• Psychedelic Medicine

MICRODOSING | +80 articles

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Tiny Amounts of LSD for Depression


by Olga Khazan

Throughout Ayelet Waldman’s entire life, she’s been 'held hostage by the vagaries of mood,' as she explains in her new book, A Really Good Day. She is a bestselling author, mom of four, and devoted wife, but her mental illness threatened it all. On good days, she was funny, productive, and kind. But on bad ones, she would catastrophize and snap at her family. So profound was her self-loathing at times that, planted on a couples’ therapist’s couch, she couldn’t bring herself to say that her husband, the novelist Michael Chabon, loves her.

A clear diagnosis (was it bipolar II or extreme PMS?), effective treatment (Effexor or Adderall?), and even the fleeting tranquility of a 'good day' were all elusive. So Waldman did what few middle-aged American moms — though perhaps quite a few moms living in Berkeley, California — would think to do: Drop acid.

She procured a small, cobalt-blue bottle of diluted LSD from a friend of a friend. It was meant for “microdosing” — taking a fraction of a typical dose every few days, not enough to hallucinate or get high. Instead, the mind opens up just a crack and allows the bleak thoughts to escape for a while. ('Not so much an acid trip as an acid errand,' she assures.)

Waldman begins taking two drops every three days. As the title suggests, over the month her supply lasts, she enjoys several unfrazzled, hyper-aware, 'really good' days.

As a relatively drug-averse former attorney, Waldman offers a different perspective from the young tech entrepreneurs who have copped to microdosing to enhance their creativity and output. Her newbie status distinguishes her book, as does the unique way she weaves in digressions about drug policy and the criminal-justice system.

I spoke with Waldman recently about her experience; an edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Olga Khazan: What would you say was the biggest advantage for you of the microdosing, from your mood to your work?

Ayelet Waldman: I think for me personally the most important thing was that it kind of jump-started me out of a pretty significant depression.

Let's say an incident happens, someone says something that hurts your feelings, you see a tweet, whatever it is, some kind of stimulus, there's sort of this four-part process. You see this, there's the incident, you have an emotional reaction, a feeling, then you have a thought about that feeling, then you have a kind of impulse, and you act on the impulse, right?

What has always happened to me is those four separate responses were all sort of clumped together. So I would see something on Twitter, and I would respond right away. There was no time at which I thought, oh you're having a feeling about this, this is making me angry. Is it really making you angry or is it making you sad? Is it making you scared? And then, here's the impulse to act. Is that the right way to really be acting? I would do these things that I would regret, which would, for me, end up catalyzing kind of a depression.

For some reason the LSD microdose sort of slowed me down. I'm sort of trying to figure out 100 different ways to say this other than “mindfulness,” because I find the whole concept sort of aggravating. But I do think it came down to that. I felt happier or at least not as profoundly depressed almost immediately the very first day I took it. God, here I am twisting myself into a knot to not say 'mindfulness,' but that really is what it is.

Khazan: You tried a lot of different pills in the past, antidepressants and other drugs. Those are all newer things and they have lots of scientists working on them, testing them, and trying to market them. Why do you think this old psychedelic worked better than all those different drugs?

Waldman: First of all, this is a one-month experiment, and there's no guarantee that it would have continued to work, and there's also no research that what I was experiencing wasn't, as I say in the book, 'the mother of all placebo effects.'

But let's say that it was, let's say that what I experienced taking the microdose was an actual, real effect and not all in my head. I took SSRIs, I took Wellbutrin, I took some of the ADHD drugs, but only very briefly. But they didn’t work to enhance neuroplasticity in the same way that LSD does. My theory is that it has something to do with the neuroplastic effects.

And the range of side effects of all these newer meds is really robust. LSD just doesn't have that many side effects. I mean except the most obvious one, which is if you take too much you start tripping your balls off.

Khazan: One thing I loved about this is you explore other issues in drug policy throughout the book. I was wondering if you could give a couple-sentence layman's-terms summary of why people can't just microdose with LSD. Why is it illegal to acquire even in really small amounts?

Waldman: Very simply, LSD is in Schedule 1. Schedule 1 is a drug that's considered to have no medical use and significant harm. Heroin is on Schedule I, LSD is on Schedule I, marijuana is on Schedule I. You say to yourself that doesn't make any sense. No medical use and significant harm? How is marijuana in the same place on the schedule as heroin? But therein lies the incoherence of American drug laws.

When LSD was invented in the 1930s, it was invented as a medicine, but in the 1960s it basically became a party drug. In the 1960s, the drug was criminalized, and the reason it was criminalized has everything to do with what was going on politically and socially in the country. So when Timothy Leary stands up in front of the massive crowd at the Human Be In at San Francisco and says "Turn On, Tune In, and Drop Out" to a group of basically all young people—and all white young people—that's very important.

They start taking LSD, and more importantly they start protesting the war, and their parents—nice, middle-class, white parents—freak out, and it becomes a scapegoat for this moment of social upheaval and it's thus criminalized. It's interesting because the criminalization of LSD is not like the criminalization of marijuana, the criminalization of cocaine, the criminalization of opium. Those drugs were specifically tied to different minority groups. Marijuana criminalization was a way to attack Mexican Americans, and cocaine was really a way to attack African-Americans.

LSD came from a different place. The idea that your kid would take a drug and start to trip just scared the shit out of everybody, so it became criminalized. And as soon as something is placed on Schedule I, all research grinds to a halt.

Khazan: How are the health risks of microdosing different from regular dosing?

Waldman: When I went into this, I assumed I was going to find all of these terrible things about the health risks of LSD, but if you took a microdose, maybe you could ameliorate those risks.

It turns out actually that there has never been a recorded incident of a fatal overdose of LSD. If I tried to think about what the health risks might be, it's not so much physical, it's not like MDMA, which causes a range of physical side effects. The danger, such as it is, is most closely related to something that was once called LSD psychosis. If you have a hallucinatory experience in an uncomfortable setting, it can be terrifying. The anxiety and the fear of that unpleasant experience can have emotional repercussions, particularly if you're someone with a mental illness.

So that's what I was worried about. Could it trigger some kind of anxiety in me that would be worse than the profound despair I find myself in now?

But the anxiety response is to the hallucination itself and to the feelings engendered by the hallucination, and microdosing isn't hallucinatory at all. And even though I'd read that a million times, I didn’t believe it until I took it. I mean you're taking LSD, aren't the walls gonna breathe?

The only thing that I noticed was it was easier for me to see the beauty in my natural world. I live in Northern California, it's ridiculously beautiful. You walk out my door and there's jasmine everywhere, the smell is overwhelming. And 99.999 percent of the time, I don't even notice. When I was microdosing I would stop and say, 'wow, that is a beautiful redwood tree.'

And again, here I am, back in that horrible mindfulness place where I have to use that word.

Khazan: Sometimes it's the only one that fits. Have you listened to the Reply All podcast episode where they microdose and have kind of a bad time?

Waldman: Yeah, I have.

Khazan: What did you think of that, how do you think your experience was different?

Waldman: First of all, here's a little tip: Don't take double the microdose and like do something like drive on a car on a really tiresome road trip. That seems like a mistake.

First of all, we don't know that what they took was LSD, because they didn’t test it. They also took too much. They were trying to keep it a secret from their colleagues, and that maybe enhanced their own anxiety.

The microdose is a little activating. If you've ever taken Adderall or Ritalin, I think for me it was not dissimilar to that, but much less intense. So I think if you're someone who doesn't normally experience those feelings of activation, then that might be disconcerting and unpleasant.

But, you know, no drug is for everyone.

Khazan: Given your history as a public defender working on drug cases, while you were doing this did you ever get paranoid and think 'I'm gonna get arrested!'

Waldman: I decided that I didn’t want to stop but when my bottle ran out, because I was feeling so much better and I cannot understate how depressed I was. It was the closest I've ever come to being suicidal. I would Google the effects of suicide on younger children and older children, because I have both.

But I do think I would have destroyed my marriage as a kind of suicide because it's so important to me, and because I love my husband so much, and my marriage is such a source of comfort and strength. I think destroying the thing that made me feel the most safe in the world was how I would have effectively committed suicide.

But I woke up and took the dose, and 90 minutes later, the fog lifted. I hadn't felt like that for months and months and months.

So at the end of 30 days, I was like fuck that, I am not going back to that pit. I'm going to go buy drugs.

So I found a person, a number, and I texted the number, and the individual who I called 'Lucy' texted me back, and I was all set to go buy drugs. I think I wanted five doses or ten doses, which I thought would carry me for a year.

Khazan: And they were like, “can you buy 60 doses?”

Waldman: 'Yeah, I can't separate it, could you take 60?' And that pumping up the figure is just what happened to every one of my clients [when I was a defense lawyer]. That like, 'I wanna buy a little methamphetamine” ... “oh here take a lot!' That's what you do when you wanna get someone into a mandatory minimum jail sentence.

So I was in my very lovely neighborhood in Berkeley, outside a Lululemon, when I decided that the mighty forces of the DEA had been marshaled to bring down this middle class, middle-aged mom of four.

I ran home and sat in bed and readied myself for incarceration. I was like, 'Alright, you'll be able to read, there's lots to read. You're a lawyer, you can help people, there are a lot of people in jail who need legal help. You can't practice law, but you can surely be like a jailhouse lawyer.' I was sitting there figuring out how I was going to turn my period of incarceration into an altruistic enterprise.

I'm constitutionally incapable of buying illegal drugs. I've just never bought any illegal drugs. Anything I've ever taken has just been given to me.

Khazan: The kind of shady nature of this, I think, does discourage people from trying it because it's not fun to try to acquire.

Waldman: It's so shady. It's true. The big thing I say to my kids, every time I say goodbye to them is 'use a condom, test your molly.' Because I really believe that one of the most problematic side effects of criminalization is no one knows what they're taking and especially now when it's so much cheaper and easier for criminal enterprises to create these 'alphabetamines,' some of which are incredibly dangerous. Synthetic cannabinoids are just a nightmare. I live in fear that one of my kids is gonna decide they're gonna take molly one night and end up ingesting one of those.

Khazan: Are you still worried about getting into legal trouble, having published this book?

Waldman: I was quite confident that nothing was going to happen. I think it's grandiose to imagine that I am a high priority of Jeff Sessions. That said, we have just elected a president whose attorney general is so retrograde, such a dinosaur in his thinking about the drug war, that anything is possible.

A consensus had formed before this election that the war on drugs was costly and ineffective. And simultaneously with electing Donald Trump and bringing in Jeff Sessions, we also legalized marijuana in a bunch of states. So it's a really schizophrenic moment in history. So yeah, I think it's possible.

Khazan: I noticed that a couple times in the book when you talked about your experiment with people, the reactions were sort of mixed. You almost felt like people were judging you a little bit. Now that it's a little more public and there's a book about it, are people still judging you or have they become more accepting?

Waldman: There are certainly people who will judge. Some people say, 'Oh that Ayelet Waldman, being confrontational again, being outrageous again,' as if that were my goal. The response from people who have dealt with issues like depression has been overwhelming and wonderful. Because even if they have no interest in doing something like this, they know that other people who suffer from depression, from anxiety, from bipolar disorder, they know what it's like to be desperately searching for a way to feel better.

You know my parents, my straight-up parents, were so wonderful and supportive and nonjudgmental. And judgment is built into the Waldman DNA even more assertively than mental illness. And they were really wonderful.

Khazan: I read that you're not saying when this took place, but to the extent that you're able to share, have the effects lasted? How long did they last?

Waldman: It's kind of interesting, the effects of the drugs have not lasted. LSD does not hang around in your system like that, but the effects of the end of the depression have lasted. I have not cycled into as low as a mood since I don't attribute that as much to LSD as to the insight brought about by that one-month experiment.

Even when my mood has dropped since then, I've had a much clearer image in my mind of what not being depressed is like, so that's one thing. It's allowed me since then to be somewhat less reactive and somewhat less impulsive. I still feel as impulsive, but for some reason since then, and with a tremendous amount of work using all these other therapeutic modalities that are boring and annoying but can be effective if you use them, I have been able to put the brakes on more inappropriate behaviors.

I still make tons of mistakes. I'll yell at my husband, but we don't have the same kind of fights really, it doesn't build to the same kind of place, or if it does I know how to repair without going to a place of suicidal ideation. I'm in this therapy now that's called dialectical behavioral therapy, and for some reason since this experience I've been more adept at the tools, and I've been more able to force myself to do them.

That being said, if it were legal, I would still be doing it, no doubt.​
 
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Scientists are studying the possible benefits of ‘microdosing’ LSD at work

by Nick Whigham | News.com.au | 3 Sep 2018

Can taking very small doses of psychedelic drugs like LSD or magic mushrooms help you work better?

That’s the premise of a trend known as “microdosing” that has become particularly popular in places like Silicon Valley where advocates claim it can help boost creativity, focus and productivity at work.

It may sound like a dubious excuse to take mind-altering drugs at your day job but the trend has some interesting advocates. Some have used the drug-taking technique to successfully treat depression and mental illness.

Despite its growing popularity, the supposed benefits so far have been purely anecdotal — but that’s about to change. A new scientific study is set to conduct patient trials to see if there really are cognitive benefits from taking small but regular hits of LSD.

Today, UK-based think tank The Beckley Foundation, which was set up to pioneer research into mind-altering substances, and the Imperial College London will launch what is being described as the first ever placebo-controlled trial of microdosing.

How does microdosing work?

Users typically take about one-tenth to one-fifteenth of a regular dose, meaning they avoid any hallucinations while still getting some of the effects of the drug.

Australian Steve McDonald, founder of the non-profit group Psychedelic Research in Science & Medicine believes workers can gain real benefit from the practice.

“Research shows that the classic psychedelics tend to shut down or minimize activity in some parts of the brain which are related to controlling sensory input. As you can imagine, at any moment there’s a massive amount of sensory input coming in,” he previously told News.com.au.

“If we were aware of it all, and trying to process it, it would overwhelm us, but at a very low level, psychedelics enhance your attention and capacity to process information, and hence they’re useful for boosting creativity and work performance.”

Where did microdosing come from?

The idea was first developed by the father of LSD, Swiss scientist Albert Hofmann. He originally developed the drug as a medicine with positive health benefits and saw microdosing as a way to achieve this.

Microdosing has been gaining traction in recent years through the promotion of researcher Dr. James Fadiman, who has been investigating the effects of psychedelics on creative problem solving since the 1960s.

Since then the idea has gradually grown in popularity. According to Rolling Stone, Fadiman receives a “steady, consistent stream” of feedback from professionals in the San Francisco area looking for ways to become more innovative.

“Microdosing has helped me come up with some new designs to explore and new ways of thinking,” one mid-20s tech start-up employee told the magazine back in 2015.

“You would be surprised at how many people are actually doing it.”

Due to the illegality of LSD, a conventional study would be too difficult to conduct. So study leader Balazs Szigeti said patients involved will be in what he called a “self-blinded” study.

Speaking to The Guardian, he said participants will be made up of people who already partake in microdosing during work. The researchers — who admitted the study was “unusual” — are keen to see how much of the reported benefits are from a potential placebo effect.

“The people who microdose right now are not an average random set of people from the street. They are very likely to have used psychedelics before and have preconceptions about them,” Szigeti said.

“You are doing something novel and exciting and that you believe in — and you know you are doing it. It is absolutely no surprise that you are getting a positive effect.”

The study participants will either take what they usually use in a capsule or an identical dummy capsule instead, without knowing which one they have taken.

During the study, they will complete questionnaires and tests and play cognitive games online, and only at the end will they learn which they were taking.

The study is small and will rely on the participants not to take any doses outside the trial period but researchers hope that if the findings prove interesting it could pave the way for larger and more conventional studies to be conducted into psychedelic microdosing.

https://nypost.com/2018/09/03/scient...g-lsd-at-work/
 
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Microdosing ibogaine

by Jordan May | Psymposia | 13 Dec 2017

"My experience with heroin went from age 14 up to age 30, and taking ibogaine was as close to a miracle as I have ever experienced in my life."

Patrick Kroupa is an ibogaine treatment expert. Having developed a heavy dependence on heroin early in life, Patrick was one of the first participants at the Healing Visions experimental treatment center using ibogaine to detox in 1999. He went on to work with Dr. Deborah Mash at the University of Miami and eventually began providing ibogaine treatments in the early 2000s. He co-authored the first paper ever published on microdosing ibogaine.

Kroupa is a well-known and outspoken advocate for ibogaine. His work has been featured in magazines like Wired, Forbes, Time, Rolling Stone, the New Yorker, and he’s made regular appearances in television and film.

How did you first hear about ibogaine, and what led you to eventually work with it to the extent that you have?

I was active in these hacker meetings called TAP, which stood for the Technological Assistance Program. It was actually this initiative by Abbie Hoffman in the 60’s, and it was mostly about phone phreaks. Phone phreaking was basically taking control of the phone systems, and there were different things you could do. It gradually transitioned into hacking during the late 70’s, early 80’s, as computers became available.

Anyways, I went to these meetings because I was one of the hacker kids. I knew absolutely nothing about counter-culture politics, what the 60’s were, who any of these people were at all. They were just like these really old weird people who were at these meetings and they were always smoking a lot of pot, and it was exciting. Through that I was beginning my experimentation with a lot of different mind-altering substances, including heroin.

And that was when I first heard about ibogaine.

I didn’t do it back then because it was impossible to get and it sounded like the textbook definition of snake oil. It’s like this mysterious substance from a far off land that only a very few people have ever done, and it will magically cure any kind of drug addiction that’s ever existed. Um, ok sure.

As years went by, we did this start up called MindVox, which was actually the first internet access provider in New York City. We went online in ’91 and we opened to the public in ’92. And basically it blew up. Everything positive that you can think of was happening in my life. It was like I had successfully turned being a participant in this strange subculture into an extraordinarily successful company that was right at the cusp of this whole explosion called the internet.

My problem was at that point my personal life was kind of falling apart. I fell in love, I got married, and my wife at the time went from being very intense and exciting to being borderline schizophrenic and having psychotic breaks. I was 22 years old at the time. Essentially, my drug use got out of control and I developed a very heavy habit. At that point in my life, to be honest, I was extraordinarily grateful to heroin. It was like the superglue that held my entire life together and made it possible to continue. I mean everything was just falling apart and heroin fixed that.

When you first get a habit and start doing heroin all the time, it makes everything in your life perfect. Food is better, sex is better, all of your relationships are better, and nothing bothers you. But it doesn’t last.

So time passes, and the honeymoon ends. Then I started all my different attempts at detoxing. I tried literally everything that was available at the time, and we’re talking about the 90’s at this point. I tried ultra rapid opiate detox, twice. It did not work. I mean it worked in the sense that you wake up and you’re clean, but you’re also sick. You’re fiending. The only thing in your head is, “I gotta get the hell out of here, go get some dope, and get straight.” And that’s what I did.

I tried a lot of different tapers. I tried methadone to taper down. I tried methadone maintenance. Spread across all the years, I spent probably half a decade on methadone. I was in the very early clinical trials for buprenorphine. All substitution therapies work in the sense that they provide some stability to your life, but none of them actually solve your drug dependence issues.

I was friends with this guy name Fred Gotbetter – who had a cool name but he never did get better. He ultimately died. But at the time, I would be sitting in the shooting gallery with this guy and we’d be banging up. We both had really heavy habits. And then he’d vanish and come back a few days later, and he wouldn’t have a habit. It was like this guy who’d be banging up 5 to 8 bags all at once, he would come back and he’d do a bump and I’d see him get all fucked up. I remember asking, “How are you doing this? What are you doing to detox?”

He said, “Oh, I’m doing ibogaine.” And basically that was the start of me trying to connect with ibogaine to reset my habit.

So, to make a long story short, I tried to get it. I knew about Howard Lotsof, and I started talking to him. He was no longer able to provide treatments in Panama at that time, and was dealing with a lot of his own health issues. This guy named Bob Sisko ultimately turned me on to Dr. Deborah Mash, who had been granted permission by the FDA to do clinical trials on ibogaine.

I ended up going to Healing Visions on the island of Saint Kitt’s, where I met Deborah Mash. I was one of their very first patients when I took ibogaine. There were medical people all around me, and it was the weirdest environment I have ever done a psychedelic drug in. For the first half hour or so I was in withdrawal. It felt like my spine was being smashed in a vice. I would be hot and sweating, and then freezing. I wanted to jump out of my skin. And all of that just kind of faded out. It was like being suspended in this ocean of warm energy. After about 30 to 45 minutes, that’s it, my habit was gone.

Were you able to kick your habit after just a single experience with ibogaine?

Quite honestly, for me it took 2 experiences. After my first experience I was clean, but as soon as I got to an airport in San Juan, Peurto Rico, I went and copped heroin. When I did that bag, this is a terrible thing to say, but at the time it was fucking awesome. It was like, “Oh yeah, this is why I started using heroin in the first place.” I could really feel my drugs for the first time in a decade.

So after that, I went back for the next round, and I took ibogaine a second time. What was different this time was that I understood what ibogaine could do for me. It could absolutely clean me up. But I still needed to process all this stuff in my head, how I was living, and move onwards.

My aftercare plan was to immediately travel to live in an ashram just outside of Bangkok for 3 months. It was a really beautiful experience for me. It was completely different from any drug treatment program I had ever been to. I wasn’t surrounded by people telling me that I was diseased and flawed. I was just welcomed by a bunch of people who were extremely accepting and gave me a lot of unconditional love and support. It’s very hard to find that in the real world – there really was no judgment, there was no shaming you for your drug use.

I got back to the States and was hired by Deborah Mash, and I ended up at the University of Miami’s Department of Neurology.

Is this around the time you developed the low-dose ibogaine protocol for MAPS?

I was working at the University of Miami at the time, but the protocol was not associated with them in anyway whatsoever.

The whole microdosing thing started because I was doing underground treatments. I was basically helping out my friends who were strung out. What I noticed with a lot of junkies – and I don’t mean that pejoratively, I was a junkie and I identify with that label – a lot of drug dependent individuals don’t like to trip. They don’t want this whole huge avalanche of emotions and things that they’re supposed to process. They prefer very gradual slow changes.

I first started microdosing myself because any time I felt cravings I would just do a really small dose of ibogaine. I don’t need to do an entire flood dose. I can just do 50mg, I can do 100mg, and you know what? The whole world is suddenly different. I feel good, all the cravings have gone away, and it’s a beautiful day today – why don’t I just go to the gym and not worry about shooting dope? What I discovered is that this worked for people who were actively doing drugs, so you could microdose down somebody’s habit.

Ibogaine potentiates whatever molecules you’re taking, which is where you gotta be careful and take very small doses. And it decreases tolerance. So if you don’t want to take a flood dose, you can take microdoses spread across days or weeks at a time. Your habit will eventually decrease down to nothing, until you literally have the option of just stepping out of your drug dependence.

It’s really hard for me to judge what anyone should be doing with themselves. I don’t believe everyone on earth needs to be clean. There are people who have chronic pain management issues. There are people who just have a tremendous amount of trauma. I’m more coming from a harm reduction/benefit maximization kind of paradigm. Whatever you want to do, here are the tools to make your life better. Microdosing with ibogaine can accomplish that for people who are drug dependent.

At the time I was working for Deborah and I understood the basics – like how do you collect data, how do you do research, how do you document whatever it is that you’re doing? And that was the inception of the protocol. I worked a lot with Hattie Wells who is currently with Amanda Feilding at the Beckley Foundation, and we had one paper published by MAPS back in 2003 and the microdosing one we published in 2005. Publishing the work with MAPS was kind of seminal because that was the first publication about ibogaine microdosing.

I don’t believe everyone on earth needs to be clean. There are people who have chronic pain management issues. There are people who just have a tremendous amount of trauma.

Do you think anyone considering microdosing should be subject to the same kind of safety screening as someone who’s going to do a flood dose?

Here’s the thing, I personally have never encountered adverse events from microdosing in myself or anybody that I’ve ever worked with. But that’s not to say it isn’t a valid concern, because when you keep microdosing, it essentially builds up in your body. Eventually you’re going to hit a state where it feels like you’re doing speed, at which point you should slow down and give it a rest for a couple of days before doing more of it.

But in my opinion, yes. You should get your liver function checked, you should get a comprehensive metabolic panel test, basic bloodwork, and get an EKG – make sure your heart is okay. I would basically say to take all the same precautions that you would take if you’re going to do a flood dose even though you’re probably not going to have any problems.

I’ve microdosed ibogaine because I want to enjoy my work more that day, or I want to have a good workout, or quite honestly because sex is great on small doses of ibogaine. But you’re not supposed to say that.

We’ve been talking to a lot of people who’ve been involved with the ibogaine movement in different ways, who have differing perspectives on if and how it should be regulated in a medicalized framework. What are your thoughts on this?

Well personally, I’m a libertarian and I tend to believe that if there’s anything on earth that I actually own, it’s the body that my consciousness resides within. It isn’t the government’s business what molecules I choose to attach to my receptors. I don’t want to live in a nanny state, or country, or whatever.

But there’s a dichotomy between what my heart says and what my head says. Coming from my heart, everyone should have the freedom to do whatever substances they feel like they need to experiment with at any point in time, in a safe environment. From the head though, I think that without medicalization, without working within pre-existing regulatory frameworks, as annoying and tangled up as all of that might be, ibogaine is going to get shut down country by country. Instead of being a treatment that’s available for people who need it, it’s going to be driven underground and stay there. The most recent example of this is in Italy, that just banned ibogaine.

On the obverse, you have Dr. Bruno Rasmussen Chaves working with it in Brazil; you’ve got New Zealand, you’ve got Canada. In Canada their response was amazing. They had a problem with an adverse event, so ibogaine got put on some watch lists; then they had another problem with an adverse event, and their response was to make it a prescription medication, which was awesome. So the reality is that now it’s a prescription drug, and if you want to do it in the underground you can go ahead and do that anyways, it’s not like the underground suddenly vanishes.

I’ve microdosed ibogaine because I want to enjoy my work more that day, or I want to have a good workout, or quite honestly because sex is great on small doses of ibogaine. But you’re not supposed to say that.

In countries where ibogaine is legally available, treatment can cost several thousand dollars. Recognizing that drug users sit at the intersections of the most marginalized and disenfranchised populations, how might the regulation of ibogaine impact its accessibility to those who need it the most?

With the scenario right now, you can either afford high-end treatment or you’re on your own in the underground. So what if you’re poor? What are your options?

The whole point with medicalization is, well, you have insurance. If you don’t have very much money, unless Trump destroys it, you have Medicare. If ibogaine is medicalized then insurance is going to pay for treatment. That’s the whole end goal. All these people who don’t have a hope in hell of ever coming up with a few grand to go to a high end clinic, and are otherwise left with information they pick up on the internet, where a typo can kill you, medicalization would make ibogaine available to this entire spectrum of people. So that would be a good thing, in my opinion.

And no, it will not be absolutely ideal, I personally don’t want to trip in a medical environment. But having said that, as a medical procedure to end your drug dependence and reboot you, safety would be the primary concern.

Within the context of society as a whole, having worked with ibogaine for roughly twenty years, and the perspective that comes from becoming an old guy whose been alive for nearly half a century at this point and has worked with hundreds of drug dependent individuals, it seems like the rational and reasonable [thing] to do. Make it available to anybody who needs it because obviously what we’ve got right now isn’t working. America is in the midst of the worst drug epidemic in history. As of 2017 the leading cause of death for people under the age of fifty is OD’ing on drugs.

What would you recommend to anyone who might be considering taking ibogaine?

Just do some research. There’s a large mountain of information available. And by research I mean don’t just go to a bunch of treatment sites whose content is mostly generated by marketing departments plagiarizing somebody else’s work which they don’t actually understand. Check out Erowid, check out the old ibogaine MindVox website, check out the non-commercial stuff, check out what ICEERS and GITA have to say.

As with any substance, do the best that you can to educate yourself about what you’re going to take and what to expect. That’s really about it. Ultimately, getting clean is taking responsibility for your own actions. You gotta drive the bus, you can’t just get on the bus for the ride. You’re gonna have to figure out your own recovery, your own path through life, so just get as much information as you can. Try to have as much knowledge as possible before taking action.

https://www.psymposia.com/magazine/...n-junkie-microdosing-medicalization-ibogaine/
 
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These are the up- and downsides of my one-month experience microdosing LSD

Psychedelic Community | The Medium | 8 Nob 2018

The concept is simple: take a sub-perceptual dose of an entheogenic substance every few days. Why not every day? The body quickly builds up a tolerance against psychedelics, and taking a dose every day would diminish the effects over time. Currently, James Fadiman’s microdosing protocol is considered the gold standard of microdosing.

Microdosing of various entheogenic substances such as LSD, Psilocybin, Mesclaine, and others made its way into all kinds of different fields of application. Some people are actively treating their mental diseases, others are using it to boost their creativity and productivity, and some are exploring it out of curiosity and other interests. But why is there such a momentum for microdosing in this particular time? I sallied out to learn more about potential reasons.

Microdosing of various entheogenic substances such as LSD, Psilocybin, Mesclaine, and others made its way into all kinds of different fields of application. Some people are actively treating their mental diseases, others are using it to boost their creativity and productivity, and some are exploring it out of curiosity and other interests. But why is there such a momentum for microdosing in this particular time? I sallied out to learn more about potential reasons.

Unlike the recreational use of entheogenic substances, with microdosing you’re not supposed to feel any psychedelic effects. “If you’re taking a microdose and you’re feeling a little high, you’ve been taking a little too much.”, says Fadiman. The actual goal is to stay under the perceptual threshold. As I am using LSD as the substance of choice for this experiment, I’ll refer only on the particular information and handling of this substance. If a full recreational dose of LSD is 100 micrograms, a good first try for a microdose is 10 micrograms. From there on, the dose can be tweaked until the user has found their personal optimum and feels comfortable.

LSD is usually distributed on so-called blotters. These are small strips of paper onto which LSD has been applied in its previously liquid form. Let’s say one blotter contains 100 micrograms of LSD (very important side note: always try to test your substances to be sure that you’re a) exposing yourself to the substance you intend to do and b) to know the actual amount of substance contained). Because cutting such a tiny blotter into 10 even tinier equal pieces is a challenge for most people’s fine motor skills, the easier method is dissolving the blotter in distilled water (see the headline picture).

Dissolving a blotter containing 100 micrograms of LSD in 10 millilitres of water, leaves you with a simple ratio of 1 milliliter water = 10 micrograms of LSD. Medical syringes are convenient tools for withdrawing precise amounts of liquid from a bigger container.

The experiment

When I first started with this exploration of microdosing LSD, I wanted to taste for myself and not rely on any other “how to do-guides” which are broadly available in literature and on the internet. As a consequence, there were many interesting and unexpected things that I had to take in consideration for further exploration. For example, I started with initial doses of about 20 micrograms cut from blotters which I tested before and contained 100 micrograms each. As you can imagine, this is not a recommendable approach and lead to great variance in respect to dosage. However, as I was also taking another road in regards to the frequency of ingesting the substance, I would take a microdose on Mondays, Tuesdays and on Thursdays, I continued with the approach of cutting. This because I thought that over time, the tolerance would eliminate potential overdosing. Anyhow, that’s something I wouldn’t do anymore in further sequences of microdosing. The length of the experiment was limited to exactly one month and took place during a normal day to day life period which I’ve chosen consciously.

Upsides

After one full month of microdosing LSD three times a week, I can generally say that there’s definitely something to it. When I started reflecting on the particular layers of the experiences, I realized that labeling the subtile details is quite a challenge for me. One of the sensations which I quickly got aware of, was that I seemed to be surrounded by a bubble like thing. In other words, I found myself somewhat cut off from my environment and to be in a micro cosmos where everything was calm and balanced. Yet, I was always able to interact with outside happenings whenever I moved my focus in that direction. This sensation or phenomenon seemed very interesting to me as it allowed myself to step into a higher state of focus with an awareness which as quite resistant to distraction.

I often observed an uplifting influence on my personal mood which had great influence on my overall perception of things and as a result, it also had a great influence on my interaction with any subject or object. In these interactions, especially with other human beings, I felt a greater connection and an even greater empathy which in most cases lead to a more constructive outcome for both sides. Moreover, the way how my brain operates clearly changed on days where I was microdosing and therefore my thought processes changed too. That’s a particular example where it is really tricky for me to properly formalize how I experienced this phenomenon. It felt like the “normal” patterns of how I process data was no longer applied but instead a more freely concept which is not tied to ordinary behavior within the brain chemistry. This enables a kind of “out of the box thinking” which may be very helpful when you work on problem-solving tasks or innovation related things where you need creativity.

My eye sight got influenced as well and on distance I was able to identify much more precisely what I was looking at — small letters for example. This was not really new to me as I observed this effect already many times with larger doses of entheogenic substances. Another interesting effect on my system was an extremely refreshing and energizing sensation which I always first felt between 1 to 5 hours expanding from my stomach. In the first phase, it sometimes felt like a tingling but never in an uncomfortable way. Over time, the tingling faded away and what remained was an energized body and mind which lasted about 8 to 12 hours depending on the structure of my days.

Downsides

It actually took me quite a while to come up with something that I perceived to be more difficult to handle or irritating while pursing a day to day life. For me personally, a potentially critical thing was to commute accompanied by big masses which sometimes felt quite overwhelming. Nevertheless, I have to say that this is already often the case when I commute one hundred percent sober. Obviously, any other overwhelming situation would be critical as well as microdosing can make you more sensitive to energies in general.

Potentially, there are many other downsides which I was or am not able to identify as these are playing out on the neurophysiological or psychological level. Long-term studies collecting data from a great number of people will someday reveal further insight into this particular aspect.

What remains unclear

Never underestimate the power of placebo. Having said that, some of the experiences and sensations which I had during my experiment may potential be correlating with this specific phenomenon. Numerous studies have demonstrated strong placebo effects in chronic pain and mood disorders. For example, in antidepressant drug trials, the placebo response makes up for seventy-five percent of the positive effect of the antidepressant.

Our individual perception of reality is heavily biased by our previous experiences and our expectations. When we are microdosing, I do believe that we’re dealing with an especially strong positive expectation bias and therefore a potential strong placebo effect. A more metaphorical way of understanding this might be the following: if you got a supplement from your sports coach on a really great number of game days and you always won on these particular days, wouldn’t you start to connect the dots and interpret that there’s a correlation between this specific supplement and the outcome of the games? That’s how I encountered microdosing. I really wanted microdosing to work.

https://medium.com/samadhi-today/th...month-experience-microdosing-lsd-bb256ea6166b
 
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Microdosing psilocybin

ZAMNESIA

Dr James Fadiman, author of “The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide” has been involved in psychedelic research for some time and carried out one of the last studies involving LSD before research bans were put in place. Fadiman is leading the way in microdosing research and is utilising somewhat of a loophole in order to gather data on the phenomena and build a clearer picture in terms of dosage and effect. He is the process of collecting testimonies from people across the world who are trailing microdosing for a plethora of reasons such as battling anxiety and ADHD all the way to seeking enhanced focus and creativity.

The aim of microdosing is to ingest a sub-perceptual dose, a small enough amount that will not bring amount large changes in mood, perception and mindset. The feeling obtained, if any, should be extremely subtle, enabling the person ingesting the dose to go about their daily work as they would when entirely sober.

Fadiman has stated, “Someone taking a dose this low functions, as far as the world is concerned, a little better than normal. To date, I received no reports that sub-perceptual doses have caused any social disruption, personal upset, or any form of work-related difficulty.”

Obviously, there are variables at play when microdosing, with factors such as the body weight of the individual involved and the amount of food eaten beforehand playing a role, among other things such as the strength of the strain of mushroom or truffle.

SCHEDULE

A standard microdose is stated to be between 0.2-0.5g of dried mushrooms. Fadiman suggests that a person looking to experience microdosing take this amounts every fourth day. An example of this routine would look something like this:

Sunday: take microdose
Monday: observe residual effects
Tuesday: day off
Wednesday: take microdose
Thursday: observe residual effects
Friday: day off
Saturday: day off

Fadiman suggests that this cycle takes place over a period of ten weeks, with the subject observing their experience, taking notes and following their normal daily routine while doing so. Interesting changes to look out for are any modification in behaviour, outlook, emotions and energy levels. Obviously, if any negative effects are experienced that make a person feel uncomfortable, they may choose to cease their intake of microdoses.

Fadiman has stated in his book the Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide, “People are saying ‘After a month or more of microdosing, I’m eating better; I’m nicer to my kids; I’m not as upset when people behave badly’. One man was saying, ‘I’m so much more in the present. I used to, even when I was enjoying something, really be thinking about what I was going to do when it was over and so forth. Now when I'm doing something, I'm actually doing it’.”

Without sufficient research in place, microdosing at this present time is really about self-experimentation in order to find out the exact dose that works with your own body and mind. People have very different metabolisms and react differently to substances that alter consciousness. For this reason, it is better to start off at the lower end of the spectrum and slowly increase the dose by tiny amounts in order to really feel out the experience.

GROWING YOUR OWN

If anybody out there decides that microdosing is something they may benefit from and want to try, the obvious next step in the procedure is sourcing some mushrooms to use throughout the process. With psilocybin mushrooms being classified as illegal substances in many places in the world, this may prove to be quite problematic. Perhaps the easiest way to obtain mushrooms, without having to set up some dodgy back alley deal, is to simply to grow them yourself.

Growing mushrooms comes with an obvious risk, so be careful and aware the entire times. Grow kits can be purchased from websites such as Zamnesia that offer a wide variety of strains that grow fast and offer several flushes of mushrooms after the first harvest has occurred. Strains include the “Golden Teacher”, “Brazil”, “McKennaii”, “Cambodia” and “Ecuador”.

DOSING

Once your mushrooms have grown to full size and you have successfully harvested and dried them, it’s time to set up a dosing mechanism. First things first, grind up your bounty into a fine powder in order to make weighing and dosing generally a bit easier. One way to do would simply involve placing the desired amount onto a sensitive scale and using a spoon to ingest.

However, easier methods exist to avoid having to do this each time and potentially creating a mess. For example capsules and capsule machines can be purchased to prepare all of your doses and saving you any hassle further down the line. Encapsulating each dose allows the user to easily consume a microdose when desired straight from a capsule jar.

https://www.zamnesia.com/blog-a-guide-to-microdosing-magic-mushrooms-n1336
 
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Microdosing psychedelics may enhance creative problem solving

Springer | Neuroscience News | 25 Oct 2018

The use of minute doses of magic mushrooms and truffles containing psychedelic substances could induce a state of unconstrained thought that may produce more new, creative ideas. “Microdosing” in this way may allow people to experience the creative benefits of psychedelic drugs without the risk of “bad trips” that can come with high doses of such substances. This is according to a new study in the Springer-branded journal Psychopharmacology which is the official journal of the European Behavioural Pharmacology Society (EBPS). The research was led by Luisa Prochazkova of Leiden University in The Netherlands and is the first study of its kind to experimentally investigate the cognitive-enhancing effects of microdosing on a person’s brain function within a natural setting.

Taking a tiny fraction of a normal dose of psychedelic substances is becoming a trend in some professional circles because this is thought to stimulate brain function and enhance mental flexibility and creativity. However, experimental research that moves away from anecdotal evidence is still rare.

In this study, Prochazkova and her colleagues investigated how a microdose of a psychedelic substance affected the cognitive brain function of 36 people who were present at an event organized by the Psychedelic Society of The Netherlands. During the experimental phase, participants were set three tasks before and after they consumed on average 0.37 grams of dried truffles. The tests assessed their convergent thinking (the identification of a single solution to a problem), their fluid intelligence (the capacity to reason and solve new problems) and their divergent thinking (the ability to recognize many possible solutions). Afterwards, the researchers analyzed the active substances present in the truffles consumed by participants.

After taking the microdose of truffles, the researchers found that participants’ convergent thinking abilities were improved. Participants also had more ideas about how to solve a presented task, and were more fluent, flexible and original in the possibilities they came up with. Microdosing with psychedelic substances therefore improved both the divergent and convergent thinking of participants.

These findings are in line with earlier studies that found high doses of psychedelics can enhance creative performance. The fact that participants’ intelligence scores and general analytical abilities did not change suggests that the effect of the truffles is rather selective, and more to the benefit of a person’s creative domain.

“Taken together, our results suggest that consuming a microdose of truffles allowed participants to create more out-of-the-box alternative solutions for a problem, thus providing preliminary support for the assumption that microdosing improves divergent thinking,” explains Prochazkova. “Moreover, we also observed an improvement in convergent thinking, that is, increased performance on a task that requires the convergence on one single correct or best solution.”

Prochazkova hopes that these findings will stimulate further research into the beneficial effects of microdosing psychedelics. “Apart from its benefits as a potential cognitive enhancement technique, microdosing could be further investigated for its therapeutic efficacy to help individuals who suffer from rigid thought patterns or behavior such as individuals with depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder,” she explains.

https://neurosciencenews.com/psychedelic-multidose-creativity-10087/
 
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Paul Austin: "LSD microdosing increases our efficiency"

GDI

"Consumers of LSD, psilocybin or cannabis are likely to dominate the future working world. By using those substances, we think more creatively and can adapt more quickly to new situations – crucial skills in our global society," says entrepreneur Paul Austin.

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You are engaged in the microdosing of psychedelics. What does that mean?

Microdosing psychedelics is at the act of consuming about 1/10th of a regular dose of a psychedelic, typically on a 2x per week basis. The effects are visually sub-perceptible, and for many people produce a slightly increased sense of touch and smell, more energy, and improved focus and creativity. In June 2015, I microdosed with LSD for 7 months, consuming a sub-perceptible amount of LSD 2x per week. From my initial microdosing experiment, I noticed an improvement in my ability to focus (flow states) and relate to other people (reduction of social anxiety). My current role in the microdosing world is as a public speaker, educator, and advocate for research and utilization.

In concrete terms: When does microdosing help and when not?

Whether or not microdosing helps depends on the context in which it is used and the individual using it. Microdoses, just like high doses, are non-specific amplifiers, so the impact of microdosing is informed by the intention one has in consuming. There are two reasons people microdose: to enhance their overall well-being and to address some sort of deficit, like depression or addiction. Preliminary data shows that microdosing has an antidepressant effect and helps with energy levels and creativity. Microdosing does not consistently help with general anxiety, as it can make the individual more anxious.

How well established is microdosing already?

Currently, 60 000 new people visit The Third Wave every month to learn about microdosing. Random House, the largest trade publisher in the world, published a book on microdosing in January 2017, and major media publications like the New York Times, the Economist, and Wired have published long-form pieces both in print and online. Jim Fadiman, the godfather of microdosing, has collected over 1600 reports for his initial study on the efficacy of microdosing that he presented at Psychedelic Science in April 2017. Because of the cultural stigma that still exists around psychedelics, microdosing is not yet mainstream. However, its popularity will only continue to grow due to its seeming effectiveness in a variety of areas.

In which situations would a macro dosage be more appropriate?

This is a big topic with a lot of active research. Studies indicate that, say, for treatment-resistant depression, or other disorders resistant to modern treatment programs, like addiction, macrodoses of psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin are very promising. As with cannabis, there are a lot of people self-medicating or getting underground treatment that is effective--it's just that our institutions have yet to catch up and validate these tools. But that in of itself is a hurdle, because psychedelics in larger dosages are difficult to place in our current pharmaceutical model, being off-patent, and needing day-long, on-site assistance from a qualified guide.

Why is the trend towards microdosing emerging right now?

From a cultural perspective, the re-evaluation of cannabis combined with psychedelic research from prestigious institutions has led to a more objective dialogue around the potential usefulness of previously illicit substances.

The trend towards microdosing is emerging because Western culture has begun to recognize that the ego's stranglehold on our consciousness (the need to control) is, in fact, responsible for much of the suffering people experience in the modern Western world. In recognizing this, we are creating work spaces that place less responsibility on the individual's place of power within a hierarchical structure, instead shifting the focus to teams that utilize collaborative and decentralized models. As our world becomes an increasingly chaotic place, the creative teams that thrive will be those who can adapt the quickest. Substances that are proven to aid adaptability (like psychedelics), and thus think outside of rigid preconceptions (divergent thinking), will be increasingly used in next generation workplaces.

Today's use of LSD seems to support the predominant economic requirement of efficiency. Is this a good thing?

From my perspective, people in workplaces consuming LSD is representative of a shift in priorities and belief systems. The future of work will be less about getting things done, as rote-thinking tasks are delegated to AI and other forms of automation, and more about using working-time in an effective and efficient manner so one can enjoy the leisurely benefits of living in the Western world. Microdosing LSD represents a reversion back towards an optimised work-life balance where creative work is amplified through pharmacological means. Additionally, while microdosing can make you more effective at your current job, it often catalyzes reflection that can lead to a desire to change your occupation in a more meaningful direction, how you execute on the demands of your work, and how you view your identity in relationship to your professional life.

Today, we use drugs for self-optimisation. What's coming tomorrow?

Well, we've always used drugs for self-optimisation within the industrial workplace. The foremost of these are caffeine and tobacco not to mention stimulants like Adderall and nootropics. What will likely be the future, from a pharmacological perspective, is the increased use of substances that encourage divergent thinking, as creativity, innovation, and complex problem solving will be held in high reverence in our future workplace. Psychedelics are currently stigmatized, in large part, because they threaten the existing hierarchy of our industrial society. Microdosing will act as a wedge to destigmatize, and thus legitimize, psychedelics substances, which will help our society transition from the Industrial Age into the Information Age.

https://www.gdi.ch/en/publikationen/trend-updates/paul-austin-lsd-microdosing-increases-our-efficiency-0
 
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Exploring the effect of microdosing psychedelics on creativity in an open-label natural setting

Luisa Prochazkova, Dominique Lippelt, Lorenza Colzato, Martin Kuchar, Zsuzsika Sjoerds & Bernhard Hommel

Introduction

Major news outlets throughout the world are reporting on the growing number of professionals using small doses of psychedelics to boost their productivity and creativity at work. A prominent example is the use of small doses of LSD by employees in Silicon Valley, as a ‘productivity hack’. This emerging phenomenon is referred to as microdosing, with dosages around one tenth of recreational doses. Yet, despite the low dosages microdosing is still thought to provide a potential boost in cognition according to anecdotal reports. Moderate to large doses of psychedelics induce changes in perception, mood and overall consciousness, often described as qualitatively similar to deep meditative or transcendental states. If, similar yet milder effects apply to microdosing, this would render microdosing a potentially interesting cognitive enhancer in healthy individuals or even the basis of a treatment strategy to tackle various disorders including depression.

Throughout the 1960’s psychedelics were extensively used at recreational doses in experimental research, clinical settings, and in creative and scientific vocations, but were made illegal in most countries worldwide as a reaction to the rising counterculture of the 1960’s and failure to establish the clear efficacy of LSD treatment. Now, after many decades of disregard, psychedelics have started to reappear as a genuine and promising area of research within experimental and clinical psychology, as well as psychiatry. Moreover, certain psychedelics, such as truffles, have regained a legal status in The Netherlands, offering researchers a particularly interesting opportunity to study its effects in a quantitative manner. This is highly desirable, as previous reports have remained anecdotal and qualitative at best, often focusing on experiences of elevated feelings of determination, alertness, and energy, improved pattern recognition, as well as strong reductions of depressive feelings. Qualitative studies based on self-reports are known to suffer from validity problems due to participants’ inaccurate memories, differences in vocabulary and verbal skills, and unintentional or willful distortions of subjective experiences.

Nonetheless, existing research with moderate doses of psilocybin shows that psilocybin is a potent neuro-pharmacological agent with a strong modulatory effect on brain processes. Furthermore, a double-blind placebo-controlled study by Hasler et al. showed that even very low doses of psilocybin were rated clearly psychoactive by most of the volunteers, which indicates that psychedelic effects do not need high doses to be recognized.

Classical psychedelics such as psilocybin, the active compound in psychedelic truffles, exert their primary effects by directly binding to serotonin 3 2A receptors. Interestingly, 5-HT2A agonism has been reported to be associated with enhanced cognitive flexibility, improved associative learning and hippocampal neurogenesis in animals. Additionally, psychedelics have been shown to increase subjective sense of wellbeing, optimism, and openness in humans. Moreover, multiple clinical trials using moderate to large doses of psychedelics have indicated that psychedelics have anxiolytic, antidepressant, anti-compulsive, and anti-addictive properties. Consequently, the effects of psychedelic substances can be argued to target the serotonergic system, and hence be beneficial in situations where there is need for mental flexibility, or where one needs to break through rigid patterns of thought. In case that future research confirms positive effects of microdosing on brain and cognition, microdosing could become an attractive alternative due to its sub-perceptual nature possibly sparing individuals from the perceptual distortions often reported with moderate or high doses.

Through the alleged benefits in mental flexibility, a promising behavioral target of psychedelics lies in the area of creativity. Creativity is a multilayered phenomenon, commonly defined as the ability to generate ideas, solutions, or products that are both novel and appropriate. Creativity is not a unitary function but consists of a number of subcomponents that provide different, to some degree opposing cognitive challenges. It is crucial to distinguish between convergent thinking, which requires identification of a single solution to a well-defined problem, and divergent thinking, which requires the collection of many possible solutions to a loosely defined problem. An example of convergent thinking task would be to find the one concept that can be meaningfully combined with three other concepts such as “…man”, “…market”, and “…bowl”, while an example of divergent thinking task would be to list all possible ways in which a brick could be used. It has been argued that convergent thinking draws more on the ability to focus exclusively on a given problem, while divergent thinking draws more on cognitive flexibility. However, it is important to point out that all available creativity tasks require the integration of both of these abilities to some degree. Of further importance to our present study is the fact that creative thinking is not a hardwired virtue. Several behavioral studies have shown that the processes underlying creative thinking can be systematically enhanced and impaired by both behavioral interventions, such as meditation, as well as, psychopharmacological agents as for instance cannabis, tyrosine and Adderall.

Moreover, a recent study conducted by Kuypers and colleagues investigated the effect of recreational doses of the psychedelic brew Ayahuasca on creativity during two spiritual retreats. They found that divergent thinking performance improved under the influence of Ayahuasca compared to baseline, while convergent thinking performance decreased in comparison to baseline. Although this study may seem to provide a useful starting point, conclusions are hampered by several disadvantages of this drug and the study design. First, dimethyltryptamine, the active psychedelic compound in Ayahuasca, needs to be combined with monoamine oxidase inhibitors for its effect to take place. MAOIs are known to have anti-depressant effects on their own, so they represent a possible confound in all Ayahuasca studies. Additionally, this implies that the qualitative experience induced by Ayahuasca and the underlying mechanisms of action differ substantially from those related to commonly used psychedelics, such as LSD or psilocybin. Indeed, the Ayahuasca brews used in the study of Kuypers and colleagues’ induced strong psychedelic experiences, the effects of which are unlikely to be comparable to the effects obtained from microdosing a psychedelic substance. High doses of psychedelics frequently result in disorienting effects in the user, which makes reliable assessment of psychometric task performance difficult during the peak effects of the psychedelic experience. Taken altogether, microdosing of psychedelic truffles and related psychoactive substances may thus be more suitable to assess the enhancing effects of psychedelics on human performance.

Discussion

The aim of this study was to explore the effects of microdosing psychedelics on creative problem solving. We observed an increase in divergent idea generation on the AUT, as evidenced by a significant increase in fluency, flexibility, and originality scores, as well as an increase in convergent thinking on the PCT after intake of a microdose of magic truffles. Given that fluid intelligence did not change between the two measurement time points suggests a specific effect on creativity performance, but not on general cognition. These findings are in line with earlier studies finding positive effects of high doses of psychedelics on creative performance. In particular, the increase in originality scores on the AUT parallels the increase in originality scores after intake of Ayahuasca reported by Kuypers and colleagues. Taken together, our results suggest that consuming a microdose of truffles allowed participants to create more out-of-the-box alternative solutions for a problem, thus providing preliminary support for the assumption that microdosing improves divergent thinking. Moreover, we also observed an improvement of convergent thinking, that is, increased performance on a task that requires the convergence on one single correct or best solution.

The outcome pattern of the present study is consistent with the idea that microdosing psychedelic substances improves both divergent and convergent thinking. The fact that intelligence was not improved suggests that this effect was rather selective, but the possibility remains that the Raven was less sensitive to the intervention than the other measures were. It is tempting to interpret our observations on divergent thinking in the context of recent suggestions that behavior drawing on flexibility and novelty benefits from a reduction of cognitive top-down control. According to this view, creativity tasks can be assumed to draw on two distinct, presumably opposing cognitive processes: flexibility is characterized by broadening the attentional scope, which enables individuals to generate many divergent ideas, while persistence is associated with a narrower attentional scope, thus allowing individuals to focus on one creative idea at a time. Some of the previous empirical dissociations of persistence and flexibility were related to dopaminergic functioning, such as in behavioral-genetics studies demonstrating that polymorphisms supporting efficient dopaminergic functioning in the frontal cortex promote persistence while polymorphisms supporting striatal dopaminergic functioning promote flexibility. This strengthens the view that frontal and striatal dopaminergic pathways are involved in persistence and flexibility. If we assume that convergent thinking relies more on frontal persistence while divergent thinking relies more on striatal flexibility, our outcomes raise the question how an intervention can manage to improve both convergent and divergent thinking.

Classical psychedelics, including psilocybin, belong to a group of tryptamines that are thought to exert their primary psychedelic effects through activity at the serotonergic 5-HT2A receptor. Of particular interest in this regard are findings from animal studies showing that 5- HT2A agonist activity correlates with an increase in associative learning and improvements in the ability to adapt behavior more flexibly.

Moreover, studies in humans have shown that the administration of psychedelics is associated with an increase in the personality trait “Openness” and that psychedelics can induce a reduction in symptoms associated with rigid behavior and thought patterns observed in obsessive-compulsive disorder and depression. Such findings could be tentatively interpreted to imply that psilocybin facilitates more flexible, less constrained kinds of cognition.

The 5-HT2A receptors are widely distributed in in the brain and especially so in high-level prefrontal and associative cortex–regions important for learning and memory retrieval, this is likely to have important functional implications. For instance, postsynaptic 5-HT2A receptor activation was shown to be associated with improvements in certain aspects of cognition as well as an extinction of previously learn response patterns. However, it is important to note, that function of the 5-HT system remains ‘elusive’ given the inherent complexity of the serotonin system and more research has to be conducted in this regard to determine its function.

While the assumption of a link between the use of psychedelics and an unconstrained brain state fits well with our findings on divergent thinking, it does not seem to be consistent with our observations on convergent thinking. Microdosing improved performance on the PCT, suggesting that it promotes convergent thinking. Note that this observation contrasts with previous findings by Kuypers and colleagues, who reported that Ayahuasca, also a 5-HT2A agonist, impaired performance on convergent thinking tasks. We believe this discrepancy could be a result of the difference in relative dosage. Kuypers and colleagues investigated participants after the intake of large doses of Ayahuasca, which is hardly comparable to the microdoses used in the present study. Previous research has shown a relationship between 5-HT2A receptor activity and goal directed behavior likely due to indirect modulation of DA release. Dopamine-related adaptive behavior follows an inverted U-shape, suggesting that smaller doses, such as the microdoses ingested by the participants in our current study, are more likely to move participants towards the most efficient mid-zone of the performance function than higher doses do. Indeed, based on self-reports, an online study by Fadiman and Krob suggests that microdosing could enhance motivation and focus, and reduce distractibility and procrastination—which seems consistent with our observation of improved convergent thinking.

These considerations suggest that microdoses truffles, and perhaps 5-HT2A agonist in general, improve processes that are shared by convergent and divergent thinking—irrespective of the existing differences. Indeed, both convergent and divergent thinking tasks rely to some degree on persistence and top-down control and to some degree on unconstrained flexibility. While convergent-thinking tasks emphasize persistence over flexibility, and divergent-thinking tasks emphasize flexibility over persistence, they both require participants to keep in mind particular search criteria, which they need to test against candidate items in memory, and to search through novel and often unfamiliar items considered for this test. The tasks thus present participants with a dilemma, which can only be solved by finding a reasonable balance between the antagonistic skills; that is, to be persistent and flexible at the same time, or at least in quick succession. Microdosing therefore might promote is the speed or smoothness of switching between persistence and flexibility—an ability that Mekern, Sjoerds, and Hommel refer to as “adaptivity.” Taken together, whereas large doses of psychedelics might induce an hyper-flexible mode of brain functioning, and possibly a breakdown of control, microdoses may be able to drive brain functioning towards an optimal, highly adaptive balance between persistence and flexibility.

Conclusion

Whereas large doses of psychedelics can introduce a range of undesirable side effects, microdoses of psychedelic substances might prove to be a promising alternative that could eliminate the risks of challenging experiences while maintaining the potential benefits of psychedelic substances on human emotion and cognition. The current naturalistic study is the first to quantitatively show that microdosing psychedelics could improve creative performance, possibly by means of inducing a state of unconstrained thought allowing for increased novel idea generation. We hope that our findings will stimulate further research into the beneficial effects of microdosing psychedelics. Apart from its benefits as a potential cognitive enhancement technique, microdosing could be further investigated for its therapeutic efficacy as to slow down cognitive decline or help individuals who suffer from rigid thought patterns or behavior such as individuals with depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2018/08/08/384412.full.pdf
 
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As microdosing explodes in popularity, a new look at the benefits and side effects of daily psychedelic use


by Kristina Pavlovic and Evan Stulberger and Sarah Wallace | NBC New York | 3 Jan 2019

In the past three years, Google searches for the term “microdosing” have tripled, and books and articles on the subject are exploding.

Microdosing is described as taking an imperceptible dose of an illegal psychedelic drug, typically LSD, MDMA or Psilocybin, more commonly known as magic mushrooms. It’s a fraction – roughly a tenth - of a full psychedelic dose.

"It’s just been a constant upward trend, constantly on the rise," said a drug dealer who spoke with News 4 on condition of anonymity. He creates microdoses by taking psilocybin or "magic" mushrooms, grinding them to a powder and pressing them into pills that are a fraction of a full psychedelic dose.

"They don’t take it to get high, they take it to be more effective," he said.

The dealer refused to say exactly how much money he has made capitalizing on this trend but said his client base has grown to about 100 people in the metro area.

One man who takes microdoses described what he called a transformative experience: "I wanted to do so many things, I wanted to go to so many places, started painting, started drawing that day, I read a ton - it just made me want to be the most productive version of myself."

Some take it for other reasons. He said he has struggled with depression and anxiety, but said he that knows people in a variety of industries that are practicing microdosing "to better themselves and their careers."

He himself uses small amounts of psychedelics at work: "I'm able to connect the pieces of puzzles I'm working on a lot quicker. I’ve gotten a couple mentions on my overall demeanor, and people have told me that it’s dramatically improved my personality," he says - all because of his intermittent use of mushrooms. “There are people I sell to in the music industry, doctors, students that use it instead of Adderall, and people in the finance industry.”

Dr. David Nichols, a professor at the University of North Carolina, is the founding president of the Heffter Research Institute. He is one of the world’s most respected psychedelic researchers and has been studying these drugs for decades.

"I think it’s important for people to recognize that psychedelics are not the dangerous drugs they might have heard about, and it looks like they can treat conditions that we haven't been able to treat until now," he said.

Johns Hopkins, NYU and other institutions are studying the potential of psychedelic drugs to treat things from obsessive compulsive disorder to PTSD. The FDA has recently given breakthrough therapy designation to one study that is looking at psychedelics as a treatment for treatment-resistant depression. Those studies are looking at full hallucinogenic doses.

"There have not been any long-term studies where people have taken a psychedelic daily over a long period of time, and although the doses are small, we don’t really know if there might be changes in the endocrine system or to hormonal levels - we don’t know any of that," said Nichols.

"It’s really an important medication, and we need to draw the distinction between that and it being a recreational drug," Nichols added.

Johns Hopkins has recently recommended the DEA reschedule psilocybin mushrooms, pending the results of clinical trials, from a Schedule I or dangerous drug, down to a Schedule IV drug, one with low potential for abuse.

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/investig...nics-Side-Effects-Benefits-NYC-503881891.html
 
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Microdosers of LSD and magic mushrooms are wiser and more creative

by Thomas Anderson and Rotem Petranker | The Conversation

We just ran the first ever pre-registered scientific study on the microdosing of psychedelics and found some very promising results.

We compared people who microdose — that is, who take a psychedelic substance such as LSD or psilocybin in very small quantities — with those who don’t, and found that microdosers had healthier scores on key mental health and well-being measures.

Specifically, we found that microdosers scored higher on measures of wisdom, open-mindedness and creativity.

Microdosers also scored lower on measures of dysfunctional attitudes and negative emotionality, which is very promising.

Subtle changes, not hallucinations

Psychedelics microdosing can mean taking five to 20 micrograms of LSD, 0.1 – 0.3 grams of dried psilocybin-containing mushrooms or very low doses of more exotic substances, like 1P-LSD, ALD-52 or 4-AcO-DMT.

No matter the substance, microdosing implies a dose so low that the individual experiences only subtle changes, not hallucinations. People are not “tripping” on a microdose; they just go about their regular day, whether that means studying at school, going to work or taking care of the kids at home.

There has been no published science on whether microdosing works, but despite this, microdosing for self-enhancement and mental health has hit the media.

For example, a 2016 article in Wired magazine described young professionals in San Francisco and Silicon Valley microdosing to enhance their creativity and focus, and to gain a competitive advantage.

Ayelet Waldman attributed her increased well-being to microdosing in A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage and My Life. More recently, Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind has further attracted mainstream attention to psychedelics.

Higher wisdom and creativity

No experimental study has evaluated psychedelic microdosing, and neither did we.

Randomized placebo-controlled trials are needed to talk definitively about the effects of microdosing. In the meantime, we investigated the experiences of people who already microdose.

Our survey investigated the relationship between microdosing psychedelics and mental health. We recruited participants online, especially from Reddit’s microdosing community.

We asked our study participants about their microdosing patterns by having them fill in some questionnaires. As firm believers in Open Science, we have openly shared all our materials and you can find them here. Our findings are soon to be published in Psychopharmacology and you can access the preprint here.

We found that microdosers scored higher on “wisdom,” but wisdom is a tricky thing to define. In this context, “wisdom” implies considering multiple perspectives, learning from mistakes, being in tune with emotions and people and feeling a sense of connection. Using this definition, microdosers were more “wise.”

They were also more creative and open. If wisdom is tricky, creativity is even more so. In this case, creativity meant finding unusual uses for regular household objects: A brick and a knife. Microdosers came up with more useful, unusual and unique uses for these objects. This is a well-validated measure of divergent thinking, though certainly not the be-all and end-all of creativity.

Microdosers also scored lower on measures of dysfunctional attitudes and negative emotionality. What does that mean?

Well, dysfunctional attitudes and negative emotionality (aka neuroticism) are bad. Dysfunctional attitudes are beliefs such as, “my value as a person depends greatly on what others think of me” or “if I ask a question, it makes me look inferior.” Neither of these are true, and they are unhealthy to believe as they imply vulnerability to stress and depression.

Microdosers endorsed less of these unhealthy beliefs. Likewise, high negative emotionality means a higher likelihood of having a mental health disorder, and microdosers had lower negative emotionality.

An exciting future for clinical science

Our results are promising. As promising as they seem, we don’t know whether microdosing actually caused any of these differences.

Maybe people with better mental health were more likely to experiment with microdosing, or perhaps there is some unknown cause that made people both more likely to microdose and to be creative.

At this point, we simply don’t know what caused the differences between the groups — just that these differences existed. We need to run controlled lab studies to actually find out.

Our preliminary work also shows that people report downsides to microdosing. For example, some people found microdosing increased anxiety and mood-instability; increased aches, pains and gastrointestinal distress were also relatively common.

The most common drawback was that microdosing is illegal. Did we forget to mention that? Yes, psychedelics are totally illegal!

LSD and psilocybin were made illegal in the 1971 UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances and remain so today. The exact laws differ depending on where you live, and using analogue substances can sometimes be a legal grey area but, for the most part, microdosing makes you a criminal.

What we need now are controlled lab experiments — randomized placebo-controlled trials of psychedelic microdosing to test safety and efficacy. Microdosing research, alongside full-dose psychedelics, promises an exciting future for clinical science and the study of human flourishing.

https://theconversation.com/microdo...-mushrooms-are-wiser-and-more-creative-101302
 
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Why more and more people are microdosing for depression

by Deb Powers | Civilized Life | 3 Feb 2019

Microdosing, until now the province of trendy Silicon Valley biohackers and Reddit users, is taking on a shiny new respectability as serious scientists and researchers take notice. Over the past few years, some of the most respectable journals of science — hello, The Lancet — have published studies looking into the practice of microdosing mushrooms, LSD, MDMA, and other psychedelics. The findings are no surprise to those who have been paying attention to the anecdotal evidence. Here’s a look at some of the purported benefits of mushroom microdosing for depression.

What is microdosing?

According to Dr. James Fadiman, who has been researching psychedelics since the 1960s, microdosing is taking tiny amounts of a psychedelic — far below the level that would cause noticeable perception-altering effects — on a regular basis as a way to “rebalance” your brain. Fadiman has been collecting anecdotal reports about microdosing from people around the world. He says that people report improvements in mood and clarity, enhanced focus, more creativity, and productivity, as well as relief from the symptoms of depression and other psychological problems.

While the term microdosing is relatively new, the concept — and the practice — are not. Dr. Albert Hoffman, who discovered LSD, was a proponent and long-time practitioner, and, as Fadiman noted in an interview with Huffington Post, indigenous people have been microdosing for thousands of years.

Why people microdose

People turn to microdosing for a wide range of reasons. There are reports that it’s effective for everything from easing anxiety to relieving the symptoms of ADHD and opening them up to more creative ideas. It seems very much a YMMV type of experience. Fadiman says as much when he notes that people who wrote for help with anxiety found it helped their anxiety, those looking for something to help their productivity benefited in increased productivity, and so on. Here’s a look at some of the reasons people tried microdosing and their results:

Janet Chang, a former Olympic speed skater, wrote in detail about her experiences during a year when she tried microdosing shrooms. She was on a quest for self-improvement during a very difficult year in her life. She experimented with varying doses of psilocybin, the psychoactive constituent in mushrooms, and kept meticulous notes. Overall, she found that microdosing made her less anxious, more creative and productive, and improved her self-perception and relationship with herself.

Patrick Smith tried microdosing LSD after a few experiences with acid at full dosage levels. He found that microdosing LSD was a far different experience. After his first experience, he wrote that by the end of the day, he felt great. He’d found a “headspace” that allowed him a high degree of introspection and let him see how his decisions affected his anxiety and depression. He concluded that microdosing is a way of experiencing the beneficial healing effects of a psychedelic without letting go of control completely.

James Jesso has been microdosing psilocybin and LSD for about two years. In a video on his site, Adventures Through the Mind, he compared the differences between microdosing shrooms vs. LSD. He noted that psilocybin helped him deal with trauma, made him feel more resilient, prevented him from spiraling into the depths of depression and helped him be more productive. He also found that psilocybin and LSD both helped him be more emotionally expressive. Overall, he concluded, microdosing LSD helps him be more productive and creative, while psilocybin affects emotions and self-perception more.

What science says

Researchers have been looking at LSD and MDMA as possible treatments for psychological disorders for decades. It’s only recently, though, that they’ve turned to studying microdoses as a method to enhance cognitive functions and ease symptoms of depression, PTSD and anxiety. Since the early 2000s, a number of small studies have suggested that there are definite benefits to taking small, sub-perceptual doses of psychedlics on a regular basis.

In a study published in The Lancet, researchers treated 12 people diagnosed with a treatment-resistant depressive disorder with two microdoses of psilocybin, seven days apart. The researchers found that though some transient adverse effects occurred — mostly a little anxiety at the beginning of the session, some confusion and nausea during the session — there were no lasting adverse effects. The beneficial effects, however, did seem to hold up. All of the patients showed a marked reduction in depressive symptoms at one-week and three-month follow-up assessments, as well as improvement in symptoms of anxiety.

A small study published in Psychopharmacology focused on the creative and cognitive effects of microdosing mushrooms. The researchers found that the microdoses seemed to affect both convergent and divergent thinking, but not fluidity. They concluded that microdoses of psilocybin might help balance cognitive persistence and flexibility and that further research into the precise effects is warranted. While all of that sounds very technical and scientific, it resonates with Patrick Smith’s observation that microdosing allowed him to delve into his emotional and creative processes without totally relinquishing control over his mind.

Much of the information about microdosing is anecdotal, and what little research does exist tends to focus on how microdosing LSD or mushrooms makes you more productive, more creative or otherwise improves your “value.” That’s about to change. The Beckley Foundation has recently launched the first full study into microdosing and its effects on mood and general well-being in addition to creativity and productivity. This could be a game-changer in the field, opening more avenues of research into the possible uses of microdosing to help people fighting a range of mood regulation disorders.

https://www.civilized.life/articles/microdosing-for-depression/

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Does microdosing improve mood and performance?

Neuroscience News | Feb 11, 2019

Microdosing means regularly taking very small doses of psychedelic substances such as LSD or psilocybin (magic mushrooms) over a period of weeks or months. The practice has made countless headlines over the past couple of years, with claims it can improve health, strengthen relationships, and increase productivity.

These claims are surprising because microdosers take doses so small there are no noticeable effects. These can be just 1/20th of a typical recreational dose, often every three or four days. With such small amounts, microdosers go about their daily business, including going to work, without experiencing any typical drug effects.

Previous research suggests microdosing may lead to better mood and energy levels, improved creativity, increased wisdom, and changes to how we perceive time.

But these previous studies have mainly involved asking people to complete ratings or behavioural tasks as one-off measures.

Our study, published today in PLOS One, tracked the experience of 98 users over a longer period – six weeks – to systematically measure any psychological changes.

Overall, the participants reported both positive and negative effects from microdosing, including improved attention and mental health; but also more neuroticism.

What we did

As you would expect, there are many legal and bureaucratic barriers to psychedelic research. It wasn’t possible for us to run a study where we actually provided participants with psychedelic substances. Instead, we tried to come up with the most rigorous design possible in the current restrictive legal climate.

Our solution was to recruit people who were already experimenting with microdosing and to track their experiences carefully over time, using well validated and reliable psychometric measures.

Each day we asked participants to complete some brief ratings, telling us whether they had microdosed that day and describing their overall experience. This let us track the immediate effects of microdosing.

At the beginning and end of the study participants completed a detailed battery of psychological measures. This let us track the longer-term effects of microdosing.

In a separate sample, we explored the beliefs and expectations of people who are interested in microdosing. This let us track whether any changes in our main sample were aligned with what people generally predict will happen when microdosing.

What we found

There are five key findings from our study.

1. A general positive boost on microdosing days, but limited residual effects of each dose.

Many online accounts of microdosing suggest people microdose every three or four days. The thinking is that each microdose supposedly has a residual effect that lasts for a few days.

The daily ratings from participants in our study do not support this idea. Participants reported an immediate boost in all measures (connectedness, contemplation, creativity, focus, happiness, productiveness and wellness) on dosing days. But this was mostly not maintained on the following days.

However, there was some indication of a slight rebound in feelings of focus and productivity two days after dosing.

2. Some indications of improvements in mental health

We also looked at cumulative effects of longer term microdosing. We found that after six weeks, participants reported lower levels of depression and stress.

We recruited people who were not experiencing any kind of mental illness for the study, so levels of depression and stress were relatively low to begin with. Nevertheless, ratings on these measures did drop.

This is an intriguing finding but it’s not clear from this result whether microdosing would have any effect on more significant levels of mood disturbance.

3. Shifts in attention

The microdosers in our study reported reduced mind wandering, meaning they were less likely to be distracted by unwanted thoughts.

They also reported an increase in absorption, meaning they were more likely to experience intense focused attention on imaginative experiences. Absorption has been linked to strong engagement with art and nature.

4. Increases in neuroticism and some challenging experiences

Not everyone had a good time microdosing. Some participants reported unpleasant and difficult experiences. In some cases, participants tried microdosing just once or twice, then didn’t want to continue.

Overall, participants reported a small increase in neuroticism after six weeks of microdosing, indicating an increase in the frequency of unpleasant emotions.

5. Changes do not entirely match people’s expectations

People have strong expectations about the effects of microdosing. But when we looked at the specific variables participants most expected would change, these didn’t match up with the changes actually reported by our microdosers.

Two of the biggest changes microdosers expected were increases in creativity and life satisfaction, but we found no evidence of shifts in these areas. This suggests the changes we found were not simply due to people’s expectations.

What does it all mean?

This complex set of findings is not what’s typically reported in media stories and online discussions of microdosing. There are promising indications of possible benefits of microdosing here, but also indications of some potential negative impacts, which should be taken seriously.

It’s important to remember this was an observational study that relied heavily on the accuracy and honesty of participants in their reports. As such, these results need to be treated cautiously.

It’s early days for microdosing research and this work shows that we need to look more carefully at the effects of low dose psychedelics on mental health, attention, and neuroticism.

https://neurosciencenews.com/microdosing-mood-performance-10723/
 
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I microdosed with LSD for a month, and this is what happened

by M. Tabu | IFL Science | 8 Oct 2017

It's day 30 of my LSD microdosing experiment, and although I don't feel anything unusual, my cognitive tests are showing that something is definitely up: According to my mood scores, I've become deliriously happy, and a fantasia of fictitious fauna has begun to leak from some exotic region of my psyche.

Admittedly, this homespun research project carries none of the credibility of a lab-based clinical trial, and nothing but a good old splotch on a brain scan will provide any real clarity as to what effect microdosing has on cognition. But as that sort of data is yet to be collected, I decided to spend a month scientifically measuring the psychological outcomes of taking tiny doses of LSD.

Why am I microdosing?

Microdosing involves consuming miniscule quantities of psychedelic substances in order to grease the wheels of cognition without producing a mind-altering trip. The practice has become popular among Silicon Valley professionals looking to boost their creativity, and gained further attention thanks to Ayelet Waldman's book entitled A Really Good Day, in which she recounts how regular microdoses of LSD helped her to overcome depression.

However, these and other anecdotal reports remain the only evidence we have for the efficacy of microdosing, which is why I've been using a battery of cognitive tasks to assess my mood and creativity levels while microdosing with LSD.

Dose

Paul Austin is the founder of The Third Wave, an online educational resource that has become a hub for people with an interest in microdosing. He told IFLScience, "people who microdose tend to fall into one of two camps," and that "the dosage they use often depends on which of these they belong to."

"The first group are those who are microdosing because of a deficit, meaning they feel something is lacking and they want to microdose just to get back to normal. These may be people with depression, addictions, post-traumatic stress disorder or social anxiety."


According to Austin, "people who microdose for this reason often, but not always, go for a dose that is a little bit more than sub-perceptible, so they get this slight feeling of glow." In other words, getting just a tiny bit high on a regular basis seems to be effective at treating depression, as testified to by Waldman in her book.

The second group are those who are already at baseline but microdose in order to enhance their creativity and productivity by entering flow states.

"A state of flow is like being in the zone," says Austin. "It's when you're engaged in something that is fairly difficult, and really complex things become easier to solve."

"People are noticing that when they take sub-perceptible doses, that that's helping them get in this zone at certain tasks like writing or solving a problem,"
meaning, in order to achieve peak performance its best to take a dose so small that you feel literally nothing; if you're tripping even a tiny bit, you've had too much.

Personally, I'm more interested in boosting creativity than treating an emotional disorder, so I decided to go sub-perceptible, and took 10 micrograms of LSD every third day for 30 days.

What was it like?

Despite the recent avalanche of media articles, I can't say noticed much benefit in terms of my productivity. I didn't develop an greater appreciation for the more boring aspects of my job, nor did I make a particularly outstanding contribution to the success of the organization during my microdosing month. All in all, my experience of reality was pretty much the same, although the results of my cognitive tests paint a rather different picture.

Effect on creativity

Austin explains that "through the practice of microdosing, you're re-training or just training your brain to think in different ways over a long period of time." And while there hasn't yet been any studies conducted into how microdosing alters brain activity, research with larger doses of psychedelics has shown that these substances produce a magnificent proliferation of connectivity throughout the brain, sparking more flexible patterns of cognition that may lead to enhanced creativity.

It is therefore believed that as people microdose over a period of time, their brain becomes increasingly adept at entering flow states, causing creativity levels to rise gradually.

To monitor this, I used the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, and found that although I didn't feel any more flamboyant as the month went on, my creativity scores did increase. This is particularly apparent in my responses to the Incomplete Figures Task, which involves drawing a complete picture from a random line drawn on a page (in red below) in a set period of time. The score is then calculated based on originality, storytelling, richness of imagery, humor, and a range of other factors.

Effect on mood

Psychologist James Fadiman is currently in the process of collecting mood and creativity data from hundreds of microdosers around the world. Speaking to IFLScience, he explained that "the most positive responders to microdosing are those with treatment-resistant depression."

To measure the effects of microdosing on my mood, I used two standard validated psychological tests, Becks Depression Inventory (BDI) and the Profile of Mood States (POMS). The day before my first microdose, I recorded my baseline levels and scored 5 out of 63 on the BDI. Given that any score below 10 is considered healthy, I didn't have much room for improvement, and while I can't say I noticed myself feeling happier as the experiment went on, I was surprised to find that my score dropped to 1 for the entire final week of my microdosing month.

The POMS gives an overall score for mood disturbance, ranging from -32 to 200, as well as a breakdown of certain mood aspects like anger, confusion, fatigue, and vigor. At baseline, my total mood disturbance was a chirpy -5, but by the end of the month, I'd become one serene bean, scoring a near perfect -28.

According to my tests, this major increase in chill was largely driven by a surge in vigor, which rose from 20 out of a possible 32 at baseline to 30 at the end of the month.

So, did it work?

Although my mood and creativity scores both improved considerably over the course of the month, I cant say I felt anything happening. According to Fadiman, though, thats the point of microdosing. "With people who microdose over a period of time we get no classic psychedelic effects, but see changes that are more gradual and seem to last," he says.

It's also worth pointing out that my results prove nothing, and that this guerrilla experiment is riddled with limitations that render it pretty useless when considered in isolation. Yet Fadiman insists that he has received huge numbers of reports similar to mine, and suggests that although "conventional science says that anecdotes don't count, when you have several hundred of them maybe they do."

Ultimately, it's hard to say how much of an effect microdosing had on me, but the results of my tests certainly seem to corroborate the underlying hypothesis: my scores got higher, even if I didn't.

http://www.iflscience.com/brain/i-mi...did-to-me/all/
 
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New chapter in the science of psychedelic microdosing*

by Haley Weiss | The Atlantic | 5 Mar 2019

A study on rats offers the first biological evidence that small doses of psychedelic drugs could have therapeutic benefits.

New research found that microdosing DMT produced positive effects on mood and anxiety in rats without impacting working memory or social interaction. This is exciting news.

The purported benefits of microdosing psychedelics are as numerous as the research is sparse. The technique, which involves ingesting small amounts of LSD, mushrooms, or other hallucinogenic drugs every three or four days, has made headlines for its popularity as a “productivity hack” among the Silicon Valley elite. But anecdotal endorsements of microdosing claim that the routine can lead to a whole variety of benefits, including heightened emotional sensitivity, athletic performance, and creativity; and relief from symptoms of anxiety, depression, OCD, PTSD, and chronic pain—all without resulting in any sort of trip.

In a lab setting, meanwhile, these effects have hardly been studied. Microdosing straddles a line between homeopathic remedy and experimental biohacking as a promising tool that hasn’t yet made its way through the clinical system’s rigorous checks and balances. Now a new study published Monday in the journal ACS Chemical Neuroscience provides the first biological evidence that psychedelic microdosing could have unique therapeutic effects that differ from the effects of a full dose.

For David Olson, a professor in the chemistry and neuroscience departments at the University of California at Davis and one of the paper’s authors, it started with ketamine. Over the past few years, Olson watched as the formerly notorious anesthetic cum party drug was rebranded as an experimental miracle for treatment-resistant depression. Ketamine has the ability to rebuild fraying connections between brain cells integral to networks that regulate emotions and mood, thanks to an effect known as neural plasticity. Olson suspected that the process by which ketamine promotes this type of plasticity could be activated by other substances as well, and in June his team published a paper showing that in rats, psychedelics such as LSD, ecstasy, and dimethyltryptamin, or DMT, mirror ketamine’s effects.

When the study ended, Olson began to wonder if the therapeutic benefits could also be achieved through microdosing. Along with the hallucinogenic effects of the drugs, he’d found that standard doses gave his rats fierce anxiety, which seemed like a high price to pay for an effective antidepressant. “I really wanted to answer the question as to whether or not the hallucinogenic effects of these compounds were necessary for the therapeutic effects,” Olson says.

At that point, there had only been four published studies on microdosing: three based on interviews with anonymous users who reported the effects, and one write-up of a conference where attendees ingested psychedelic truffles. (A fifth microdosing study, also interview-based but the first with an empirical setup, was published last month in the journal PLOS One.) For the new study, Olson’s team calculated a dosage of DMT—which is chemically like a stripped-down version of LSD or psilocybin “magic” mushrooms—that was too small to produce any hallucinogenic effects. They gave it to the rats every three days. On off days, the animals completed tests, including two experimental proxies for human anxiety and depression, respectively: a repetitive fear exercise, and a forced-swim test that looks at whether the animal will simply give up when in danger.

Seven weeks later, the researchers found that even though the rats weren’t given enough DMT to hallucinate, their depression and anxiety scores still improved significantly. The uptick in anxiety associated with the higher dose of DMT was nowhere to be found in the rats that had taken intermittent microdoses. Olson says the study demonstrates that the therapeutic effects of psychedelics—in rats, at least—can indeed be harnessed independently of the hallucinogenic effects. It appears that each of DMT’s distinct effects can be activated only if the amount of the drug present crosses a certain threshold. For the benefits of neural plasticity, that threshold seems to be lower.

For most substances, a study like this could quickly prompt more research that would eventually open the door to clinical trials. But for psychedelics, which are highly illegal substances in the United States that fall among the most strictly regulated both in and out of labs, the progression of research can be slower. “There has been a very big transformation of how psychedelics are perceived in society over the past 10 years,” says Balazs Szigeti, a researcher at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai who is currently collecting data for a self-blinding study of microdosing. “Animal-model research is helpful in moving it forward, but the major hurdle to conducting a large-scale clinical study on microdosing is the money.”

Still, psychedelics have potential dangers. When Olson’s team first gave rats standard, non-micro doses of psychedelics, one potential benefit they observed was a boost in the growth of dendritic spines—small protrusions that boost the activity of communicatory cells—in the part of the brain that controls personality and social behavior. The team expected to see the same effect from a microdose, but instead found almost the opposite. “In the male rats, we saw no change in neuronal structure; and in the females, we actually saw a decrease in dendritic-spine density,” Olson says. To his team, these results were concerning: In some cases, it looked almost like the DMT was having a cytotoxic effect, proving fatal to brain cells.

Olson hopes that by experimentally adjusting different elements of the study, he can figure out a safe way to determine the boundaries of microdosing’s benefits and harms. One factor he’s especially interested in looking into is age, which he says can greatly limit the degree to which a boost in neural plasticity is helpful. Microdosing “during neurodevelopment could be really, really bad,” Olson explains. “On the other hand, the aging brain is a little more susceptible to issues of cytotoxicity, and so that also could be very, very bad. There could be only a very narrow window of time in which they might work.”

Maybe microdosing is the perfect answer for treatment-resistant depression between the ages of 30 and 40, but harmful at any other age. The idea that a tiny psychedelic dose could damage the same brain structures that a full dose reinforces feels counterintuitive, but might be something committed microdosers should consider. So much of what is understood about how various substances work presumes a sort of graded spectrum of effects. Could microdosing, which we still know so little about, be an exception to the rule?

“There’s that saying,” Olson says, “that the difference between a medicine and a poison is the dose.”

*From the article here: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/...edelic-microdosing-depression-anxiety/584119/

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Could microdosing psychedelics treat mood disorders?

by Kelly Burch | THE FIX | 7 Mar 2019

A new study investigated whether low doses of psychedelic drugs could have an antidepressant effect.

Individuals in and out of the medical community have long been fascinated with psychedelic drugs and their short- and long-term mind-altering effects.

Some people with depression believe the drugs have the ability to treat mental health disorders, and new research indicates they may be right whether low doses of psychedelic drugs could have an antidepressant effect.

A study published in the journal ACS Chemical Neuroscience found that rats who received tiny doses of the psychedelic N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) experienced an antidepressant effect, but no negative effects on their memories.

“Taken together, the data presented here suggest that subhallucinogenic doses of psychedelic compounds might possess value for treating and/or preventing mood and anxiety disorders,” study authors wrote. However, they warned that more research is needed into the safety and effectiveness of microdosing in humans.

“Despite the therapeutic potential of psychedelic microdosing, this practice is not without risks, and future studies need to better define the potential for negative neurobiological or metabolic repercussions,” they wrote.

The data suggests that people who extol the virtues of using psychedelics to treat depression and trauma may be on to something.

“These antidepressant-like and anxiolytic-like effects are consistent with the anecdotal human reports regarding psychedelic microdosing providing strong supporting evidence that psychedelic microdosing might actually have therapeutic potential,” study authors wrote. “Compounds capable of enhancing fear extinction learning in rodents, such as 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) are excellent candidates for treating PTSD symptoms in humans.”

With microdosing, an individual would receive enough of a drug to stimulate brain changes, but not enough to induce hallucinations. Finding the most effective amount may be time consuming, but researchers expressed “cautious optimism” that it could be done effectively.

“The overall psychedelic microdosing load, which includes the amount of drug in each dose, the frequency of administration, and the length of treatment, is likely to be critical for achieving the beneficial effects of psychedelic microdosing without negative repercussions,” they wrote.

Proponents of psychedelics say that the drugs—even taken at high doses—can help alleviate symptoms of depression, addiction and other mental health conditions. In fact, during the 1950s and '60s, psychedelics were a mainstream treatment option in Canada. Today, many people with addiction turn to ibogaine treatment, which is illegal in the United States, to help them heal from addiction and trauma.

Kevin Franciotti wrote for The Fix about his experience using ibogaine to treat his addiction:

“Each month throughout the year following my single dose treatment, an investigator called me to administer an outcomes interview measuring my addiction severity, and mailed me additional scales to fill out myself. At the end of my participation in the trial, ratings for depression, anxiety, and addiction severity had plummeted, reflecting the new lease on life ibogaine had brought me.”

https://www.thefix.com/could-microdosing-psychedelics-treat-mood-disorders
 
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Using psychedelics to increase performance and re-program the mind*

Neurohacker Collective | 16 Aug 2016

Alhough psychedelics are currently schedule-1 drugs in many countries, humans have been using them for thousands of years for healing, self-inquiry and visioning into the nature of reality. In fact, some propose that the evolution of human consciousness itself was catalyzed by the use of mind-expanding substances discovered or concocted by early man. If neurohacking is about upgrading the hardware our consciousness runs on, we would be remiss not to mention these technologies of altered states.

The rose tinted days of “tune in, turn on” are long past. Contemporary Neurohackers are exploring these chemicals for everything from accelerated learning to healing major trauma, reprogramming underlying associations that lead to habitual behavioral or thought patterns, shadow work, paradigm engineering, and, of course, the continued exploration of the nature of reality itself.

Microdosing and performance enhancement

Defined as being both both sub-hallucinogenic and sub-perceptual, microdoses of psychedelics are being used by some neurohackers as part of a weekly routine to access higher levels of creativity, increased focus, and improvements in stamina, response time, and physical acuity.

Silicon Valley entrepreneurs looking for a creative edge, as well as extreme sports enthusiasts wanting to enhance athletic prowess, have reported experiencing these benefits without feeling negatively “altered.” Users have also reported success with microdosing to alleviate depression, cluster headaches, smoking cessation, and ADD/ADHD.

Dr. James Fadiman, Ph.D., is one of the leading researchers in microdosing today. After collecting and reviewing user reports since 2010, he’s found that the overwhelming majority of people have reported overall enhancement of well-being, emotional balance, and spiritual awareness. His research to date has been synthesized in The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide, which provides guidelines for experimenting with microdosing. While further research is sorely needed, the potential is there for microdosing to become an alternative to addictive prescription antidepressants, anti-anxiety medications and mood stabilizers.

Psychedelics and reframing the past

Some of the foundational work done on the psychotherapeutic benefits of psychedelics for trauma healing comes from Stanislov Grof. He pioneered LSD-assisted psychotherapy in the 60s, showing how the appropriate conjunction of therapy with psychedelics could accelerate the rate of healing. He did a lot of early neurohacking experimentation as well, like using strobe light entrainment and psychedelics together to induce mystical experiences.

One version of therapy he developed concerns “reframing work” on past psychological traumas. Neuroscience has shown us that we don’t remember original data or events so much as we remember the way we remember it. And every time we recall something from the past, we actually change the memory. The idea of “reframing” is to take advantage of this fact and to deliberately go in and change the way we remember some event.

Visualize some event from your past, go into the feeling of that moment, and then visualize yourself doing it differently. For example, standing up for yourself when you hadn’t, saying no, etc. The more intensely you can recollect the event and the more real your visualization, the more powerfully you can rewire your brain. Psychedelics can dramatically increase the intensity of your recollection - can bring the event right back into the present and give you authorship over how you want to respond to those events. You can’t change an event from the past - but you can change the meaning of that event for your present.

Empathogens and changing habits

For better and worse, one of the principle tools of the mind is habituation. As we proceed through life, our brain is constantly compressing complex behaviours and relationships into simple habits that require little to no conscious thought. This is true whether those habits and unconscious associations are healthy and desirable or not. If some event in your past connected feelings of embarrassment, shame or disgust to some thing or situation, you will find yourself hard-wired to avoid that thing or situation - even if you consciously want to go there.

Using empathogens, we can deliberately rewire these associations. By taking a chemical that combines neuroplasticity with pleasure and then thinking about or engaging with things you have negative associations with, you can permanently change your associative state.

One of the places this was pioneered was MDMA-assisted shadow work. A person recalls an event in their past that makes them feel some strong negative emotion every time it comes to mind. They take MDMA, an empathogen that decreases aversion/fear responses and increases emotional openness and empathy, and can experience the memory with a different understanding. The next time they remember that event, they find that they simply don’t feel the same way, and that some psychological and emotional damage has been healed. This technique is so powerful that MAPS has demonstrated that MDMA-assisted psychotherapy is perhaps the best current treatment for the deep trauma of PTSD.

But this kind of hack isn’t just for deep trauma. Thoughtful Neurohackers have used it to edit habits as prosaic as procrastination and fear of public speaking. Always procrastinate around cleaning your house? Terrified of public speaking? It is currently possible (and someday it might be legal) to choose to take an empathogen, associate the resulting highly positive state with cleaning or speaking, and permanently reduce or eliminate the anxiety you used to associate with that activity.

*From the article here :
https://neurohacker.com/microdosing-psychedelics/
 
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People who microdose for a month say it increases positive emotions and productivity

by Eric Dolan | PsyPost | 3 Apr 2019

Preliminary research published in the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs sheds light on the growing popularity of microdosing — or taking small doses of psychedelic drugs to improve mood and attention.

“About 9 years ago, I heard about microdosing, and followed up since the information I was told was so different from higher dose reports. I have been involved in psychedelic research on and off for 50 years,” said study author James Fadiman of Sofia University.

The researchers recruited more than a thousand volunteers from 59 countries via their website, microdosingpsychedelics.com. The volunteers agreed to microdose once every three days for a month. They also completed daily evaluations of their emotional states and submitted journals of their experiences.

The volunteers commonly reported an increase in positive emotions, finding social interactions easier, and having fewer headaches. Many also said that microdosing improved their productivity and helped them focus. As one participant wrote: “Feeling productive, able to focus on what I choose, enjoying relationships, good energy, and not recalling that I took anything.”

The findings indicate that “microdosing has none of the classic exciting effects of psychedelics, is safer, and many people all over the world report taking these low doses to be beneficial,” Fadiman said.

The results are similar to another study that measured the psychological changes produced by microdosing. That study found that microdosing was associated with heightened levels of connectedness, contemplation, creativity, focus, happiness, productiveness, and wellbeing. However, it was also associated with an increase in neuroticism.

Other research has found that microdosing can improve creative thinking.

But research on microdosing is still in its infancy. Long-term, placebo-controlled studies are needed to validate the negative and positive effects.

“People whose major symptom is anxiety should not microdose. Although there are thousands of years of recorded use, there are no contemporary double-blind studies. Inform yourself,” Fadiman told PsyPost.

The research is ongoing and still accepting new volunteers — and the researchers plan to conduct several follow-up studies.

“Because several hundred thousand people have or are already microdosing, a number of university-based studies are underway. The science is starting to catch up with the users," Fadiman said.

 
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It makes me enjoy playing with the kids': Is microdosing mushrooms going mainstream?

by Hattie Garlick | The Guardian | 3 May 2019

Before the school run, or commuting to work, increasing numbers are taking tiny doses of psychedelic drugs in the UK. Why?

Rosie has just returned from the school run. She drops a bag of groceries on to her kitchen table, and reaches for a clear plastic cup, covered by a white hanky and sealed with a hairband. Inside is a grey powder; her finely ground homegrown magic mushrooms.

“I’ll take a very small dose, every three or four days,” she says, weighing out a thumbnail of powder on digital jewellery scales, purchased for their precision. “People take well over a gram recreationally. I weigh out about 0.12g and then just swallow it, like any food. It gives me an alertness, an assurance. I move from a place of anxiety to a normal state of confidence, not overconfidence.”

Over the last 12 months, I have been hearing the same story from a small but increasing number of women. At parties and even at the school gates, they have told me about a new secret weapon that is boosting their productivity at work, improving their parenting and enhancing their relationships. Not clean-eating or mindfulness but microdosing – taking doses of psychedelic drugs so tiny they are considered to be “sub-perceptual.” In other words, says Rosie: “You don’t feel high, just… better.”

It’s a trend that first emerged in San Francisco less than a decade ago. Unlike the hippies who flocked to the city in the 60s, these new evangelists of psychedelic drugs were not seeking oblivion. Quite the opposite. While a “full” tripping dose of LSD is about 100 micrograms, online forums began to buzz with ambitious tech workers from Silicon Valley eulogising the effect of taking 10 to 20 micrograms every few days. Others used magic mushrooms. While both drugs are illegal in the US and the UK, increasing numbers claimed that tiny amounts were making them more focused, creative and productive.

Yet the scientific evidence remains shaky. The latest study, published in February in the open- access journal Plos One and led by cognitive scientist Vince Polito, tracked the experience of 98 microdosers who were already using psychedelics – a class of drugs including LSD and psilocybin.

There is, the study noted, “a perception of microdosing as a general panacea that is able to improve virtually all aspects of an individual’s life”. All 98 participants expected its benefits to be “large and wide-ranging”. Yet while some clear changes were noted – decreased mind-wandering, for example – the study found no evidence of increased creativity or life satisfaction. In fact, after six weeks of microdosing, a small increase in neuroticism was noted.

The study’s participants did, however, report lower levels of stress and depression. It was this that drew Rosie to try it. “I’ve done the traditional treatments,” she tells me. “Therapy helped hugely – it got me out of a seriously bad place and to a functioning one. And for many years, I was functioning very well, outwardly. No one would have known. But inside, I was a mess.”

Antidepressants failed to work, so she stopped taking them after the birth of her second child, comforting herself with alcohol instead. “I wasn’t getting blind drunk and peeling myself off pavements,” she says. “But if I felt bad, my mind would immediately travel to the next drink I could have. It was the only thing that helped block out the sadness.”

That changed about a year ago, when friends began talking about microdosing. Rosie wondered whether it might have a positive effect on her mental health. She gave up booze, went online and found a company in Holland selling kits for growing your own magic mushrooms.

In the very early days, she got the dosage slightly wrong and found herself, “not tripping at all, but staring at a tree for slightly longer than passersby would find normal”. Otherwise, she says, the only down side is, “I can’t take it after 5pm or I can’t sleep.”

She is scrupulously careful to keep her mushrooms far out of the reach of her pre-teen children. “But it definitely doesn’t impair my ability to parent,” she says. “If anything, my awareness is sharpened.”

There is, however, one major danger in Rosie’s mind – its illegality. She has agreed to meet me on the proviso that I keep her identity a secret. “I have two kids. I’ve got responsibilities. And although I believe completely in what I’m doing, these are still class A drugs.” Growing kits are illegal to possess in the UK and she says: “The thought that the company now has my name and address in their records makes me nervous, as did the fact that they mailed the kit to me through the post.”

Once her kit arrived, there were more concerns. It came with strict instructions to wash her hands up to her elbows and keep her mushrooms as sterile as possible, to prevent bacteria growing. “Blue streaks appeared on their stems,” she says. “As a novice, that was really scary. I didn’t want to kill myself with contaminated mushrooms. I went on lots of forums to check, and it turned out it’s just a normal, safe form of bruising."

“It would be much safer if it was legal, so you could openly seek expert advice,”
she concedes, but adds, “I’ve taken antidepressants with lists of side-effects as long as my arm. Now I’m taking something with no known side-effects and it’s working. In life, you make risk calculations every day. Is it safe to cross the road? Should I have one more glass of wine? This is just another of those. And I’m significantly happier as a consequence.”

***

Just how much of a risk is microdosing? Research in this area has a long and trippy history. Used to treat mood disorders, from anxiety to alcoholism in the 1950s and 60s, psychedelics including LSD and psilocybin became classified as illegal, class A drugs in Britain in 1971. Since the US had also criminalised them the year before, research into their clinical use ground to a halt, while horror stories about recreational overdoses and bad trips abounded.

Then, in 2011, came The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide. Written by American psychologist and researcher James Fadiman, it introduced the term microdosing into popular culture, setting out appropriate doses (10 micrograms of LSD every three days) and including glowing first-hand reports of improved productivity. He attracted evangelical followers in the US, and then across the world. Scientific research into the practice began, too.

“There’s only one genuine concern about microdosing,” says David Nutt, former chief drugs adviser to the government and author of Drugs: Without The Hot Air. “There’s a theoretical possibility that a relatively low dose of LSD, taken every day, could narrow the heart valves. Beyond that," he says, "there is no evidence that even “full” doses of LSD are dangerous to health (though clearly, the ill-advised actions of those under its effects can be). But users should not underestimate its illegality: Possession carries a maximum penalty of seven years in prison,” he says.

Barbara J Sahakian, professor of clinical neuropsychology at the University of Cambridge’s Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute, is more cautious. She says that the “increasing lifestyle use of ‘smart drugs’ by healthy people” is not the best route to improved brain health. “Some people would prefer to take a drug, as it is rapid acting, rather than consider other means of enhancing cognition, like exercise or cognitive training, which take time and require effort,” she says. “Rather than taking short-term, inadequate solutions, such as microdosing, to long-term problems, it is time for people to consider how they can best improve their health and wellbeing.”

Yet some proponents of microdosing claim that it has enabled them to improve just that. Lindsay Jordan, 40, has just returned from a daybreak yoga class. She’s a senior university lecturer, and will soon begin planning her next lessons. But first, she takes out a small dropper bottle. She squeezes two drops of liquid on to her tongue from the pipette. It looks like Rescue Remedy. In fact, it’s 1-propionyl-lysergic acid diethylamide, or 1P-LSD, a psychedelic drug with effects almost indistinguishable from LSD. In 2016, the Psychoactive Substances Act made 1P-LSD illegal to sell or import, but not to possess. Jordan’s supply comes through a friend who bought it before the act came into effect.

She first tried LSD recreationally while in the early stages of a doctorate in education, two and a half years ago. “I came to it rather late in life,” she says. “It was as if a whole new world opened up for me. Psychedelics, combined with my doctoral study, really broadened my mind.”

She came across the work of Fadiman, and decided to experiment by taking a tenth of a full 1P-LSD dose every third day for a month. “I felt unusually alive,” she says. “Lights looked sparkly. I felt delighted. After the first month, I tweaked it so that dose days coincided with, say, visiting family. I enjoyed playing with the kids more when I was microdosing. Likewise going to weddings – I found it easier to be interested in people.”

The effects may not have been dramatic, but they were wide-reaching. Jordan says that microdosing has made her significantly better at her job. “A colleague told me I’d become a lot more open, a lot warmer,” Jordan says. “My job used to be a struggle. I used to not enjoy teaching, and my students did not enjoy learning. Now I can teach in a hot stuffy room for hours and look out across a sea of smiling faces.”

Its impact was not limited to her professional life. “Microdosing contributed to the end of my marriage,” says Jordan, “because it led to me seeing what I should be doing with my life. I want to devote my energies to serving my students and my lovely friends. We both feel much freer now.”

***

The true impact of microdosing is currently being explored at Imperial College London, in the world’s first placebo-controlled study of the practice. People who have already decided to microdose are volunteering to take capsules, some of which contain their usual dose of their own drugs, others a placebo. Thus blinded, they answer questionnaires and solve online tasks designed to measure their cognitive abilities and wellbeing.

“If we do brain imaging when a full dose of psychedelics is in the brain, a lot of the functional networks that we can measure start to fuse into each other,” says Dr David Erritzoe, the study’s lead. “There’s broader communication between the networks. That could be the biology behind this ‘more-free’ state of mind or perception that people typically report.”

It could be that the same is also happening, to a lesser extent, when a microdose is taken, he explains. “Collaborators of ours in Copenhagen have recently done some interesting research, conducting brain imaging with different doses of psilocybin. It looks like the amount that the psychedelic community call a microdose actually hits quite a lot of receptors. Enough, in fact, that it could be having a valid effect.”

On the other hand: “We’re looking to see if the mean effect [of microdosing] exceeds that of the placebo effect,” says Balázs Szigeti, Erritzoe’s partner in the study. “It’s a big if. If I had to guess, I’d be torn. I’m not questioning the fact that microdosers experience a positive effect,” clarifies Szigeti. “I’m questioning whether that’s down to psychological reasons or a pharmacological effect.”

***

Chloe is 40, lives in Yorkshire and runs a business in the hospitality sector. Like Rosie, she began microdosing as a means of addressing mental health problems, after suffering “quite a serious breakdown.” Unlike her, however, she uses LSD, cutting a tab into 16 tiny triangles – a process she acknowledges is “inexact” – and taking one of these on each microdosing day.

“You can get acid delivered from the dark web, if you have a techy friend,” she says. “Otherwise you have to get it through dealers, unfortunately.” A 200mcg tab, costs her about £5, making each microdose come in at 30p. Given the irregularity with which she microdoses, she estimates that she is spending about £2 a month.

“If the impact on my life is finally finding a way out of depression, then I’m comfortable making that choice,” she says. “The first day I microdosed was the best day I’d had in five years. For so long, I’d felt like I’d been sedated. It’s so miserable when you know you used to be excitable and enthusiastic. But that day, it felt like a lightbulb had been turned on in my mind. I felt giddy, just really glad to be alive. I’d not had those feelings for so, so long.”

It hasn’t been totally straightforward; the first time her partner tried microdosing, “he had a massive panic attack. It really amplified his anxiety,” she says. “He’s done it loads since, mainly because he saw what a difference it had made to my mental health, and he has had some amazing days. But it’s not to be taken lightly, especially if you have a mental health condition. He still finds that if he’s feeling really anxious, it’s best to stay away.”

Nor does she feel microdosing helps with every task. “I’ll take some this Wednesday, because my business is expanding and I’m designing that day. Microdosing will help with the creative side. I’ll take some on Thursday, because I’m trying to upskill one of my managers and it helps with my human interaction and empathy.

“But if I knew I was going to be sitting at home doing the bookkeeping and looking at spreadsheets for hours, I wouldn’t microdose – I’d get distracted.” All the women I speak to stress that they use microdosing in conjunction with other strategies such as psychotherapy, regular exercise and a better diet.

Back in her flat, her microdose taking effect, Jordan says that the drugs shouldn’t be mistaken for a magic cure. “It’s not a linear path – it’s not as simple as, ‘Do this one thing, and everything will be fixed.’ But I’m ridiculously happy.” After I leave, she’s planning to write a seminar and catch up with some admin. “Microdosing changed my life. For me, it was a catalyst for profound and wide-reaching changes.” So much so, that she rarely feels the need to do it now. “I think that’s a good sign – it means you’re integrating what you’ve learned into your everyday life. These days, it’s a treat.”

 
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Psychedelic microdosing's antidepressant benefits

by Haley Weiss | The Atlantic | Mar 5, 2019

The purported benefits of microdosing psychedelics are as numerous as the research is sparse. The technique, which involves ingesting small amounts of LSD, mushrooms, or other hallucinogenic drugs every three or four days, has made headlines for its popularity as a “productivity hack” among the Silicon Valley elite. But anecdotal endorsements of microdosing claim that the routine can lead to a whole variety of benefits, including heightened emotional sensitivity, athletic performance, and creativity; and relief from symptoms of anxiety, depression, OCD, PTSD, and chronic pain—all without resulting in any sort of trip.

In a lab setting, meanwhile, these effects have hardly been studied. Microdosing straddles a line between homeopathic remedy and experimental biohacking as a promising tool that hasn’t yet made its way through the clinical system’s rigorous checks and balances. Now a new study published Monday in the journal ACS Chemical Neuroscience provides the first biological evidence that psychedelic microdosing could have unique therapeutic effects that differ from the effects of a full dose.

For David Olson, a professor in the chemistry and neuroscience departments at the University of California at Davis and one of the paper’s authors, it started with ketamine. Over the past few years, Olson watched as the formerly notorious anesthetic cum party drug was rebranded as an experimental miracle for treatment-resistant depression. Ketamine has the ability to rebuild fraying connections between brain cells integral to networks that regulate emotions and mood, thanks to an effect known as neural plasticity. Olson suspected that the process by which ketamine promotes this type of plasticity could be activated by other substances as well, and in June his team published a paper showing that in rats, psychedelics such as LSD, ecstasy, and dimethyltryptamin, or DMT, mirror ketamine’s effects.

When the study ended, Olson began to wonder if the therapeutic benefits could also be achieved through microdosing. Along with the hallucinogenic effects of the drugs, he’d found that standard doses gave his rats fierce anxiety, which seemed like a high price to pay for an effective antidepressant. “I really wanted to answer the question as to whether or not the hallucinogenic effects of these compounds were necessary for the therapeutic effects,” Olson says.

At that point, there had only been four published studies on microdosing: three based on interviews with anonymous users who reported the effects, and one write-up of a conference where attendees ingested psychedelic truffles. (A fifth microdosing study, also interview-based but the first with an empirical setup, was published last month in the journal PLOS One.) For the new study, Olson’s team calculated a dosage of DMT—which is chemically like a stripped-down version of LSD or psilocybin “magic” mushrooms—that was too small to produce any psychedelic effects. They gave it to the rats every three days. On off days, the animals completed tests, including two experimental proxies for human anxiety and depression, respectively: a repetitive fear exercise, and a forced-swim test that looks at whether the animal will simply give up when in danger.

Seven weeks later, the researchers found that even though the rats weren’t given enough DMT to hallucinate, their depression and anxiety scores still improved significantly. The uptick in anxiety associated with the higher dose of DMT was nowhere to be found in the rats that had taken intermittent microdoses. Olson says the study demonstrates that the therapeutic effects of psychedelics—in rats, at least—can indeed be harnessed independently of the psychedelic effects. It appears that each of DMT’s distinct effects can be activated only if the amount of the drug present crosses a certain threshold. For the benefits of neural plasticity, that threshold seems to be lower.

For most substances, a study like this could quickly prompt more research that would eventually open the door to clinical trials. But for psychedelics, which are highly illegal substances in the United States that fall among the most strictly regulated both in and out of labs, the progression of research can be slower. “There has been a very big transformation of how psychedelics are perceived in society over the past 10 years,” says Balazs Szigeti, a researcher at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai who is currently collecting data for a self-blinding study of microdosing. “Animal-model research is helpful in moving it forward, but the major hurdle to conducting a large-scale clinical study on microdosing is the money.”

In the 1950s and ’60s, tons of research funding in the United States and abroad was dedicated to studying the effects that psychedelics have on consciousness, creativity, and spirituality. But psychedelics were outlawed under President Richard Nixon’s Controlled Substances Act. Grant money for psychedelics research quickly dried up, and by the time researchers decades later became curious about the esoteric substances, most prior research had been rendered effectively useless by modern scientific standards. Grant money can still be hard to come by.

Noah Sweat, a program coordinator at the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s School of Public Health, claims that the specter of this politicization continues to influence psychedelics research. “People now that are in positions of authority, either over departments that would be researching [psychedelics] or over the grant-awarding processes, might not have any sort of political objection to the research, but just have kind of absorbed the ambient cultural attitude toward them,” he says.

Still, psychedelics have potential dangers. When Olson’s team first gave rats standard, non-micro doses of psychedelics, one potential benefit they observed was a boost in the growth of dendritic spines—small protrusions that boost the activity of communicatory cells—in the part of the brain that controls personality and social behavior. The team expected to see the same effect from a microdose, but instead found almost the opposite. “In the male rats, we saw no change in neuronal structure; and in the females, we actually saw a decrease in dendritic-spine density,” Olson says. To his team, these results were concerning: In some cases, it looked almost like the DMT was having a cytotoxic effect, proving fatal to brain cells.

Olson hopes that by experimentally adjusting different elements of the study, he can figure out a safe way to determine the boundaries of microdosing’s benefits and harms. One factor he’s especially interested in looking into is age, which he says can greatly limit the degree to which a boost in neural plasticity is helpful. "Microdosing during neurodevelopment could be really, really bad,” Olson explains. “On the other hand, the aging brain is a little more susceptible to issues of cytotoxicity, and so that also could be very, very bad. There could be only a very narrow window of time in which they might work.”

Maybe microdosing is the perfect answer for treatment-resistant depression between the ages of 30 and 40, but harmful at any other age. The idea that a tiny psychedelic dose could damage the same brain structures that a full dose reinforces feels counterintuitive, but might be something committed microdosers should consider. So much of what is understood about how various substances work presumes a sort of graded spectrum of effects. Could microdosing, which we still know so little about, be an exception to the rule?

“There’s that saying,” Olson says, “that the difference between a medicine and a poison is the dose.”

 
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LSD microdosing makes people feel sharper, and scientists want to know how

by Stephie Grob Plante

May didn't notice much with the first dose of LSD. She felt good, she got a lot accomplished, and that was all.

It was the day after that things really clicked. She felt even better, and she got a lot more accomplished. She repeated this for a month: one 10-microgram dose of LSD every fourth day, as per the regimen recommended by psychologist and microdosing research pioneer James Fadiman's protocol, made mainstream-famous by Ayelet Waldman's month-long LSD self-study chronicled in last years A Really Good Day.

It's certainly not euphoric or like a high of any sort at all.

"I did a little experiment," says May, a 64-year-old psychotherapist in Marin County requesting anonymity. "It was this game on my iPad that I was kind of stuck on, and I noticed whenever I was on day two of the microdosing regimen, my performance was significantly better."

This wasn't May's first time doing acid. Shed taken LSD sporadically over the past 40 years. This was, however, her first foray into microdosing. She'd heard promises that microdosing LSD would yield heightened productivity and dissipate mental clutter.

Microdosing provided that sharpness for May, as advertised. "For me, its just clarity. It's like how you would feel if you had a really good, deep rest, and then woke up and were able to focus very clearly."

So what's happening physiologically to someone on a low dose of LSD? In the absence of hard science, reports from volunteers like May make up the only existing literature. "And if the dose is in fact very, very micro, not much happens at all," says May, "I did not have any sensory stuff tied to it." On occasions she'd taken higher doses of LSD in the past, she'd experienced some hallmarks of an altered state, but not with microdosing. "That's not what I was going for," she said.

All reporting on microdosing's purported benefits has been anecdotal, speculative. The machinery of science moves much more slowly than hype. But the science is starting to catch up. The first glimpses of data on microdosing were presented on April 21, at Psychedelic Science 2017, a six-day summit in Oakland of more than 100 clinical researchers and physicians and 2,500 psychedelic enthusiasts. Fadiman shared results from his ongoing study's first 418 volunteers.

LSD isn't the only microdosed substance included in the protocol; psilocybin and iboga are part of it as well, and other psychedelics as long as they're dosed somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of the normal recreational dose. For LSD, Fadiman accepts self-reports from individuals ingesting between 8 and 15 micrograms, though he recommends starting with 10. A daily check-in instrument asks contributors to rate their mood, productivity, and energy on a scale.

"And then we ask people to write us a report," says Fadiman in a recent interview. "Which is where, from my point of view, things get really interesting."

Fadiman and co-investigator Sophia Korb's site went up in February; over 1,000 people have filed self-reports to date. On one (really good) day, participants submitting write-ups hailed from nine different countries. He briefly shares a few stories from the project with me: A man suffering depression credits microdosing with giving him the confidence to bid for a whole project on behalf of his company, rather than for a small piece. An engineer who says he gains the ability to see all the moving parts of the machine he's working on in synchronicity, rather than fixating on one aspect. Another individual who, Fadiman reports, said it very nicely: "I'm a much better version of myself." There are two big takeaways from Fadiman's results so far: microdosing can be an aid for productivity, and it can provide relief for treatment-resistant depression.

LSD's widespread use became one of the impetuses for 1970s Controlled Substances Act. But there are no known overdose deaths attributed to LSD. Psychedelic resource Erowid does report a low number of deaths associated with LSD, and advises caution.In some cases, though, deaths linked to LSD were either not LSD at all (other drugs come on blotters, too), or the result of accidents or suicide on especially high doses.

The tiny dose is also the selling point.

Says Erowid, "Put simply, LSD does not cause death at recreational or therapeutic doses (less than 500 micrograms). Microdosing is one-fiftieth of that amount."

"LSD is a totally amazing substance,"
says Ralph Metzner, a psychopharmacologist considered a forefather of LSD research. "Because it is so potent, and such tiny amounts and tiny differences in tiny amounts make such a huge difference, it's sensitivity is off the charts. There's no other drug that comes close to that kind of sensitivity."

Microdosing's tiny dose is it's key selling point. "The benefit of it being micro is you go about your normal daily activities," says Rick Doblin, executive director of psychedelic research nonprofit MAPS. "Your cognitive processing is slightly enhanced in certain ways, more creative, more focused, little bit of a mood elevation, but you're not in any way tripping. And you can drive. You can do all sorts of things that you wouldn't do if the dose were higher."

Microdosing is quiet, reflective.

Lex Pelger, a 34-year-old biochemist and writer in Brooklyn, agrees that the effects are so mild theyre almost imperceptible. Pelger hosts Psymposia, an events group centered on psychedelic science, and says he microdoses every couple days, finding it helpful for interviewing, lecturing, and writing. "You just don't need as much coffee that day," he says.

Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist, once told Metzner that he self-experimented with low doses of LSD in his later years, circa the 1990s. "Just to think," Metzner says. "Microdosing is quiet, reflective." Metzner likens it to taking a vitamin. And though modern clinical investigations of psychedelics regulate dosage, mindset, and the environment around test subjects to ensure streamlined data, they can't account for two factors that Metzner says determine the quality and intensity of a psychedelic experience: individual variability and learned sensitivity. "Every individual will react to a psychedelic, particularly LSD, in a unique way. That microdosing is micro, renders it a teaching tool."

"It's like learning to use a microscope,"
says Metzner. "How to adjust the lens, and of course you have to know what it is that you're looking at."

While we wait for the definitive science on what microdosing does in the body, its possible to review what we know about larger doses of LSD. A new report will soon be out from the Center for Brain and Cognition at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona that does just that. The scientists collected data from the rainbow-hued neuroimages of twelve brains on LSD, taken in fMRI sessions by a team at Imperial College London last year.

"The goal was to try a new analysis that might lead to more information on how the drug works," says neuroscientist Selen Atasoy. "We wanted to look at the dynamics, rather than static images to analyze how brain activity changes over time. Its really like jazz improvisation, what LSD does to your brain."

Atasoy and her team translated Imperial's data into what they call harmonic brain states. Basically, the fMRI measures blood flow to brain structures; each unique pattern of brain activation gets a frequency, which Atasoy likens to a musical note. "The notes can then be strung together. By doing this, the researchers can see how many brain states the volunteers went through, or the complexity of the music," as Atasoy puts it "and compare that to a placebo."

"It's really like jazz improvisation, what LSD does to your brain,"
says Atasoy. "Your brain seems to use many more of these brain states, similar to how in improvisation, people use many more musical notes. And as with jazz improvisation, the notes are not random," Atasoy says. The idea of harmonic brain states is relatively new; the first publication was from Atasoy last year. "I would say in general the concept of harmonic brain states does not enjoy a huge following," says Robert Bilder, a neuropsychologist at UCLA.

Neuroimaging studies for low-dose LSD are on the way.

Imperial College London's neuroimaging study used 75 micrograms of LSD, a dose 7-1/2 times larger than a true microdose. Still, the results on higher doses can provide insight on what happens to people like May on low doses. "I expect that the microdose would enable some flexibility while you can still remain focused, while you can still maintain that structure," says Atasoy. Any theories on microdosing are still speculation for now.

But neuroimaging studies for low-dose LSD are on the way. Amanda Feilding, director of the UK-based Beckley Foundation, announced at Psychedelic Science that a microdosing LSD study will take place at Imperial later this year. The plan is to recruit 20 participants to test a variety of LSD doses. Then they'll play the strategy game Go inside an fMRI machine while researchers monitor their brain's blood flow.

"I rather love brain imaging in the sense that it gives you a pictorial explanation," Feilding tells The Verge, pulling out a sample of the neuroimages from Beckley and Imperial's moderate dose LSD study last year. Feilding designed the microdosing protocol to learn more about how a low dose of LSD affects the brain. "I just want to go in more deeply, to track down the physiological basis of the reported feelings of increased well being, or overcoming depression or improving cognitive functioning," she says. The study isn't funded yet.

"It's amazing what a craze microdosing has become," says Viceland's Hamilton Morris in a recent live podcast recording of The Duncan Trussell Family Hour. "I would've never expected that the way to get everybody interested in psychedelics again was to make them not psychedelic."

The secret weapon of microdosing is that it is a deceptively ho-hum experience.

Microdosing LSD sounds like a trip, but its secret weapon is that it is, all said, a ho-hum experience. Many of the studies in the current wave of clinical psychedelic research add to this perceived tameness; after all, the aim appears to be making LSD legal for prescription or therapeutic use. To do that, the Orange Sunshine of the 60s must be deemed respectable, which in the United States means pharmaceutical. "There's a future where LSD is not simply decriminalized but also legally accessible," says Ethan Nadelmann, founder and outgoing executive director of Drug Policy Alliance.

"The information that's increasingly coming out about microdosing makes it more likely that it will happen sooner than later," says Nadelmann. "It's presenting a growing segment of the public with a new perspective on LSD, and it's something that really shatters the images of LSD that people may have in their minds."

LSD is synthetic, which makes it easier to accurately measure dosage compared to plant-based psychedelics or cannabis. That means the effects of prescription LSD would be much easier to replicate. (The same holds true for synthetic psilocybin.) "More studies will be needed to establish that microdosing works and is safe for that to happen," says Nadelmann.

In fact, findings from the first known scientific study investigating safety and tolerability of low-dose LSD were slated to go public at Psychedelic Science 2017. But three weeks before the scheduled presentation, lead investigator Neiloufar Family and Eleusis Benefit Corporation, a pharmaceutical company, withdrew their study from the conference lineup, leaving the timing for LSD's prescription drug future uncertain.

"Certainly, nobody else is working with LSD in a drug development context," says Doblin. "So if their study isn't the first step, there is no first step."

Family said that she and her team are hoping to have everything completed this summer. When reached for clarification via email, Eleusiss founder Shlomi Raz wrote that though the clinical trial is complete, its analysis continues, alongside other studies in process. "We hope to be able to release these aggregated findings at the same time so as to provide the scientific, medical, and broader public with a more comprehensive perspective on the research and its implications," Raz wrote in the email.

Raz declined to comment on whether Eleusis plans to patent and sell low-dose LSD for prescription use. "They're pretty secretive," says Doblin, "so I'm not exactly sure what's going on."

That leaves Fadiman with the only game in town: an ongoing self-report study. It may serve as a road map for the next round of needed clinical LSD research. "Microdosing is a case study in citizen science," he says of his 1,000-participant-and-growing study. "There's no way that conventional science could really replicate what we're doing."

Approved double-blind studies at research hospitals like Johns Hopkins, New York University, and Harbor-UCLA are the gold standard for research in the field. But these studies are very small, sometimes with 20 participants or fewer. Fadiman's admittedly messier work does serve its own purpose, then, by gathering experiences from larger groups of people. That may guide future controlled trials by suggesting new questions about these psychedelic drugs.

 
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