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002 - Microdosing

Mar 27, 2017, 46 min read

Program Notes

Guest speaker: Ayelet Waldman

http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0451494091Today brings us the first of the Salon2 podcasts, and it is hosted by Lex Pelger, who I have asked to tell you a little about what his psychedelic clan is up to. After Lex’s introduction of the Psymposia Team, he will be interviewing Ayelet Waldman about her new book titled “A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life”.

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Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:19 ►

This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon 20, just as I am in the still-running Psychedelic Salon 1.0, from which I’ll be podcasting another Terrence McKenna talk tomorrow.

00:00:33 ►

But today is a day that I’ve been looking forward to for a long time.

00:00:37 ►

It is the day when the salon begins to expand beyond what I and the other co-hosts that we’ve had here have been doing

00:00:46 ►

for the past 12 years. Today brings us the first of the Salon 2 podcasts, and it’s hosted by Lex

00:00:52 ►

Pelger, who I’ve asked to tell you a little bit about what his psychedelic clan is up to.

00:00:58 ►

And after Lex’s introduction of the Symposia team, he will be interviewing Islet Waldman about her new book that is titled

00:01:05 ►

A Really Good Day, How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life.

00:01:13 ►

Great title. And since I’ve been a proponent of microdosing myself, after first experimenting

00:01:20 ►

with it for several months many years ago, I’m anxious to hear this interview

00:01:25 ►

myself, which I’ll be doing for the first time after downloading it, just as you have.

00:01:31 ►

So this is going to be my first time to listen to a podcast from the Psychedelic Salon in the

00:01:36 ►

same way that you do, and I’m looking forward to this as an ongoing experience. Now let’s begin the first Salon 2 program from Lex Pelger and the Symposia team.

00:01:49 ►

And she said, oh my god mom, what is wrong with you? Are you like on acid or something?

00:01:55 ►

And I was like, I couldn’t believe it. But no, I was not in fact going to tell her at that moment

00:02:02 ►

that I was on acid. But yes, I was in fact on acid.

00:02:22 ►

Hello, I’m Lex Pelger, host of Symposia, and this is our first contribution to the Psychedelic Salon 2.0. I want to begin by thanking Lorenzo for inviting us to contribute

00:02:25 ►

and for all his hard work making this podcast such a cornerstone of the community. Today,

00:02:30 ►

our first interview is with the writer Ayelet Waldman about her new microdosing memoir,

00:02:36 ►

A Very Good Day. It’s about her month-long experiment taking tiny amounts of LSD

00:02:40 ►

every few days, and we’re glad to have her on the podcast. Before we roll the tapes here in the

00:02:45 ►

No Nonsense studio, I want to tell you a little bit more about our work here at Symposia. We

00:02:51 ►

organize talks and conferences and storytelling events about drugs. We focus on the issues around

00:02:56 ►

psychedelics and harm reduction and drug education and policy reform to end the war on drugs.

00:03:02 ►

In Symposia Magazine and at our live live events we strive to bring the science and the stories

00:03:06 ►

together.

00:03:09 ►

Here’s the news on our end and how you might get involved.

00:03:12 ►

For starters, we hope to see you at the Psychedelic Science Conference this April in Oakland.

00:03:17 ►

Even if you can’t swing a ticket to the conference, you should come to the free marketplace.

00:03:21 ►

It’s open to the public and it’s a great spot to bring people along who might be curious

00:03:25 ►

about this world.

00:03:26 ►

They’ll have the MAPS bookstore

00:03:27 ►

and the art gallery

00:03:29 ►

and the tea house to chill in

00:03:30 ►

and lots of vendors

00:03:31 ►

with pretty things for sale.

00:03:33 ►

And then there’s also

00:03:35 ►

the symposia stage.

00:03:36 ►

That’s where we’ll be running

00:03:37 ►

a nonstop reel of talks,

00:03:39 ►

conversations, storytelling,

00:03:40 ►

interviews, and live podcasts.

00:03:42 ►

If you can’t make it out to Oakland,

00:03:44 ►

you can watch a live stream on our Facebook page,

00:03:46 ►

April 21st to the 23rd.

00:03:55 ►

Because of the opportunity of that stage,

00:03:57 ►

that led to Symposia’s biggest news,

00:03:59 ►

our idea to launch a storytelling tour across the continent

00:04:02 ►

we’re now calling the Blue Dot Tour.

00:04:05 ►

We chose the name because we want to be hitting those blue cities and red states

00:04:08 ►

that serve as such pressure cookers of activism, education, and art,

00:04:12 ►

like Asheville or Roquois or Missoula, Montana.

00:04:15 ►

But we won’t stop there.

00:04:18 ►

We also want to go to those red cities and blue states

00:04:20 ►

and those purple cities and green states

00:04:22 ►

and those orange cities and black states

00:04:24 ►

and anywhere else we can find a host from Mexico to Canada.

00:04:28 ►

I love the open mic storytelling events because people share their own experiences with drugs,

00:04:33 ►

good, bad, or strange. And we believe that in learning about drugs in other intense states,

00:04:38 ►

we can learn a lot from listening to each other.

00:04:41 ►

To help change the world, we want to foster a place where the activists and the scientists and the explorers and the harm reductionists and the academics and the doctors

00:04:48 ►

and the heads can all gather together and start building a new model. So I will have my Pabst

00:04:55 ►

truck, a table of literature from our favorite drug organizations, and a pickup bed filled with

00:04:59 ►

books. See the blue dot tour on symposia.com for more.

00:05:06 ►

Now on with the show.

00:05:17 ►

I yell at Waldman’s brave to come out of the closet about her intentional medical use of LSD.

00:05:20 ►

But she is already no stranger to controversy.

00:05:25 ►

She even made it all the way up to an appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show after she wrote a New Yorker piece where she declared that she loved her husband even more

00:05:29 ►

than she loved her children. However, since she’s married to the novelist Michael Chabon,

00:05:35 ►

I will take her word for it because anyone who wrote The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier

00:05:39 ►

and Clay must be a hell of a guy. And so with even more bravery, I think, she came out a decade ago

00:05:47 ►

on her blog about being a parent with bipolar disorder. And if you want to see those writings,

00:05:52 ►

you can see it on her bad mother blog, which she stopped writing long ago because she said

00:05:57 ►

blogging was bad for her mental health. Luckily, she did continue writing. And in her new book,

00:06:03 ►

she goes further than just covering microdosing.

00:06:06 ►

With her background as a federal public defender in California and a consultant to the Drug Policy Alliance,

00:06:11 ►

she covers the gross atrocities and the wrongheadedness of the war on drugs.

00:06:18 ►

I would recommend this book as a gift to anyone you know who might be considering very low doses of psychedelics.

00:06:23 ►

to anyone you know who might be considering very low doses of psychedelics.

00:06:28 ►

And as Hamilton Morris recently said on the Duncan Trussell podcast that they broadcast from the Bell House here in Brooklyn,

00:06:30 ►

I would have never expected that the way to get everybody interested in psychedelics

00:06:34 ►

was to make them not psychedelic.

00:06:40 ►

And so for those who want to dig deeper on microdosing,

00:06:43 ►

look to Jim Fadiman.

00:06:44 ►

He’s been a leader in the field, always gracious with advice, and indeed assisted Ayelet on her book.

00:06:51 ►

Now on with the show, here is Ayelet Waldman.

00:06:56 ►

When did you realize that this was going to turn into a book that you’d be spreading around?

00:07:01 ►

Well, I think probably about eight days in,

00:07:06 ►

somewhere between the eighth and tenth day,

00:07:09 ►

I realized that it was a 30-day experiment,

00:07:13 ►

and I had decided not to work on the novel that I was working on at the time, but rather to just let myself write, but write whatever I wanted.

00:07:17 ►

And about eight to ten days in,

00:07:19 ►

I realized that what I was writing was a book about not just the experience,

00:07:23 ►

but kind of a larger discussion about the history and neurochemistry of psychedelic drugs, the history of the war on drugs.

00:07:31 ►

It’s kind of the historical basis, the way that it’s been fought, the results, the kind of legal and social implications of the war on drugs, a family history of mental

00:07:45 ►

illness, a story of my marriage. So it’s kind of a wide-ranging integrated piece that has as its

00:07:52 ►

core this 30-day experiment microdosing with LSD. It’s a great way to cover a lot of topics.

00:07:59 ►

We now know from recent fMRI studies that psychedelic drugs especially lsd allow different parts of

00:08:06 ►

your brain to communicate in unusual and novel ways and in a sense this is a book that is that

00:08:12 ►

encompasses a lot of different parts that integrate in novel and i would argue coherent and interesting

00:08:18 ►

ways that’s great what was it like to start digging into the research on all these different background areas? Well, I have a lot of expertise in drug policy reform coming from the criminal justice perspective.

00:08:32 ►

For seven years, I taught a seminar at UC Berkeley School of Law on the legal and social implications of the war on drugs.

00:08:38 ►

And before that, I taught constitutional criminal procedure and criminal law, and I was a criminal defense attorney.

00:08:45 ►

I was a federal public defender, and most of my cases were drug cases and also immigration cases at the time.

00:08:51 ►

So I had this area of expertise, but I didn’t have any specific expertise in psychedelic drugs.

00:08:57 ►

So that’s where most of my research, the stuff that was new to me, happened.

00:09:03 ►

That makes sense.

00:09:07 ►

It’s a great background for what you were talking about.

00:09:13 ►

And in fact, you had a novel, Daughter’s Keeper, about drug dealing involved in that.

00:09:14 ►

How did that come about?

00:09:16 ►

Right, that was sort of the first literary novel.

00:09:21 ►

I got my start writing murder mysteries, and that was the first sort of straight novel that I wrote. And it was about a young woman whose boyfriend gets caught up in basically set up is in a drug conspiracy and she

00:09:30 ►

becomes tangentially involved and thus faces prosecution under the conspiracy

00:09:35 ►

law is facing a very long mandatory minimum sentence so so I’d written about

00:09:40 ►

the kind of I’d written about the mandatory minimum is about the war on

00:09:44 ►

drugs about again from a criminal justice perspective before.

00:09:48 ►

And I had written, you know, I had a column at one point for Salon and I’ve written quite a bit of nonfiction about and many of the topics I covered had to do with criminal justice.

00:09:58 ►

And I also edited an anthology of first person narratives from women in prison, which was all about, it was designed to illuminate

00:10:06 ►

different human rights violations within the women’s prison system. So I’ve kind of kept my

00:10:11 ►

foot in on the criminal justice area for a long time. It’s really, in a way, the stuff that I’ve,

00:10:20 ►

you know, I’ve written 13 books and most of them haven’t have, you know,

00:10:26 ►

there have been novels about all sorts of subjects like losing a child or the Holocaust.

00:10:31 ►

And in truth, those are probably more anomalous when you consider my history and my education

00:10:36 ►

than this book, which is about the drug war and, you know, mental illness in the brain.

00:10:45 ►

And that’s one of the things that’s really been impressive

00:10:47 ►

is how honest you are about mental illness

00:10:49 ►

and talking about bipolar disorder.

00:10:54 ►

Mike, I guess my first question is,

00:10:56 ►

what’s the things not to say when someone comes out

00:10:58 ►

about having a mental illness of some kind?

00:11:02 ►

What’s the stuff you hate hearing?

00:11:03 ►

What, not to say?

00:11:03 ►

Yeah, from people who mean well,

00:11:05 ►

but say the stupid, say the wrong thing. I haven’t really encountered that in my life. I mean,

00:11:09 ►

I think most people tend to be, you know, if they’re mature, they tend to be compassionate.

00:11:15 ►

So I think that what you do if someone tells you that they have a mental illness is you

00:11:19 ►

try not to be too afraid of them. You know, the fact is that most mental illnesses are managed fairly well.

00:11:27 ►

It’s like having diabetes. You take your medicine, you’re fine. You don’t take your

00:11:30 ►

medicine, things start to go off the rails. How did that play into your concerns as you

00:11:37 ►

started considering a LSD microdosing experiment, I was in a particular situation in that my medication regimen,

00:11:46 ►

I have a mood disorder called premenstrual dysphoric disorder, or I had at the time.

00:11:51 ►

It’s hard to say what I have now because I haven’t had my period in so long. So premenstrual

00:11:59 ►

dysphoric disorder is just basically, it’s like being bipolar, but just in the week before your period.

00:12:10 ►

So I am, and I had a very effective treatment protocol.

00:12:14 ►

I took one week of SSRIs, in my case, Selexa,

00:12:20 ►

but people use different SSRIs, Prozac, Markets, a version just for this.

00:12:22 ►

I took one week in the week before my period, and that really treated the disorder very effectively.

00:12:27 ►

I functioned very well.

00:12:31 ►

But as you get older, if you’re a woman, as you hit your sort of 40s and approach your 50s,

00:12:38 ►

you enter a period called perimenopause.

00:12:40 ►

So menopause is when you don’t have your periods anymore,

00:12:43 ►

but perimenopause are the years leading up to that, when your cycles start to get a little wonky. So you know,

00:12:49 ►

you could be have a regular, in my case, I had a regular 30 day cycle from the time I was 13

00:12:53 ►

until the time I was about 43. So for 30 years, I had a very predictable cycle. But then things

00:13:00 ►

kind of, you know, some days, some months,‘d have two periods. Sometimes I’d have no period for four months.

00:13:05 ►

And so my treatment protocol depended on me being able to predict when I was going to

00:13:10 ►

get my period and when I could no longer predict it, I couldn’t take my meds.

00:13:15 ►

So I was in a situation where my meds weren’t working.

00:13:20 ►

Nothing was working.

00:13:21 ►

I was getting very, very depressed, even desperate.

00:13:23 ►

And that’s when I decided to try microdosing.

00:13:27 ►

Wow.

00:13:29 ►

That must have really put all those different pharmaceuticals,

00:13:32 ►

and they just didn’t come up.

00:13:33 ►

So LSD was the last thing to try.

00:13:36 ►

Yeah, I mean, I had tried lots and lots.

00:13:37 ►

In the book, I have a whole long section on all the different medications

00:13:41 ►

that I’ve been prescribed.

00:13:42 ►

And some of them worked for a little while.

00:13:44 ►

Some of them worked a little bit, but mostly they were ineffective.

00:13:49 ►

And what was really curious was that of all the things that I’ve tried, I think this LSD

00:13:53 ►

microdosing was without a doubt the most effective. Now, of course, without research, I can’t say with

00:13:59 ►

any confidence that what I experienced wasn’t a placebo effect. You know, the placebo effect is

00:14:03 ►

very, very strong. And that’s why we need double-blind studies in order to assess

00:14:07 ►

whether what someone is experiencing is placebo or not.

00:14:10 ►

So I can’t guarantee to myself or anyone else that what I experienced

00:14:15 ►

wasn’t merely a placebo effect,

00:14:17 ►

but it certainly is enough evidence to justify further research,

00:14:21 ►

which is what my book calls for.

00:14:22 ►

That sounds great.

00:14:24 ►

And you saw, did it seem like

00:14:26 ►

you felt lasting effects beyond the 30 days, some things that really stuck with you? You know,

00:14:32 ►

the awareness and the kind of understandings that I reached during that period, the insights for

00:14:38 ►

sure. But I think microdosing is not like, you know, many people report with a large dose of LSD

00:14:45 ►

that they achieve an improvement in mood and anxiety that lasts for a while.

00:14:51 ►

And the same is not true of microdosing.

00:14:53 ►

Microdosing, I don’t think, or I’m not sure yet whether, I don’t believe that it lasts

00:15:01 ►

in that same way that it can have a long-term effect.

00:15:06 ►

it lasts in that same way that it can have a long-term effect. So personally, I’ve had to work very hard to maintain equilibrium, certainly since November. But I think, so I don’t think

00:15:13 ►

microdosing is something that you can kind of do for a month and then expect to feel better forever.

00:15:18 ►

So, you know, it’s very possible that if I find my moods lose control again and if I don’t find a legal remedy, I think I’ll explore things like ketamine and other treatments first.

00:15:31 ►

But it’s good to know that microdosing is always an option.

00:15:36 ►

That is great.

00:15:37 ►

It would be so much more sane if you get at the corner pharmacist.

00:15:41 ►

Yes, it would be. And so then you would actually know that you’re, you know, I tested the LSD that I received,

00:15:46 ►

used a testing kit from amazon.com, but I would much prefer to have, you know, actual

00:15:51 ►

chemists doing the testing so that I, and I would like to know, I think dosing is important

00:15:56 ►

too.

00:15:56 ►

I mean, nowadays people just sort of take a standard dose, but for all drugs, dose depends

00:16:01 ►

on weight, on experience, on brain chemistry.

00:16:03 ►

For all drugs, dose depends on weight, on experience, on brain chemistry, and it would be really nice to have a reputable body making dosing recommendations.

00:16:11 ►

I mean, the problem with a criminalized system is that things are not safe

00:16:15 ►

and there’s no public health incentive.

00:16:19 ►

So, you know, people cut heroin with fentanyl and people overdose

00:16:23 ►

and people market all sorts of things as LSD, which are not, or as MDMA.

00:16:29 ►

There was the incident a few years ago where 11 Wesleyan students ended up in the hospital.

00:16:35 ►

One of them had to be intubated and defibrillated because they took what they thought was molly,

00:16:42 ►

but that turned out not to be MDMA at all, but rather AB Fubinaca, which is a much more dangerous drug.

00:16:49 ►

Yeah, it’s happening more and more.

00:16:51 ►

I think the last numbers was half of MDMA tested in the United States has no MDMA.

00:16:58 ►

I’d be surprised if half even, I think half is an underestimate.

00:17:01 ►

I think the majority of what’s marketed now is MDMA or moly is not, in fact.

00:17:07 ►

Because as the precursor chemicals get harder to source, people turn to other less – more easily sourced chemicals.

00:17:15 ►

And unfortunately, the more easily sourced chemicals are quite often much more dangerous.

00:17:22 ►

Absolutely.

00:17:23 ►

It’s why in one way, we’re lucky that these things

00:17:26 ►

are easier and safer to get now over the

00:17:27 ►

dark web. I think that’s one of the safest

00:17:29 ►

ways for anyone out there who wants to get

00:17:31 ►

this stuff. But I think before going down

00:17:33 ►

that path, you really have to be smart about

00:17:35 ►

doing your research and your own

00:17:37 ►

personal harm reduction. Well, I’m not. I’ve never been able to

00:17:39 ►

do anything like that. I’m far too much

00:17:41 ►

of a coward. I don’t, I’m not comfortable

00:17:43 ►

with the, I feel like if I tried to buy something off the dark web, I’d probably end up trying to

00:17:48 ►

order it from the DEA homepage. So that’s just not an area that I’m comfortable exploring

00:17:54 ►

or talking about.

00:17:56 ►

No, but one thing I think that is important is…

00:17:59 ►

I don’t even think I know what the dark web is, really. There you go. That’s how much

00:18:03 ►

of a Luddite I am.

00:18:02 ►

I don’t even think I know what the dark whip is, really.

00:18:03 ►

There you go.

00:18:04 ►

That’s how much of a Luddite I am.

00:18:06 ►

That’s okay.

00:18:09 ►

You can be smashing those looms anywhere you want.

00:18:15 ►

It’s nice that it’s out there for the people who really are desperate for medicine specifically and want to use it.

00:18:21 ►

But on the flip side, it also allows for a lot of teenagers to be getting anything they want in the world and not being too wise about what they’re taking.

00:18:23 ►

age to the beginning, anything they want in the world, and not being too wise about what they’re taking.

00:18:24 ►

Yeah, I mean, in a perfect world, we would have, drugs would be sourced sensibly, dosed

00:18:31 ►

reasonably.

00:18:32 ►

We would have a lot of, you know, we would have an education campaign and a public health

00:18:38 ►

campaign, and we would treat, you know, we would treat them the way we treat coffee,

00:18:42 ►

the way we treat, you know, well, ideally better than we treat some pharmaceuticals.

00:18:47 ►

At one point when I was feeling suicidal before I started this experiment,

00:18:52 ►

I was standing in front of my medicine cabinet staring at its contents,

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evaluating of all the things there, the Vicodin, the antidepressants,

00:18:59 ►

the anti-anxiety medications, the Valium,

00:19:01 ►

what was the most dangerous thing in my medicine cabinet?

00:19:04 ►

And the answer was Tylenol.

00:19:05 ►

That was by far the easiest.

00:19:07 ►

If I wanted to kill myself, by far the easiest and fastest way would be to overdose on Tylenol

00:19:11 ►

because that was the most toxic thing in my cabinet.

00:19:15 ►

Wow.

00:19:15 ►

Wow.

00:19:16 ►

Yeah.

00:19:16 ►

It doesn’t take that much more Tylenol to shut your liver off for good.

00:19:21 ►

Yeah.

00:19:22 ►

Yeah, absolutely.

00:19:24 ►

It’s amazing compared to toxicity of LSD,

00:19:27 ►

which is something you talk about in your book

00:19:29 ►

that turned you on initially, correct?

00:19:31 ►

Yeah, I mean, I didn’t know much about LSD

00:19:34 ►

when I started my research,

00:19:36 ►

and it turns out there’s a figure

00:19:37 ►

that chemists call the LD50 of a drug.

00:19:40 ►

That’s the amount that will cause you to overdose,

00:19:43 ►

and LSD doesn’t have a verified LD50 because there’s no verified LSD overdose in the literature.

00:19:49 ►

There are two cases of human overdoses of LSD that have been reported,

00:19:52 ►

but both of those are suspect.

00:19:53 ►

One is an individual who likely died of exposure, and the other one is a multi-drug use,

00:20:01 ►

and there’s no reason to think that it was the LSD that killed that person

00:20:04 ►

other than any of the other drugs.

00:20:07 ►

So because there’s no real verified LSD overdose, we don’t even know what an overdose would mean.

00:20:15 ►

There was an instance of a bunch of people in San Francisco who were snorting lines of what they thought was cocaine,

00:20:21 ►

but it turned out to be pure LSD.

00:20:23 ►

So try to imagine how many thousands of times the regular dose that was.

00:20:28 ►

And they were quite sick.

00:20:29 ►

They went into the hospital.

00:20:30 ►

A couple of them were in comas.

00:20:32 ►

They had internal bleeding.

00:20:33 ►

But within 12 days, they all left the hospital healthy and healed.

00:20:37 ►

So even that much of an overdose won’t kill you.

00:20:41 ►

It’s not a good thing, but it won’t kill you.

00:20:43 ►

So it’s just an interesting, you know, it’s such a vilified drug, but the reasons

00:20:49 ►

for its vilification have far more to do with politics and white middle class anxiety than

00:20:55 ►

they have to do with science.

00:20:57 ►

Absolutely.

00:20:58 ►

Which maybe just described America in a nutshell, now that I think about it.

00:21:03 ►

Unfortunately so.

00:21:08 ►

And for anyone out there who heard the story about the elephant that overdosed on LSD,

00:21:13 ►

it did happen that they gave a ton of LSD to an elephant,

00:21:17 ►

but it seems like what actually killed the animal was the ton of barbiturates they gave it afterwards to try to get it down.

00:21:18 ►

Oh, I didn’t know that.

00:21:19 ►

They gave it barbiturates to, ah.

00:21:21 ►

Yeah, so it’s…

00:21:23 ►

I did not realize that.

00:21:25 ►

Yeah, that’s what they did to the tripping elephant is gave it too many downers.

00:21:28 ►

Rookie mistake.

00:21:30 ►

Good to know.

00:21:31 ►

Yeah.

00:21:32 ►

But it was a great piece of publicity for the DEA.

00:21:36 ►

And so on this harm reduction side, what’s your – you have a lot of people, I’m sure, asking you about your FAQs about this and your harm reduction

00:21:45 ►

and what worked for you specifically and how to microdose these things.

00:21:51 ►

So what worked for me, and I’m very clear that I don’t prescribe, I’m not a doctor,

00:21:56 ►

and I’m not suggesting that anybody engage in illegal activity,

00:21:58 ►

but what worked for me was 10 micrograms of LSD in liquid form taken every three days.

00:22:05 ►

I think if it were legal, I would be doing it every other day

00:22:09 ►

because I don’t actually think the third day is necessary.

00:22:14 ►

I think that some people might like a reset day.

00:22:20 ►

I think personally that every other day would be the smartest,

00:22:24 ►

the best for my system.

00:22:28 ►

And, but I have no, you know, I don’t, mine sort of arrived in my mailbox from a mysterious

00:22:35 ►

benefactor. So I don’t have any tips on how to get it or not. But I would suggest that if you

00:22:41 ►

are interested in microdosing, there’s lots of

00:22:46 ►

information in my book, lots of stuff about history and neurochemistry and research that’s

00:22:54 ►

important to read. And then if you want to participate in a microdosing study, Dr. James

00:22:59 ►

Fadiman has on his website a protocol and an FAQ that can be really helpful.

00:23:06 ►

That’s great.

00:23:06 ►

What was it like for you to start talking to him as you started researching this?

00:23:11 ►

He’s a lovely man.

00:23:12 ►

He’s very emotionally supportive.

00:23:15 ►

And, you know, I think now because of my book,

00:23:17 ►

he’s getting inundated with people looking for advice and support.

00:23:22 ►

Great.

00:23:23 ►

Which is lovely,

00:23:26 ►

but it takes up a lot of his time, I think.

00:23:30 ►

But he’s really just a really generous, wonderful person.

00:23:33 ►

I was very grateful for the guidance,

00:23:38 ►

both emotional and intellectual, that he gave me.

00:23:41 ►

That’s really great.

00:23:43 ►

His work’s been so important in this field. Yeah.

00:23:44 ►

I mean, he started out in the

00:23:45 ►

1960s doing psychedelic research and um that work is really interesting too and has a lot to do with

00:23:50 ►

why a lot of people microdose i mean there are people who do it for me like me for mood benefits

00:23:56 ►

but they’re also people who do it as kind of a performance enhancing drug like ritalin or Adderall, but without all the negative side effects.

00:24:13 ►

And Jim, in the 60s, he did, he researched the relationship between psychedelics and creativity, specifically problem solving.

00:24:20 ►

And he did this really fascinating study where he invited 28 engineers, architects,

00:24:27 ►

people in the nascent computer business

00:24:29 ►

to, he and his colleagues,

00:24:31 ►

had them come in with two problems

00:24:33 ►

that they had each been working on for a long time

00:24:36 ►

and hadn’t been able to solve,

00:24:37 ►

whether they were design problems or math problems

00:24:39 ►

or physics problems, whatever they were.

00:24:42 ►

And they brought these,

00:24:49 ►

all of these engineers and scientists brought their intractable problems in and they took LSD and then they worked on their problems.

00:24:52 ►

And a number of them had really profound insights,

00:24:54 ►

went on to patent discoveries, formed businesses.

00:24:59 ►

And it was just really beginning this research when it was shut down by the government

00:25:02 ►

when LSD was criminalized.

00:25:02 ►

just really beginning this research when it was shut down by the government when LSD was criminalized.

00:25:04 ►

But just imagine, you know, we know that there are a lot of, you know,

00:25:10 ►

Steve Jobs and others have attributed much of the most important insights

00:25:15 ►

of their careers to LSD, and that’s certainly not unique.

00:25:20 ►

And people, that’s one of the reasons I think that LSD is so popular

00:25:22 ►

in Silicon Valley, LSD and psilocybin, which effectively act in the same way on the brain.

00:25:29 ►

And so what was it like for you those first days as you started down this experimental rabbit hole?

00:25:35 ►

Well, I didn’t trip, right?

00:25:36 ►

So I didn’t have that kind of flashes of creative insight.

00:25:39 ►

But I certainly worked really well.

00:25:41 ►

I worked better in that month than I’ve worked ever.

00:25:45 ►

worked really well. I worked better in that month than I’ve worked ever. I worked productively and creatively and with a kind of amazing focus, but yet not that sort of narrow myopic focus that you

00:25:51 ►

get when you try Ritalin or Adderall, but rather a sort of open-minded, creative focus. It was

00:25:56 ►

pretty damn awesome. Wow. Yeah. Did you find any days where it wasn’t the right fit or any little

00:26:04 ►

downsides? Yeah, sometimes I was a little irritable.

00:26:06 ►

I was on a three-day program, so day one, microdose, day two, day three, don’t, day four, microdose again.

00:26:13 ►

And I was a little irritable sometimes on the day that I took the medication, but less than without it.

00:26:23 ►

Just relative to day two and day three,

00:26:25 ►

I’d say,

00:26:26 ►

like it wasn’t as bad as it had been before.

00:26:31 ►

And by irritable,

00:26:32 ►

I mean like,

00:26:33 ►

you know,

00:26:33 ►

just more easily aggravated,

00:26:37 ►

but I didn’t,

00:26:38 ►

I didn’t have any big fights with my husband or anything that month,

00:26:41 ►

which was nice.

00:26:42 ►

Or I was much nicer to be around.

00:26:44 ►

My children noticed it. And my friends noticed it. month, which was nice. It was much nicer to be around. My children noticed it.

00:26:45 ►

My friends noticed it.

00:26:47 ►

Everybody seemed to notice it.

00:26:49 ►

Wow, that distinct.

00:26:52 ►

Yeah, it really was.

00:26:54 ►

When I started telling people that’s what I had done,

00:26:56 ►

they were all like, that’s what it was.

00:26:59 ►

In fact, didn’t your daughter ask one day?

00:27:01 ►

Yeah, well, that was just crazy.

00:27:02 ►

It was so ridiculous.

00:27:04 ►

It was just being really funny with her in the morning and doing her hair and giggling and which is not normally

00:27:08 ►

me i’m not a morning person and she said oh my god mom what is wrong with you are you like on

00:27:14 ►

acid or something and uh i was like i couldn’t believe it but no i was not in fact going to

00:27:22 ►

tell her at that moment that i was on acid but But yes, I was, in fact, on acid.

00:27:26 ►

These kids, they’re just too smart these days.

00:27:29 ►

Yeah, insightful.

00:27:30 ►

What do you know?

00:27:31 ►

And it’s not something she had ever said before or since.

00:27:35 ►

Wow.

00:27:37 ►

What was it like coming out to your kids specifically?

00:27:40 ►

Well, my husband and I have always had a harm reduction approach when it comes to our children and drugs.

00:27:44 ►

We’ve always been very where we don when it comes to our children and drugs.

00:27:48 ►

We’ve always been very, we don’t ever lie to them, ever.

00:27:54 ►

Unlike some people we know who, you know, big stoners in high school, we’re like, no, I never smoked weed.

00:27:55 ►

But we never lie to our children.

00:27:56 ►

We don’t tell them everything.

00:27:59 ►

We feel like we’re entitled to privacy.

00:28:03 ►

So we say if we don’t want to tell them something, we don’t tell them.

00:28:07 ►

But about this issue in particular, we just, we do our best not to lie.

00:28:11 ►

And we also try to give them as much information as possible. So we give, you know, when it comes to, say, marijuana,

00:28:16 ►

we talk a lot about the fact that, for example,

00:28:19 ►

it’s impossible to overdose on marijuana,

00:28:21 ►

that you cannot have a fatal overdose on marijuana.

00:28:23 ►

You can’t consume enough of it to kill you.

00:28:25 ►

But then we also talk about the effects

00:28:27 ►

of marijuana on the adolescent brain and how there’s research that seems

00:28:31 ►

to indicate that those are not great, that especially in the period as your frontal

00:28:35 ►

lobe is developing, marijuana is not that there might be some damage caused by

00:28:41 ►

marijuana use. So we try to provide them with a lot of information and then leave the decisions up to them because unless you plan to like have your teenager sit on your lap

00:28:49 ►

for their entire adolescence, they are going to be out in the world making their own decisions.

00:28:53 ►

And we want to make sure that they have the capacity and the information to make those

00:28:57 ►

decisions wisely. That’s a great way to handle it. It must be challenging though sometimes with that much honesty um well you know it’s better than lying i feel like you know at least i my kids tell me what

00:29:11 ►

you know the kinds of things they’re up to i always say like you know if you’re a person who

00:29:15 ►

lies to your children about drug use you better hope that if god forbid your kid overdoses they’re

00:29:20 ►

near my kids because my kids know exactly what to do. My kids aren’t going to dump your kid in a bathtub full of ice water or drop them off in a parking lot of a hospital where

00:29:31 ►

he expires in a pool of his own vomit, as has happened to many kids. My kids are going to

00:29:37 ►

call 911 and say they need Narcan and there’s a heroin overdose happening, and then they’re

00:29:43 ►

going to call their mother because the rule is call 911 and then call mom.

00:29:47 ►

That’s a great rule.

00:29:49 ►

Yep.

00:29:50 ►

Like, you know, some people, when they send their kids out the door, they say drive safe.

00:29:53 ►

I always say use a condom and test your molly.

00:29:56 ►

That’s my message.

00:29:57 ►

Because my one rule with my children is that my job is to keep them safe.

00:30:01 ►

There will be no dying on my watch if I can keep it from happening.

00:30:05 ►

And I think the reason that kids end up at risk

00:30:08 ►

is because they’re not given the information they need to make good choices.

00:30:13 ►

Yeah, that makes sense.

00:30:16 ►

So how has there been in terms of pushback and controversy

00:30:21 ►

when you’re talking about this kind of stuff and your kids?

00:30:24 ►

Weirdly, not very much. I mean, there was one article in the New York Times about microdosing

00:30:29 ►

that basically took me to task and said I was going to, you know, it analogized cocaine and LSD,

00:30:36 ►

which is just ridiculous. And, you know, cocaine is an addictive stimulant and LSD is psychedelic

00:30:43 ►

and non-addictive psychedelic.

00:30:48 ►

So the idea of these two drugs being remotely analogous is ludicrous at best.

00:30:52 ►

But other than that, the feedback has been incredibly positive.

00:30:58 ►

You know, I’m really horrified by what Peter Thiel did to Gawker.

00:31:02 ►

And I’m a First Amendment absolutist in many ways. And I do not believe that there should be, like, lawsuits,

00:31:06 ►

that that kind of lawsuit should be allowed to go forward.

00:31:08 ►

But on the other hand, my life is immeasurably better

00:31:12 ►

without Gawker in the world.

00:31:13 ►

And I’m sure they would have had a field day with this book,

00:31:15 ►

but because they haven’t been around, the press has been really positive,

00:31:18 ►

and it’s been mostly kind of great.

00:31:22 ►

Knock on wood.

00:31:22 ►

You know, anything can happen tomorrow.

00:31:25 ►

And, you know, Jeff Sessions could be

00:31:26 ►

breaking down my door as we speak,

00:31:28 ►

and I could be writing

00:31:30 ►

you sad letters from federal prison asking

00:31:32 ►

you to send me

00:31:33 ►

books

00:31:35 ►

and fill my commissary account.

00:31:38 ►

But I think the long

00:31:40 ►

list of people that he is going

00:31:42 ►

to attack is

00:31:44 ►

there are a lot of people there before me, like every immigrant, every African-American, all the gay people.

00:31:52 ►

Yeah. With your background in criminal justice, this must be a hard time to watch how things might be moving now.

00:31:58 ►

Yeah, I think it really is dangerous. We’re in a very dangerous time.

00:32:03 ►

That’s what I like about your form of activism is very much take it to people and let them make their own decisions.

00:32:10 ►

So what have your audiences been like when you get to speak about this stuff in person?

00:32:16 ►

They’ve been amazing.

00:32:18 ►

I’ve had just massive audiences, the biggest of my career, really open. The one thing I’ve noticed that’s been

00:32:26 ►

kind of tragic is that people will come up to me all the time and they’ll just be so

00:32:31 ►

full of, they’ll be like, tell me about their microdosing and they’re thrilled about it

00:32:36 ►

and it’s been a wonderful experience for them and they talk about it loud and proud. And

00:32:40 ►

then there are people who come up to me and they take me aside and they whisper in my

00:32:43 ►

ear with terrible shame that they have a mental illness, they’re bipolar, they’re depressed,

00:32:49 ►

they have anxiety. And it just makes, it breaks my heart that we live in a society where it is,

00:32:54 ►

it causes more shame to be mentally ill than to use an illegal drug. That’s just awful.

00:33:01 ►

That’s just awful.

00:33:13 ►

Are there people with a mental illness, though, who maybe yourself or Jim Fatman have worn against microdosing specifically?

00:33:20 ►

Look, I think everything to do with drugs is all about set and setting.

00:33:24 ►

So the most important thing is setting is obvious where you take them.

00:33:30 ►

Set is you, what you bring to the equation. I think that the link between the phenomenon of LSD psychosis is to my mind has been overstated, but there is no doubt that there have been people

00:33:38 ►

who have taken psychedelic drugs, who are mentally ill, who have come into the experience and psychedelic drugs have caused an exacerbation of their symptoms.

00:33:49 ►

So I don’t think people who are psychotic or schizophrenic

00:33:52 ►

should be experimenting with psychedelics personally.

00:33:55 ►

I think that’s dangerous.

00:33:57 ►

I mean, you know, we may one day find out that there’s like a treatment

00:34:00 ►

that uses some form of psychedelics, but not so far to my knowledge.

00:34:08 ►

And I think it’s important that people who are, say, bipolar

00:34:14 ►

and using psychiatric medication that works for them,

00:34:17 ►

that they not stop using their medication.

00:34:20 ►

That’s really, really important.

00:34:21 ►

Good advice.

00:34:22 ►

I am not someone who says, you know, run away from psychiatric meds.

00:34:25 ►

They’re terrible.

00:34:25 ►

I believe that psychiatric meds can be very, very helpful.

00:34:28 ►

They were for me for many years.

00:34:31 ►

So I don’t think, Mike, if your psychiatric meds are working for you,

00:34:36 ►

then microdosing is not for you.

00:34:39 ►

That’s great advice.

00:34:41 ►

And I appreciate what you’re saying about schizophrenia too. I think it’s a main psychedelic interaction to be nervous about.

00:34:51 ►

And you hear anecdotal reports of small amounts being helpful for people who are schizophrenic.

00:34:56 ►

Yeah, I mean we may find they might do a study and find that certain doses of LSD are in fact fact, effective for treating the symptoms of schizophrenia,

00:35:05 ►

but we don’t know that yet.

00:35:06 ►

And large doses of LSD do mimic the symptoms of psychosis,

00:35:13 ►

and it’s just not something you should be messing around with

00:35:17 ►

if you have one of those serious psychiatric diagnoses, I think.

00:35:22 ►

I believe you’re right, too.

00:35:23 ►

CBD from the cannabis plant might be a better thing to try.

00:35:26 ►

Yeah.

00:35:26 ►

There’s better indications there.

00:35:30 ►

And switching up drugs a little bit, one thing that you mentioned that was really intriguing

00:35:34 ►

in the New Yorker article, I think, was about MDMA for rough spots in a marriage.

00:35:42 ►

Yeah, that has been really wonderfully effective for me and my husband. We

00:35:45 ►

tried it at the suggestion of Sasha Shulgin, the man who, though he wasn’t the first person to

00:35:55 ►

synthesize MDMA, that honor goes to Merck, the pharmaceutical company. He was one of the first people to ingest it and study the effects.

00:36:08 ►

And Sasha found that his wife had experience with doing couples therapy,

00:36:16 ►

and she used it in her practice.

00:36:20 ►

Other clinicians used it in their practices.

00:36:22 ►

And Sasha and Ann both recommended it to my husband and me

00:36:25 ►

as a kind of marital therapy tool.

00:36:28 ►

And we have found it to be incredibly effective.

00:36:30 ►

We do it every couple of years when we feel like we’ve reached

00:36:34 ►

kind of a communications impasse in our relationship.

00:36:37 ►

And it’s been great.

00:36:40 ►

It’s been really, it’s been very useful.

00:36:42 ►

Like, I don’t understand MDMA as a party drug.

00:36:46 ►

That doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense to me

00:36:48 ►

because we just sit and talk for six hours.

00:36:54 ►

But I think it can be, I think it can be really,

00:36:59 ►

I understand how come there have been such positive results

00:37:03 ►

using MDMA for people with PTSD, for example,

00:37:07 ►

because it allows you to explore a potentially traumatic or troubling incident, but from

00:37:15 ►

a place of empathy and love and compassion, which PTSD, for example, can be described

00:37:23 ►

as a disease of memory.

00:37:25 ►

You have these traumatic memories that are impossible to confront

00:37:30 ►

because confronting them triggers the traumatic response.

00:37:34 ►

So if you can take a drug that will allow you to deal with those memories

00:37:38 ►

in a way that’s not traumatizing, then you can resolve the symptoms of PTSD. And, um, and in a way

00:37:47 ►

to much lesser extent, that’s kind of like what marital therapy is. You know, you take,

00:37:52 ►

you, you want to explore the sources of conflict and stress, but in, but without anger and without

00:37:57 ►

shame and without fear and without, um, uh, you know, sadness and that’s MDMA allows you to do that.

00:38:07 ►

That’s beautiful.

00:38:08 ►

The quote I really liked from you I saw was,

00:38:11 ►

I believe that with whom you do MDMA for the first time

00:38:13 ►

might be even more important than whom you have sex with for the first time.

00:38:17 ►

Yeah, that’s what I always tell my kids.

00:38:19 ►

That’s great. That makes a lot of sense.

00:38:21 ►

They don’t listen to me, but it would be great.

00:38:24 ►

Because the whole idea is like,

00:38:25 ►

sex only gets better the more times you do it.

00:38:28 ►

The same is not true of MDMA.

00:38:31 ►

It’s sad but true, yeah.

00:38:34 ►

That’s a good point.

00:38:37 ►

All right.

00:38:38 ►

The one question I’d like to end up with,

00:38:41 ►

especially curious on your answer because of your background

00:38:43 ►

and seeing how the war on drugs operates on the ground.

00:38:47 ►

If you were in charge of how these different drugs are available to the public,

00:38:52 ►

what kind of system would you like to see in place?

00:38:54 ►

I’m in favor of complete legalization.

00:38:57 ►

I believe that prohibition causes damage, and I think we should decriminalize all drugs.

00:39:04 ►

We should come from a public

00:39:05 ►

health perspective. We should engage in a massive campaign of education. And I think, in fact,

00:39:12 ►

we should supply drugs to those who are addicted so that they can take safe medications or drugs,

00:39:19 ►

even the drugs that are, you know, I think even heroin addicts, the programs that have been,

00:39:24 ►

drugs that are, you know, I think even heroin addicts, the programs that have been, that have proved to be most effective in both protecting people from overdose and in ultimately encouraging

00:39:30 ►

them to stop using have been drug distribution programs. So I think that it, that, that that’s

00:39:42 ►

what we should be doing. We should, we should be combating the heroin scourge by giving heroin to people who are addicts

00:39:48 ►

because the scourge is caused by the criminalization more than anything else.

00:39:52 ►

So I am an absolutist when it comes to drug policy.

00:39:57 ►

I believe absolutely in legalization.

00:40:01 ►

Well, thank you so much for your work getting these ideas out there.

00:40:04 ►

Well, it’s been a pleasure talking to you.

00:40:08 ►

Thank you so much, and be sure to send me the link so I can put it up on

00:40:10 ►

social media where we all connect

00:40:11 ►

so that we never have to leave the house again.

00:40:15 ►

Amen. That’s the way to do it.

00:40:17 ►

The book is

00:40:18 ►

A Really Good Day. It’s a great

00:40:20 ►

combination of many things, especially Target

00:40:22 ►

around microdosing, and it’s a worthwhile

00:40:24 ►

read, and there’s also some great interviews

00:40:26 ►

over the internet. Thank you so much

00:40:28 ►

for taking time to talk to us today. My pleasure.

00:40:30 ►

Bye-bye.

00:40:33 ►

If you enjoyed

00:40:34 ►

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00:40:36 ►

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00:40:38 ►

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00:40:45 ►

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00:40:52 ►

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00:40:56 ►

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00:41:02 ►

A special thanks to Matt Payne, who engineered the sound, Joey Whipp and California

00:41:07 ►

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