why your boss suddenly wants you to start doing drugs

Some companies are quite literally turning to drugs in a desperate, demented search for more productivity as their frustrated employees turn to them for sanity.

You’ve probably had the experience of applying for a job, getting an offer, then having to go into an office, pee in a cup, then wait for a clean test before you could show up for work. Countless companies warned all would-be applicants that their workplaces were “clean and sober” and that they very much drug test regularly. In short, if you do drugs, they wanted nothing to do with you and were more than happy to give you long lectures on the dangers of substance use in the office or shop floor.

But in a stunning reversal, some companies are doing the exact opposite. From from instituting random drug screens, they’re recommending their employees start getting ketamine injections and micro-dose themselves with nootropics, shrooms, and LSD in search of a solution to employee burnout and depression. Far from trying to expand or feed workers’ heads — as Jefferson Airplane so famously sang in White Rabbit — and encourage them to see the bigger picture, executives and managers are trying to use drugs to squeeze all they can out of them.

There’s something uniquely perverse when an overworked employee comes to their boss’ office, says they’re completely worn out, and what they hear is “have you tried drugs?” It’s similarly dystopian when mid-career professionals struggling to survive in an economy where merciless bankers working for people richer than some countries are pulling the rug from under them faster than they can run, and trying to get ahead for the first time in a long time ask for help and are told “you can push yourself harder by taking these drugs, or, you can use those drugs to cope.”

It’s one thing if people want to do drugs. We can disagree with their decision and tell them what the drugs will do to their bodies and minds with prolonged use. When the boss or a career coach either downplays the risk of feeding you head with LSD, and ketamine, and psilocybin — the active ingredient in magic mushrooms — or outright tells you it may be worth it, that’s when you get into some very weird territory.

It reminds me of athletes using performance enhancing drugs, sacrificing their livers, kidneys, genitals, and risking all sorts of complications, but with mostly white collar office workers and paper pushers suffering from clinical FOMO, anxiety, or ennui as they start to simply shut down and give up. They’re not pushing their bodies to their limits, they’re just trying to survive in a world where only three years ago, it was made abundantly clear that their bosses will very literally sacrifice them in a heartbeat to hit quarterly targets and feel absolutely zero remorse.

We shouldn’t necessarily conclude that there’s no benefit in certain people taking a psychedelic shown to have positive effects in treating severe depression, anxiety, or addiction and PTSD. A lot of people out there need mental health help and are having trouble getting it. But we should also note that a) it should not be that difficult to just keep our heads above water, b) our system should not be handing us rocks when we are drowning, and c) our bosses should not be trying to squeeze more productivity from us by drugging us to our eyeballs.

Ultimately, that last part, is what this is really about. Countless executives have been very loudly and frequently decrying the productivity plateau, demanding to know why the typical worker hasn’t been as productive for the last year and a half as they’ve been in the decades before. Now, if they had a shred of empathy, they would realize that one of the main reasons for this is the diminishing returns of productivity at work and an epidemic of burnout.

Layoffs over the past year have been particularly soulless, brutal, and handled with all the tact of a 1980s rich boy villain the audience is meant to boo through their movie in the middle of his grand entrance. Fake jobs are inundating the web, frustrating would-be applicants. Salary offers are laughably lowballed for the qualifications sought. And existing pay is not keeping up with inflation.

How much productivity do you expect when you lay off 20% of your company, split up the duties of the fired employees to already overworked survivors, then post wanted ads demanding a Nobel Peace Prize, 15 years of experience of solving world hunger, a PhD in international relations, and on call availability six days a week just to be a Tier 1 support tech for $16 an hour in NYC? How motivated are your workers going to be if the only reward they’ll get for working around the clock is an ulcer, stubborn belly fat, five more “emergency, top priority” tasks, and a 2.7% COL adjustment?

People will work very hard for extended periods of time if they have a goal and a real promise of gain and rest at the end of this crunch, optimistic and smiling through the pain and fatigue. What they do resent is working harder and harder, losing more and more of themselves to work for smaller and smaller returns while being treated with all the respect and civility offered to a spare cog in a giant engine. No wonder they’re fed up and want to scale back from this abusive, coerced relationship.

And the corporate world’s solution to this is to say “Hmm… Well, the pizza parties are a bust. Have we tried pumping them full of hallucinogens and psychoactive drugs?” It would be funny if it wasn’t sadly, and unfortunately, more true than we’d want it to be.