pull a sort of a bait-and-switch with their “psychedelic” therapy and ended up with a lucrative business selling “dissociative” ketamine maintenance therapy (at home!). This sounds like an excellent business model, with a clear path to growth and profitability. And it sounds dangerous.
You can get to know Beynon from various informal interviews posted on YouTube. He seems a nice enough entrepreneur: smart, bursting with serotonergic empathy. He is seasoned and resilient, with 2 prior startups under his belt. In one of these interviews, Dylan illustrates the denial stage of The American Disease, season 2025 (the ketamine version). Between min 25 and 30 of the interview, you can marvel at the pretzel logic of a man explaining away and deflecting the known risks of ketamine use. Later in the interview, Dylan mentions that he takes ketamine himself, in his own clinic, once a month. Considering that he also mentions that schizophrenia runs in his immediate family, Dylan might not want to shake his snow-globe in this particular manner too often.
Of course, we don’t know if Dylan and his Mindbloom colleagues have assisted Elon in his ketamine journey in any way whatsoever. That’s personal information, which should remain private and stored on secure servers, where it is safe from unwarranted intrusions from people who have no right to know.
In summary, a megalomaniac is hovering behind the Resolute Desk, experimenting with a drug that he thinks makes him even smarter than his genius-legend and worshipping lackeys tell him. He acts like he’s the dungeon master for a new role-playing game called USA. But he looks more like a frumpy schoolboy—and increasingly, he talks like the rusting man who lives under the bridge. He wasn’t born in our country, but perhaps we should be asking, nevertheless, if Elon Musk is suffering, directly or indirectly, from The American Disease.
