After a Wall Street Journal report this weekend said Elon Musk has been using cocaine, ecstasy, LSD, ketamine, and magic mushrooms, Musk issued non-denials, but top executives of his companies remain worried about the fallout.

It is well-known that Tesla CEO Elon Musk smoked marijuana on camera during a taping of the Joe Rogan podcast in 2018. But a report this weekend in the Wall Street Journal tied Musk to using cocaine, ecstasy, LSD, ketamine, and magic mushrooms, and has obviously created a wee bit of anxiety for top-level board members at Musk’s companies Tesla and SpaceX.

The report is behind a paywall, but to summarize: it says Musk used many of the above-mentioned drugs at several parties at which all guests had to sign non-disclosure agreements, between 2018 and 2021. It also describes a 2017 all-hands meeting at SpaceX where Musk gave a speech that was reportedly “nonsensical,” “unhinged,” and “cringeworthy,” before SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell had to step in and take over. And of course, Musk has openly admitted to using ketamine.

Musk has since responded to the report. “After that one puff with Rogan, I agreed, at NASA’s request, to do 3 years of random drug testing,” he posted to Xitter Sunday. “Not even trace quantities were found of any drugs or alcohol. @WSJ is not fit to line a parrot cage for bird 💩.”

Musk’s attorney Alex Spiro told the Journal that Musk is “regularly and randomly drug tested at SpaceX and has never failed a test,” and added that “there are other false facts” in the Journal article, though he didn’t specify which ones.

Musk further posted Sunday that “Whatever I’m doing, I should obviously keep doing it!” and "If drugs actually helped improve my net productivity over time, I would definitely take them!” Those statements certainly sound like non-denials.

But Bloomberg reports that all this drug talk around Musk could be trouble for the Tesla and SpaceX boards of directors. “This will give ammunition to class-action lawyers on behalf of disgruntled shareholders at Tesla, if they can tie evidence of drug use to his actual role as an executive,” Santa Clara University School of Law professor Stephen Diamond told Bloomberg. “The Tesla board has an obligation to discern what’s going on here.”

The real problem could be for SpaceX, which is massively reliant on government contracts, and Musk’s erratic behavior being attributed to drugs would likely present red flags for the federal government. But as for Tesla, its board of directors is now firmly packed with Musk suck-ups, including his own brother.

“A small percentage of investors will sell their stock over the next week and put some pressure on shares,” Deepwater Asset Management managing partner Gene Munster told Bloomberg. “Most investors won’t care, because it falls into the category that if you want to profit from Elon, you have to put up with his controversies.”

Related: Elon Musk to Fleeing Advertisers: 'Go F**k Yourselves' [SFist]

Image: PowerfulJRE via YouTube

A 33-year-old man who had done too much acid while vacationing with friends in Bodega Bay last year, and who subsequently went on a violent rampage that injured several people — including his friends — and was then shot by police, pleaded no contest this week to six counts of assault with a deadly weapon and stealing a security truck.

Former YouTube engineer Betai Koffi had been drinking after taking what friends say were four tabs of LSD on July 4, 2019, when he turned extremely violent and erratic, as SFist reported last year. The friends say they were trying to prevent him from leaving their rented house when he attacked several of them — including choking one and stabbing another with a pencil. Koffi then got in his rental car and quickly crashed it into the house's garage and ran off toward the beach.

Dispatcher audio from the Sonoma County Sheriff's Office includes one of his friends explaining, "He said he thought he was already dead. And that nothing mattered but we thought it was just, you know, drugs talking at the time."

Surveillance footage seen below shows Koffi as he walks on to the property of a neighboring house, barefoot. A security guard for the neighborhood can be seen approaching down a driveway, and Koffi is heard saying "fuck you" to the guy, followed by "Yeah, do whatever you gotta do."

Koffi then assaulted the guard, walked away toward the street, picked up a stake lantern from the garden, and assaulted and injured the guard with the lantern when he was approached again. Koffi then carjacked the guard's patrol vehicle — a pickup truck — and drove it at high speeds through the neighborhood, hitting two people who were out for a walk. (Both suffered non-life-threatening injuries.)

After crashing into a wall and driving through a side yard back onto Pelican Loop, Koffi was confronted by a CHP officer and Sonoma County Sheriff's Deputy Jason Pasero. When Koffi tried to ram the officers with the truck, Pasero fired seven rounds, hitting Koffi multiple times — including once in the head.

As the Chronicle reports, Koffi awoke from a coma several weeks later, and he remains severely injured, including paralysis on his left side. His attorney, Stephen Gallenson, tells the Chronicle, "He feels terrible about [the ordeal] and he’s remorseful about the harm he caused to others and it’s affected his life significantly... Fortunately, no one except for him was hurt badly."

Koffi and his attorney struck a plea bargain last year that avoided attempted murder charges, but his no contest plea was to 11 separate felonies. He's now set to be sentenced in February, and it's unclear how much jail time he may face.

Previously: Man Takes Four Hits Of Acid While On Bodega Bay Holiday, Ends Up Allegedly Stabbing People, Shot By Police

In a sad, sad cautionary tale that reads like a really violent after-school special, 24-year-old Sheldon Steward of Oakland was convicted this week in Plumas County in a case involving LSD and the murder of his best friend. As CBS 5 reports, Steward and then-20-year-old Trevor Holminski went on a camping trip near Bucks Lake in Plumas County National Forest, dropped acid, and in the early morning hours of August 22, 2015, Steward is believed to have stabbed his friend to death, and then tried to burn his body to conceal the crime.

Steward then also set some of the surrounding woods on fire as well.

Steward's defense attorney argued that he committed the act in self-defense, but jurors were obviously convinced otherwise. As the East Bay Times reported from the trial last month, Steward had initially made the self-defense claim, pointing to 10 puncture wounds on his neck. But authorities said the wounds were in a perfect row and appeared self-inflicted. Steward had given a story involving Holminski making unwanted sexual advances toward him that were rebuffed, making him angry. But later, confronted by police, Steward changed his story, describing the conversation he had with his dying friend in the woods. "He keeps tellin’ me to leave him, leave him. I'm like, ‘Trevor I can’t leave you. This doesn’t look good for me. This doesn’t look good for either one of us, Trevor. I can’t just leave you out here in the forest like this.’ And he asked me to put him out of his misery and I did it,” Steward reportedly said.

A jury deliberated less than a full day before reaching their verdict on Tuesday, and came back with a verdict of guilty of first-degree murder, with the added enhancements of using a knife and setting a fire during a drought emergency.

Steward's sentencing date has not been set, but Plumas County District Attorney David Hollister says he could face 26 years to life in prison.

Holminski was a musician who attended Ex’pression College for Digital Arts in Emeryville, and he lived in Emeryville at the time. He was originally from Antioch. He and Steward had met at the school about 18 months prior to the murder. The two reportedly liked to do acid together.

Below is a brief documentary Holminski made in 2013 about his own experience with being sent to a wilderness rehabilitation program by his parents, in order to combat his depression and bad behavior as a teenager.

Richmond Mayor Tom Butt has been on a quest for many months now trying to figure out which of a group of houses in Point Richmond was home to Owsley “Bear” Stanley's LSD-making lab back in 1966. A problem he keeps running into, though, is that no one quite remembers which house it was, even the people who were there.

Butt posted about his quest back in December on his website, noting that the infamous "King of Acid" was amongst friends in Point Richmond, which across the last century "has always been a quirky place, filled with characters and intrigue — artists, heroes, villains, musicians, poets, drunks, druggies, professors, rogues and scoundrels." Among those rogues and scoundrels was also Richmond's mayor at the time, a leftie hippie named David Pierce, and at least until October 1966, LSD was still legal in California.

Grateful Dead biographer Dennis McNally wrote that “Without [Stanley], there simply wouldn’t have been enough acid for the psychedelic scene of the Bay Area in the Sixties to have ignited."

Stanley, along with cohorts Tim Scully, Melissa Cargill and Don Douglas, reportedly made hundreds of thousands of tabs of acid in one Point Richmond basement, and were responsible for the trips of tens of thousands of hippies at the Human Be-In in January 1967, kicking off what would be the Summer of Love.

But now Butt, who found out about the Point Richmond lab from the 2016 biography Bear: The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley, is determined to put a brass plaque somewhere so that Richmond's place in drug history can be solidified. He told KPIX back in December "I’ve got actually some old home movies. I’ve got slides of the neighborhood, assessor records. I’ve looked at historic maps, historic aerial photos..." and now he tells KQED he's got it narrowed down to three possible houses, one of which is no longer there, and two of which have been heavily remodeled.

If he can figure this out, definitively, he wants to hold a dedication ceremony and "invite all the characters from those days," as he told KPIX.

Sadly, though, Stanley died in a car crash in 2011, so he won't be there to see it.

Below, a video of him from 2009.

Related: San Francisco's 16 Greatest Infamous Local Legends

Microdosing: It's all the rage in Silicon Valley these days, maybe because everyone wants to be the next Steve Jobs and Steve did acid in India back in the day so why not give it a go? Even Michael Chabon's wife Ayelet Waldman got hip to it and wrote a book about it.

If you haven't heard about it from your druggier friends, microdosing is the practice of taking one tenth (or some small amount) of a regular dose of LSD, which proponents say doesn't cause you to trip but just gives you added focus and creativity to create new apps or whatever.

KRON 4 now has an "in-depth" report on microdosing, speaking to various practitioners in the Valley who say it's great, and they're so much more productive on acid, and it's so easy to get now thanks to the dark web.

"When you have some of your best ideas when going for a run or something, just imagine that, but stronger," says Sam Parr, founder of The Hustle.

The acid in Santa Cruz is really bad right now, man. Either that or it's really, really good and it's making people so out of their minds that they're committing crimes and getting arrested, and in one case getting killed. Santa Cruz County sheriff's officials have put out a public warning about a spike in LSD use among local teens, as CBS 5 reports, but is it actually a spike in use or just that dosages are all wrong?

The latest incident involved a teenager who had to be hospitalized Wednesday after someone dosed her popsicle, or after she put liquid LSD on the popsicle herself.

Two days earlier, on Monday, a 29-year-old Watsonville man believed to be tripping on acid led CHP officers on a chase on Highway 17 after he drove into a construction zone. CHP officers told Bay City News that after they tried to pull over the man, who was identified as Marko Manojlovic, he "drove into a metal fence, got out of the car, jumped over the fence and fled on foot." Manojlovic then allegedly assaulted the two officers who caught up to him on foot, kicking on several times, and he was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence, evading arrest, resisting arrest and battery of a police officer.

And these incidents happened several weeks after 15-year-old Luke Smith stabbed his father and uncle after taking LSD with a friend, just before 3 a.m. on November 19. In an ensuing standoff with Santa Cruz County sheriff's deputies in which Smith was allegedly threatening officers, a sheriff's deputy fatally shot Smith. As KSBW reports, Smith took a larger dose than his friend, and the friend had left to go home after Smith became angry on his trip. In confronting the officers, Smith was allegedly swinging a knife and refusing to put it down, even after being bitten by a K-9, and being hit with a dozen non-lethal 40mm foam rounds.

In attempting to talk Smith down, sheriff's deputy Chris Vigil could be heard on camera footage saying to Smith, "LSD is a tough thing, because it's hard to differentiate between what's real and what's not. Put the knife down, buddy." Vigil would be the one to shoot the single lethal shot from his AR15 rifle.

Four people were arrested one day later at a Santa Cruz home because they were believed to be the source of the acid that Smith took — one of whom was found unconscious in the home due to a suspected drug overdose.

Bradley Allen Hodge II, 24, Taylor Filson, 28, Thomas Negron, 20, and Nathaniel Trecaso, 28 are all facing charges that include felony manufacture of a controlled substance, and as the Mercury News reported, sheriff's investigators found methamphetamine, ecstacy, and an unknown substance, all packaged for sale, along with LSD in the home.

Negron could not be arraigned with the others because he was in custody in Georgia at the time on an unrelated charge of trafficking 10 pounds of marijuana. Trecaso remained hospitalized in a "semi-conscious" state days after the raid.

Per KSBW, Smith's sister Savannah posted a warning to friends on Facebook that said, "There is a bad batch of LSD circulating throughout the area. This batch of LSD made my brother extremely violent and ended with the police shooting him. Nothing could stop him from what he was doing, because he wasn't himself; this drug brought out some form of evil in him."

Friends and family all said that the violent incident was extremely out of character for Smith, who was an avid surfer and skater.

A toxicology report for Smith is still pending.

Previously: Santa Cruz Fraternity And Sorority Members Busted In MDMA Drug Ring

What was that about all California drivers being on drugs? 51-year-old Berkeley High School teacher Douglas Haight (seriously?) lost his job and teaching credentials after a December DUI arrest turned up a bottle of LSD disguised as liquid breath mint.

The DUI occurred on December 1st, when Haight's Toyota Camry ran a red light on busy Bellam Boulevard in San Rafael. After he blew a .13, Haight told police that he had just left Terrapin Crossroads — a noted Grateful Dead bar nearby.

When he was booked into the Marin County jail, a deputy suspected he might be holding something. (Which is probably some kind of hippie profiling and the ACLU should definitely step in here.) Tests on the liquid breath mint Haight was carrying in his pocket came back positive for (surprise!) hallucinogenic lysergic acid diethylamide. Although Haight was originally arrested for a misdemeanor DUI, he was later charged with two felonies — one for possession of the LSD and another for trying to bring it into the county jail.

As is the Berkeley Unified School District's official policy, Haight was stripped of his teaching credentials immediately upon being charged with a felony. At Berkeley High, Haight had been a full-time advisor to the school's Independent Study program, where he worked with the smart kids outside of the "typical classroom environment." Because of course he did.

[MarinIJ]
[OaklandTribune]

A San Francisco man was just convicted in federal court of conspiring to sell ecstasy, possessing ecstasy with intent to distribute, and possessing more than 10 grams of LSD with intent to distribute. On the LSD charge alone, he faces a maximum sentence of life in prison. We had no idea the punishment was so steep!

35-year-old Oshan Cook was one of four people arrested in a DEA sting operation in Oakland in 2010. Evidence in the trial showed that Cook and his co-conspirators were looking sell three pounds of powdered MDMA at $18,000 per pound (enough for 5,000 to 10,000 ecstasy tablets or a really insane molly party), and Cook had on a backpack at the time containing 1.3 pounds of E and 1.3 ounces of liquid LSD. Cook went to trial while the other three plead guilty and received sentences of one to five years in prison.

Cook is seen as the supplier to the other three who pleaded guilty, and will likely see a stiffer sentence, possibly of ten years or more. Cook is the owner of recently closed tea house Om Shan Tea in the Mission, and his brother and friends had put together this indiegogo campaign to pay for a "good lawyer," however the $25,000 funding goal was never met.

This is actually the second time Cook has been on trial, with a July trial ending in a mistrial after one juror refused to convict him.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White will conduct sentencing on January 17, and Cook faces maximum sentences of 20 years each for the ecstasy charges, and a maximum sentence of life in prison for the LSD.

[BCN/Appeal]
[HuffPo]