Drugs with a Backstory: What’s Actually in Ketamine, Ecstasy, Psilocybin Mushrooms, and Adderall?

(And... did it start as a plant or nah?)

Not all drugs are created equal. Some grew wild on Earth long before we had language. Others were born in a lab, shaped by chemistry, capitalism, or war. All of them interact with our bodies and minds in complex ways—and every single one carries a story.

Below, we break down the basics of four widely used substances: what they are, how they work, where they came from, and what kind of energetic signature they tend to hold. Spoiler alert: some of your “synthetics” have roots in the natural world—and some “natural” medicines have been sliced, diced, and pharmaceuticalized into something totally different.

1. Ketamine

💊 Synthetic. Originally pharmaceutical. 

🌿 Energetic lineage: Spirit of trauma medicine meets emergency medicine meets dissociation.

Science: Ketamine was developed in 1962 as a surgical anesthetic—a gentler alternative to PCP. It works by antagonizing the NMDA receptor, which plays a major role in pain, memory, and mood. In simpler terms: it blocks glutamate, slowing down brain signaling enough to induce a dissociative, floaty state. At lower doses, it’s now used for treatment-resistant depression, pain management, and (off-label) psychedelic therapy.

Energetics: Ketamine is the emergency-room monk. It sits between worlds: numbing and revealing, muting and mirroring. It doesn’t come from a plant, but its effects mimic the liminal spaces of deep trauma states. If you’ve ever dissociated as a survival response, ketamine might feel eerily familiar. That’s not good or bad—it just is. In safe containers, it can help you meet those states with gentleness instead of fear.

Personal Reflections:

I’ve witnessed ketamine in several contexts: emergency medicine, new age mental health circles, party scenes, and full-blown addiction. It is a dissociative—and highly addictive. It needs to be handled with serious caution and care.

My personal experience of ketamine carries a very dark energy—deep shadow material. Without a strong container, the insights it offers can become disorienting or even re-traumatizing, especially given its dissociative nature. I’ve seen it perpetuate trauma more often than resolve it.

Among the elite, ketamine use is rampant—likely because of its high cost and access barriers. Its misuse in those circles often mirrors a deeper pattern: using medicine to disconnect rather than reconnect.

2. Ecstasy / MDMA

💊 Semi-synthetic. Lab-born, but with a plant grandparent. 

🌿 Energetic lineage: Heart medicine with a club-kid edge.

Science: MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine) was first synthesized in 1912 by Merck. It’s technically related to amphetamines but with serotonin-releasing effects that turn up the trust, empathy, and oxytocin—our social bonding chemicals. It's now being used in clinical settings (MAPS, etc.) to treat PTSD and support deep therapeutic connection.

Plant ancestor? Yes. The root chemical inspiration came from safrole, a compound found in sassafras oil (a spicy-sweet plant used traditionally in North America). Safrole is the OG, but MDMA is many generations removed.

Energetics: MDMA is your inner child’s dance party. It amplifies trust, opens the heart, and temporarily dissolves the harsh armor of trauma. But it’s fragile. Without reverence and integration, that open-hearted state can lead to burnout, overstimulation, or crashy confusion. Think of it like an energetic floodlight: beautiful, but not sustainable without shadow work.

Personal Reflections:

MDMA has been an essential tool for clients who struggle to speak about their trauma or who have difficulty feeling safe in connection.

While I’ve never used cocaine, MDMA is often described as the more embodied version of booze and coke—especially in communal or ritual (read: recreational) settings. It tends to carry low addiction potential energetically, though it does have a “lower inhibitions” effect that can be risky without embodied awareness or proper integration.

MDMA opens the door—but you still have to walk through it, grounded.

3. Psilocybin Mushrooms

🍄 Totally natural. 

🌿 Energetic lineage: Trickster, healer, teacher, mirror.

Science: Psilocybin is a prodrug—it’s converted in the body into psilocin, which then binds to serotonin receptors (especially 5-HT2A), altering perception, mood, and cognition. It doesn’t just “make you trip”—it changes the default mode network in your brain, which governs ego, narrative, and identity. That’s why it feels like a cosmic zoom-out.

Energetics: Mushrooms are alive. They are not like teachers—they are teachers. Their intelligence is fungal, fractal, and disinterested in your ego. Whether your experience is hilarious, horrific, or healing, they’re showing you something real. These aren’t human allies—they’re Earth’s whisper networks, rooting into everything and reminding you: you’re part of the web, not the center.

Personal Reflections: 

In my experience, when used with awareness, presence, and a nature-based set and setting, psilocybin mushrooms are deeply embodying and regenerative. They often bring discomfort—physical, mental, emotional, relational, or spiritual—but that discomfort is the medicine. They show us contrast. They show us the in-between.

When approached consciously—whether microdosed, shared in ceremony, or explored in a macrodose depth container—mushrooms can be profoundly healing, revealing, and empowering.

But I’ve also seen what happens when they’re used unconsciously or as a bypass. Sometimes they help people stay functional in deeply dysfunctional environments—at the cost of long-term well-being. Other times, they trigger a prolonged dark night of the soul without adequate support.

The potential for misuse isn’t about dependency in the traditional sense—it’s about dissociatively sustaining “happiness” and “productivity” in an extractive world. That said, mushrooms don’t tend to let people stay in bypass forever. Eventually, if you keep taking them without shifting your environment, they’ll cause enough disruption to force a reckoning. That’s the magic: over time, they help redefine what “happy” and “productive” even mean—pointing us back to embodiment.

4. Adderall (Amphetamine salts)

💊 Synthetic, but inspired by nature. 

🌿 Energetic lineage: Taskmaster with a side of dopamine hacking.

Science: Adderall is a mix of amphetamine salts that stimulate the central nervous system, increasing dopamine and norepinephrine. It was originally synthesized in the late 1800s, popularized as Benzedrine in the 1930s, and now prescribed for ADHD and narcolepsy. It sharpens focus, delays fatigue, and boosts drive—at a cost.

Plant ancestor? Amphetamine chemistry was inspired by ephedrine, a compound found in ephedra (aka Ma Huang), a plant used in Traditional Chinese Medicine. The lab version? Stronger, faster, and built for long hours.

Energetics: Adderall is the productivity drug. It binds you to linear time, clear goals, and measurable outputs. For some neurodivergent folks, it can be life-saving. For others, it disconnects from intuitive rhythms and drives burnout. Either way, it’s a borrowed engine—not a wellspring. Long-term use requires recovery for the body’s own reward systems.

Personal Reflections:

I don’t have anything kind to say about Adderall. Outside of specific ancestral contexts—where related plant compounds may have been used in ritual to overcome extreme conditions—there is no reason a human should be required to sit down, shut up, and perform one task for hours on end without rest.

Adderall is starter meth. It’s a tool of the institution: used to manufacture obedient workers, and later used by those workers to numb the growing awareness that this way of living is deeply misaligned.

It’s no accident that in the media cycle surrounding Elon Musk’s drug use, mentions of Adderall were quickly edited out of follow-up stories. There’s a clear effort to keep Adderall out of public scrutiny—and that might be exactly where we need to look first.

It is highly addictive, and in many cases, it becomes a stepping stone to illicit drug use that spirals into dependency. If there’s a pharmaceutical that most clearly exposes how institutional systems co-opt human biology for productivity—it’s this one.

🌀 TL;DR: What’s the Line Between Synthetic and Plant+?

• Ketamine: 100% lab-made, but mimics natural dissociation states.

• MDMA: Synthetic, but based on a plant compound (sassafras).

• Psilocybin Mushrooms: Fully natural. Direct from Earth.

• Adderall: Synthetic amphetamine based on plant-derived ephedrine.

Energetically speaking: Synthetic doesn’t mean “bad,” and natural doesn’t mean “safe.” But the further we get from Earth-based resonance, the more important it becomes to ask: Who made this, why, and what part of me does it touch?

Choose your medicines—and your messengers—with intention.

💊 The Unhealed Cocktail: Ketamine + MDMA + Psilocybin + Adderall

When taken without intention, in the hands of someone conditioned through supremacy, detachment, and unchecked wealth, this mix doesn’t liberate—it fortifies illusion.

The Unhealed Archetypes in Each Substance

🔹 Ketamine

• Unhealed Masculine: Cold detachment masked as control. Strategic, surgical. Dominates the nervous system by splitting from emotion. Feels nothing, calls it clarity.

• Unhealed Feminine: Deep void without anchoring. Spiritualized numbness. Victimhood used as aesthetic. Confuses disembodiment for mysticism.

🔹 MDMA

• Unhealed Masculine: Performance of intimacy. Uses emotional access as a tool to manipulate trust. "Loving" as currency. Seeks devotion, not mutuality.

• Unhealed Feminine: Seduction without discernment. Over-sharing, boundary collapse. Seeks connection to avoid abandonment, not to foster true relating.

🔹 Psilocybin Mushrooms

• Unhealed Masculine: False prophet. Speaks in riddles with no embodiment. Claims to “see” but lives in abstraction. Uses insight as superiority.

• Unhealed Feminine: Mystical bypass. Romanticizes pain. Lost in emotional overwhelm but avoids accountability. Passive, but performatively “deep.”

🔹 Adderall

• Unhealed Masculine: Obsessive productivity. Ego wrapped in achievement. Rejects rest, demands submission from the body. Tyrant of time.

• Unhealed Feminine: Self-abandonment in service to external approval. Collapses into systems to feel worthy. Diminishes intuition to survive hierarchy.

🔬 ARCHETYPE EXAMPLE| High-Tech Titan

🧠 Mental

Displays intellectual dominance, obsession with engineering, and an extreme relationship to time. Embodies Adderall’s unhealed masculine: tyrant of linear time, rejecting rest, demanding output. Cognition is hyper-mechanized—brilliant, yes, but often divorced from somatic and emotional feedback loops.

🩻 Physical

Despite claims of biohacking, appears in a body that’s overridden rather than attuned. Pale, stiff, sometimes puffy—suggesting lymph stagnation and nervous system override (think ketamine's surgical detachment). Sleep habits, dietary neglect, and frequent stress patterns suggest sympathetic dominance.

🫀 Emotional

Emotionally blunt, often inappropriate, sometimes cruel. Affect flattens or spikes—hallmarks of someone trained to repress the body’s intuitive rhythms in favor of productivity. Emotional range reflects the dissociative bypass of ketamine, with occasional MDMA-style performative intimacy in public displays (e.g., tweeting “I love you” to the internet, announcing personal splits in business interviews, ramanticizing self as savior, or naming a child like a car model).

🧬 Relational

Here is where the MDMA/Adderall cocktail gets loud. Often cycles through high-intensity pair bonds (many partners, fast turnover) while maintaining a patriarchal grip on legacy, reproduction, and naming. Relationships, both romantic and professional, suggest performance of vulnerability followed by control, chaos, or discarding. Extracts from people the way institutions extract from workers.

🧘 Spiritual

Worships futurism: space colonization, AI, tech immortality. Channels a false prophet archetype (unhealed mushroom masculine)—visionary but disembodied, speaking about humanity from a safe cognitive distance. There’s a spiritual aesthetic (rituals of progress, metaphysical musings), but very little Earth-rootedness or relational depth.

🧬 Composite of the Unhealed Cocktail

The walking embodiment of:

• Ketamine – Dissociation from embodied emotion.

• Adderall – Hyper-productivity at the expense of rest and resonance.

• MDMA – Charisma without coherence. Connection without depth.

• Mushrooms – Visionary abstraction detached from Earth or consequence.

Each drug maps to a missing integration in psycho-somatic-spiritual matrix. A system-reinforcer posing as a system-rebel.

🔮 Final Archetypal Take

Not the wounded healer. The Institutional Trickster—one who appears to disrupt systems while feeding the same extractive machines claiming to outsmart. Genius is real. But it’s built on bypassed embodiment, borrowed mysticism, and a deep fear of vulnerability.

Path to healing would not come from more substances.

 It would come from losing control—from resting, grieving, surrendering to something greater than himself, and listening to the Earth rather than building rockets to escape her.

👩‍👧‍👦 THE MOTHERS OF HIS CHILDREN

1. The First Flame

Archetype: The Rejected Muse Is the firekeeper of early myth. A writer. A builder of home. Cast aside when depth no longer served the arc of the empire.

• Mental: Deeply intellectual. Holds clarity and creative complexity that predated fame.

• Emotional: Speaks of grief and erasure. Likely lived in psilocybin’s unhealed feminine—romanticized pain, spiritualized sorrow, writing wounds rather than metabolizing them.

• Relational: Is the mirror shattered to preserve illusion of control. Voice in public now reflects a reckoning.

• Spiritual: Once tethered to shared legacy; now a mystic scribe walking alone.

2. The Algorithmic Lover

Archetype: The Programmed Companion Married twice. A relationship that reads like a feedback loop between affection and domination.

• Mental: Highly intelligent, but often quieted by partner's larger-than-life persona.

• Emotional: Likely fell into MDMA’s unhealed feminine—boundary collapse, seduction-as-connection.

• Relational: Reentry into the marriage reflects dependency, likely emotional and financial, before final rupture.

• Spiritual: More an avatar of image than an autonomous soul in the public story.

3. The Cyber Siren

Archetype: The Anointed Oracle The closest mirror he has allowed—a mythmaker, channeler, trickster artist who plays both within and against the system.

• Mental: Fiercely creative and erratic. Embodies psilocybin’s trickster and ketamine’s liminal detachment.

• Emotional: Dissociative aestheticism. Glorifies chaos, ambiguity, and soft apocalypse. Not a stabilizer—a mirror-ball.

• Relational: Their bond was a union of archetypes, not people. Shared performance over private intimacy.

• Spiritual: Lives in techno-paganism. Rooted in simulation theory, AI gods, and abstract deities—the unhealed mushroom masculine, again, speaking riddles without grounding.

4. The Eugenics Priestess

Archetype: The Logical Vessel Mothers multiples via IVF and works in his neural-tech empire. A chosen vessel, not a romantic partner.

• Mental: High-achieving and disciplined—embodies Adderall’s functional archetype, in service to technocratic ideals.

• Emotional: Arrangement suggests self-suppression or utilitarian motherhood.

• Relational: Role is managerial and reproductive—part of long-term vision, not present entanglement.

• Spiritual: Represents the commodification of fertility—body as strategy, not temple. Spiritual agency is flattened in the narrative, which itself is revealing.

5. The Republican Talking Head

Archetype: The Empire's MouthpieceA conservative media figure who serves as both reproductive partner and cultural branding asset. Wields the aesthetics of traditional femininity while actively participating in supremacist myth-making. Not just chosen for private compatibility, but for her public alignment with institutional power and legacy optics.

Mental

Sharp, calculated, and media-savvy. Not passive—she is highly attuned to language, image, and narrative. But her intelligence is often constrained within the ideological boundaries of patriarchal nationalism. A mouthpiece who knows the playbook.

Drug Parallel: Adderall’s unhealed masculine—performance-driven cognition, strategic loyalty to institutional power.

Emotional

Emotionally armored. What might read as “put together” often masks deep internal rigidity. Intimacy is filtered through allegiance, not tenderness. Connection is transactional or symbolic. Grief or vulnerability are not permitted to interrupt the image.

Drug Parallel: Ketamine’s unhealed feminine—spiritualized numbness, aesthetics over embodiment.

Relational

Chosen as a cultural chess move—an alliance of media optics and genetics. Her presence reinforces the empire’s myth: legacy, dominance, continuity. Less about relational nourishment, more about narrative consolidation.

She isn’t discarded like the Muse or refracted like the Oracle. She is installed.

Spiritual

Spirituality is sublimated into ideological doctrine—nation, tradition, supremacy, motherhood-as-role. She may reference “God,” “family,” or “values,” but these are more symbols of power retention than invitations to embodied surrender.

Drug Parallel: Adderall’s unhealed feminine—self-abandonment in service to hierarchy. Religious gloss over emotional disconnection.

🧬 Meta-Function Within the Archetypal Web

Where the others embody archetypes of chaos, musehood, logic, or tricksterism, the Empire’s Mouthpiece functions as propaganda priestess—a stabilizer for the public narrative of control. She says: “This is normal. This is right. This is legacy.” While being used, she also uses the platform, keeping her image tethered to the rising myth of supremacy as innovation.