Micro-dosing LSD is all the rage among the Silicon Valley, tech startup young business crowd right now. People are using it to boost their focus, bump their creativity and make their office-lives a little more vibrant, interesting and of course, inspiring.

But apparently, the board members of Iterable aren’t down.

This week, the company’s CEO, Justin Zhu, who worked at both Google and Twitter before co-founding the $2 billion startup company in 2013, was ousted from his own company. All because he took a little LSD before an important business meeting.

On Monday the company’s board notified their employees that Zhu would be leaving the company, though they left the reason for his departure somewhat ambiguous. Zhu was quick to clear the air though. In an interview with Bloomberg he explained that he’d been experimenting with micro-dosing LSD at work, and in 2019 he’d dosed up before a business meeting and one thing led to another, and now he’s out of work.

What happened in that meeting? Maybe one of Zhu’s board members simply saw him covertly bust out the vial and dropper. Or, maybe he took a little too much and started swinging from the office lights like a monkey instead of presenting Iterable’s quarterly ROI’s. We may never know.

What’s certain is that Zhu’s been replaced by his co-founder Andrew Boni. Who said that Zhu’s “behavior also undermined the board’s confidence in Justin’s ability to lead the company going forward.”

(Squares.)

It’s a story that really only highlights a double-drug-standard that’s accepted without question in this country. Some drugs are acceptable to use for work, like Adderall, but others can get you fired. If Zhu’d been gobbling up amphetamines midday prior to a business meeting his associates might have praised him for his hard work and dedication to his post. However, because he was using a psychedelic often associated with hippies and deadbeats, he was forced out of his own massively successful $2 billion tech startup. 

The moral of all this, of course, is a simple and ancient piece of wisdom: don’t tell your boss or board what kinds of drugs you take to do your job. Not even in Silicon Valley, I guess.