Elon Musk, SpaceX and Tesla CEO, is often known for making quirky posts on Twitter, and his latest is a poll asking which one between Benadryl Spiders and DMT Machine Elves would win.
The world’s richest man also shared the poll results, which show DMT Machine Elves leading with 69% votes, and Benadryl Spiders at 31%. Musk captioned it “It was inevitable”.
The 51-year-old entrepreneur’s comment about inevitability hints at his belief that DMT Machine Elves would win, but knowing Musk’s proclivity for making “69” jokes – which is the internet’s reaction to the sex position of the same name – his comment takes on a possible double meaning.
What are Benadryl Spiders and DMT Machine Elves?
Benadryl is an over-the-counter antihistamine, which is used as allergy medicine but has turned deadly ever since a 2020 TikTok trend urged people to consume more of the medicine to induce hallucinations.
Cook Children’s Medical Center in Fort Worth, Texas, saw a teen hospitalized after taking 14 Benadryl tablets, and her mother, in a statement, by the centre said, “It was scary. She had fractured sentences, hallucinations. Her resting heart rate was 199”, Healthline reported.
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She added, “As a parent, you worry about drugs and you know the signs for drug use. I never thought about having to lock up my allergy medicine. I just want other parents to know about this because it’s dangerous and I had no idea. And I’m angry. These people [on TikTok] are essentially prescribing medication without a medical degree and our kids are trusting them”.
Musk’s reference to Benadryl Spiders likely refers to hallucinating and seeing spiders while abusing the allergy medication.
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DMT (N,N-Dimethyltryptamine) is a psychedelic, taken by many for a “breakthrough” experience, and with higher doses, there have been reports of people encountering beings, known as “elves”, which seem autonomous, and exist in a reality separate from our own. A survey in the Journal of Psychopharmacology noted one respondent saying, “There was an indescribably powerful notion that this dimension in which the entity and I convened was infinitely more “real” than the consensus reality I usually inhabit. It felt truer than anything else I’d ever experienced”, as per Big Think.
Terence McKenna, American ethnobotanist and mystic, described the machine elves one encounters on DMT, saying “You pass through a membrane of some sort, and you’re in a place. You’re pushed through, and you see the tykes, as I call them. The self-transforming machine elves that are singing in a hyperdimensional language. They surround you and say, ‘Welcome, we’re so glad to see you’.”
Dr Rick Strassman, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico, was initially sceptical of McKenna’s observations but dosed 60 individuals with DMT, and recorded them having similar experiences in Contact Through the Veil parts one and two – the chapters in his magnum opus titled DMT: The Spirit Molecule.
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“I was familiar with Terence McKenna’s tales of the “self-transforming machine elves” he encountered after smoking high doses of the drug… I admittedly chalked up these stories to some kind of West Coast eccentricity. Therefore, I was neither intellectually nor emotionally prepared for the frequency with which contact with these beings occurred in our studies, nor the often utterly bizarre nature of these experiences”, he said about the experiment.
Does Elon Musk do drugs?
Musk had infamously smoked marijuana during an interview, and at one point, the billionaire also advocated for psychedelics as an alternative to antidepressants.
However, Futurism reported in 2021 that Musk said in a Wall Street Journal summit that “drugs probably make you age more”.
