A systematic study of microdosing psychedelics
doi.org
doi.org
It cooked his brain and he's lucky he didn't end up in a psych ward. He's stopped now (not by choice) and he's slowly coming back to normal.
I'm not writing this to dissuade people from microdosing, or from drugs in general (I'd be a massive hypocrite if I did). But to note that when left up to their own devices with drugs, some otherwise incredibly intelligent people will fall victim to the drugs. I've seen people (a lot who should've known better) get wiped out by basically every different type of drug. Weed, alcohol, Xanax, MDMA, amphetamines, LSD, ketamine, etc.
HN likes to talk about the positive effects of drugs, which there are when used responsibly, but for a certain percentage of the population, they'll fall victim to their impulses. It's easy to say that if you make rules and stick to them you'll be fine, but when you start to form a habit, you start bending and breaking those rules.
For me drugs have been quite helpful. They have taught me about:
1) Some extreme emotional states.
2) Some extreme cognitive states.
3) They serve as a benchmark in emotional intensity when I encounter extreme experiences that are not facilitated by drugs (e.g. falling in love, exercising a lot or meditating very deeply).
4) They teach me a thing or two about my YouTube/gaming addiction or any addiction really.
5) If you're not careful they do mess up your mind, but our alcoholic culture is contributing to that for at least 50% in my experience. In all fairness, alcohol is drugs, anyone who disagrees is playing a dangerous game of definitions and of health.
6) The effect that believe and interpretation has on our actions. Sometimes one can think extreme things, and if you follow through on those thoughts, then your actions become extreme as well. This is why one needs a tripsitter.
But I didn't learn these things through microdosing. I learned them by doing it occassionally, once per half a year would be a lot. I do have the fortune of being in one of the best places in the world for it (The Netherlands) and having the ability to get things tested beforehand (this is something our government is doing right).
My point with this story is: while a part of my family has been going to total shit because of drugs (I am surprised they are alive, though friends of my family aren't -- alcohol poisoning), for me, they have been a very useful tool. Starting experimentation 15 years later than your average family member definitely helps.
I feel that drug experimentation done well is like bouldering. Yes, you fall, but it's on a soft cushion. Drug experimentation not done well is like, real life rock climbing without a carabiner. It's like bouldering, but a lot higher and no safety cushion.
No, alcohol is arguably much worse. Lets put aside health effects, and even related issues like deaths from drunk driving. The more insidious issue, is that in many parts of society, alcohol is a required component of social interaction. Many standard human activities, including dating, networking, enjoying art, even religious gatherings, all include some aspect of alcohol. None of these activities strictly requires alcohol, it's just that we've been conditioned over tens, hundreds, or thousands of years to accept it.
In contrast, illegal drugs have the benefit of being anti-social. Almost by definition, illegal drugs are substances that are not tolerated in society. Accordingly, doing illegal drugs provides a level of agency, it's a behavior you decided to do rather than one that has been forced upon you. It's an assertion of your free will.
Alcohol and drugs are entirely different. One is a choice and one is a law.
I was using the term more narrowly. By "anti-social", I meant not accepted by society. I didn't mean it prevents you from socializing.
That's what I did with psilocybin. And I have experienced the amazing effects of it, but man the dark side can be damn dark. I get why enough people are extremely against drugs. It's because things can become very dark and one should not forget that this is the case for a great enough group of people.
Here's my story about that observation (I think we should be a bit more open about this, and since I'm Dutch, at least my government won't pursue me for the following story).
At one point, I was taking a bit too much weed. And I was shocked, I smoked maybe once per week at best and it was more likely that I was smoking twice per month. This has been my peak in my life.
Yet, I still felt really messed up by it, what gives?
It turned out, that I didn't count all the nights of alcohol:
1. Every week 1 time with my GF's family. We would get very tipsy on average.
2. Every week 1 time with friends and/or GF. We would get tipsy on average.
3. Every week 3 to 4 random beers in between.
It also turns out that I didn't count the occassional psychedelic trip, once every 4 months.
It also turns out that I didn't factor in my occassional sleep deprivation.
It's kind of like calculus: a lot of a little bit is a whole surface, and this was a whole surface of misery and the worst offender was alcohol, closely followed by weed.
The issue was: cutting down on alcohol.
Cutting down on weed was easy, very very easy because I also found out when I might want to use it and those occassions happen rarely. Cutting down on occassional legal psychedelics (again, The Netherlands) was also easy. I'm slowly fixing my sleep issues as well.
Cutting down on alcohol was a lot tougher. I've managed to cut my consumption down by 50%. My other forms of drug consumption are cut down by 90%! It takes (and still takes) a lot of effort to just do 50% with alcohol. I have to say no, when people enjoy and smile and I just want it too. Fortunately, I quite like my sober self, and have to remind myself how being very tipsy feels (I find it quite unpleasant). So that helps, but I find it quite hard and that worries me. It would've been easy if we didn't have an alcoholic culture.
Also, for how long was he doing several tabs a day, and how consistently?
As for what it did to him. He started getting memory loss and delusional memories (thinking something happened when it didn't), as well as thinking he was "on another level" to everyone and nobody understood him. Nobody understood him because nothing he said made sense. He'd try talking to people and the sentences just didn't make sense. He'd keep getting stuck in loops or go off on weird tangents, which is normal while tripping, but even when he hadn't taken any acid in like 12 hours he'd still be stuck in these loops and tangents. He was basically unaware of reality, and unaware of what was happening to his mind and his psyche. People tried to help him, but he was completely unaware of the damage he was doing to himself and unwilling to accept from others that he might be harming himself.
He makes a lot more sense when talking now (it's been about a month), but he's still not all there.
I feel like part of the problem is that people don't consider "party" drugs like acid or MDMA as particularly harmful or addictive, so they're less aware when they start to use them in harmful ways. At least with benzos (Xanax, Valium) or amphetamines, people are usually aware that they're addictive and harmful when overdone.
If someone considers powerful psychedelics to be party drugs, they're already making a grave mistake.
I disagree about benzos or amphetamines, I have had to force wean many people off of both classes of drugs after developing nasty addictions that their rewired brains would easily write off as benign.
Acid and many other psychs, unlike benzos or amphetamines, are not chemically addictive. It's entirely psychological. Their addiction profile in general is much better than most other classes of psychoactive drugs.
I would wait a few more months for your friend's brain to finish reregulating itself now that it's not receiving daily blasts of serotonin. Simarly to SSRIs which inhibit the reuptake of serotonin, which doctors generally recommend an adjustment period of a few months when beginning or ending a prescription. He could get 100% better. Or at least 99%. Psychologically he may have made some permanent changes to the way he thinks about the world. But his memory and all that should come back OK.
That said... a few tabs a day for months is crazy and we've never done any research outside of maybe MKUltra which has tested the effects of such a long and intense daily regiment. This really needs to be done so that everyone can be more safe.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure/image?size=...
That can't be the case, as 300mg of psilocybin would be a devastating dose. Even 30mg is a sturdy dose. Obviously, they must mean 300mg of mushroom matter, but it doesn't say if it is dry weight or wet weight.
Anyway, it will be nice when someone can do a double blind study of microdosing and get some real data to work with.
It can be a metric, but it doesn't indicate productivity by itself. It's hard to use even correlated to other metrics, but loses its value if compared out of context and without knowing the code quality
Ofcourse noone an help you if you are trying to cheat your own system.
https://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2011/04/the-plural-of-a...
I found it was way too easy to take too much, or to start to feel the effects enough and then want to take more. Even when I kept the dose low, I don't think it led to any increase in productivity. I felt better, sure, but I was looking to get a more permanent sense of accomplishment rather than a short term mood boost.
Modafinil is much better suited for productivity. But it fucks up my routine and temper.
>"Milken Institute 2019 Global Conference, where I moderated a panel in front of a standing-room-only crowd: Psychedelics: Mind-Enhancing Methods to Well-Being.
The entire video can be found here[1]. If interested in my personal goals and thinking about the space, check out the first two minutes. The panelists then provide a great overview of the science, investing opportunities, anecdotal personal benefits, legal challenges, and much more. I think it’s one of the more comprehensive panels ever done on the subject."
1) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8RIVQDZH4Q4&feature=youtu.be
I don't know if mescaline is different, if it was my experience level, or set & setting, but I had no problem eating a pepperoni pizza while experiencing some really nice visuals.
I definitely take the Hunter S Thompson approach to psychedelics, rather than the Timothy Leary approach.
> No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride...and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well...maybe chalk it up to forced consciousness expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten.
But as always with LSD, the effet from person to person can be very different.
Decent summary:
It definitely stimulated my creative side and caused me to spontaneously work on tasks I'd been putting off and some I'd forgotten completely long ago.
I didn't even realize those effects until after the fact, when reflecting on the past few days and realizing I'd done all sorts of unlikely tasks, and it was all desirable stuff I'd intended to get done at eventually.
It also makes me far more extroverted, which is a mixed bag. I'll casually and confidently strike up conversations with total strangers in public as if we're long-time friends, something I don't typically do at all.
I can absolutely say that Psilocybin has made me perfectly comfortable being myself and has helped me become a very confident person.
Start with a small dose (2g or so) and just keep experimenting upwards.
psilocybin/shroomtek tea is socially passable
tabs or anything else you have issues with consistency
Dear people who believe that it should be your choice what you do with your own womb: please apply the same ethics to your synapses, and exercise them accordingly in the voting booth.
The issue comes that there arent exactly a lot of candidates talking about legalization, especially beyond marijuana.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/nyregion/new-jersey-marij...
Abortion is a pressing practical issue People may be very vocal about it.
Psychedelics is mostly an issue of recreation, even without a few millennia of consumption ingrained into culture like alcohol.
So the efforts people exert to legalize each are commensurate to how pressing each issue is.
2- The argument is different.
The question underlying abortion is about the status of the unborn baby. Is it a separate life that needs to be protected by law or is it part of you. If it is part of you at first, when does it become an individual?
The question about drugs is about self harm. Should we let people harm themselves? To what point drug use is considered self harm? How should we categorize drugs (most people agree that heroin is bad, psychedelics are more debatable)? Are substance bans effective?
Until recently it was pretty hard to find any politician outside of the libertarian party who would even go on the record as being pro cannabis, though former house Speaker Boehner now works for the industry. But if you look at public intellectuals, there have been lots of conservatives opposed to both abortion on demand and drug prohibition. As far as I know both have been the editorial position of National Review for decades, and William F Buckley was quite vocal on the moral failings of the war on some drugs.
Theocons like Pat Robertson have been calling for cannabis to be regulated like alcohol for over a decade.
The Mercer family, who were the primary funders of Trump and Bannon-era Breitbart are certainly pro-life. They also are the single largest donors to MAPS in support of the FDA trials on MDMA therapy for PTSD.