Tech bros love talking about microdosing - but the legality of psychedelics is a messy grey area
Vince Kadlubek’s company was nearing mainstream success when it began to feel weird that he couldn’t talk about psychedelics.
Back in 2015, Kadlubek had co-founded Meow Wolf – a Santa-Fe-based art collective that makes trippy, immersive installations. In 2019, stressed to breaking point, he had passed the baton to a new, more culturally conservative leadership, tasked with securing capital to expand into other cities.
Yet even as he continued to advise the company, Kadlubek was undergoing a "transformative" healing process thanks to 5-MeO-DMT, a hallucinogenic chemical secreted by the Colorado River toad that is highly illegal in the US. As a gay man, he’d never felt any pressure to hide his sexuality in the business world; somehow, he knew this was different.
"I was thinking to myself: man, I can’t even bring up the word ‘psychedelic’ at a board meeting without people getting freaked out," said Kadlubek last Thursday during a panel discussion at Discovery Sessions, an interdisciplinary psychedelics conference in San Francisco.
"It’s so f***ed up. We’re very psychedelic – we’re inspired by LSD, mushrooms –
