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Comment by henriquemaia | Hacker News Reader

That's an uncharitable reading. OP is just sharing what works with her/him. Which is ok. From what I understood from your comment, for you it doesn't. Which is ok too, as now you know yourself a bit better. Two personal experiments with very different outcomes. There's no need for moral judgments either way.

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I'm not saying her experience is invalid. If it works for her, great. But there is this tendency of microdosing proponents to oversell what is effectively a high(nothing wrong with that, I love getting high) as some sort of profound self-help tool. It's a high. That's fine. Getting high can have positive effects too. Call it that, though.

The paper stated James Fadiman as the source for the characterization of a microdose, it however failed to properly convey his point of view.

I've heard James Fadiman reporting twice that it is 10% of a recreational (1-3g) or therapeutic dose (3.0-3.5g), but certainly not 10% of a heroic dose. This study went with 0.5g which is 10% of what's considered a heroic dose.

The effective dose is considered to be 6mg if psilocybin or 0.6g of dried magic mushroom, thus the amount given in the study is very close to being detectable (and incidently was in most of the cases) which I don't think you can charaterize as a microdose. James Fadiman expressly stated a microdose would be a dose that you couldn't detect and would forget you had taken while going on about your day.

If one is taking 0.2-0.3g of dried magic mushroom this would be, without question, not getting high.

depends on your individual sensitivity to psychedelics, 0.2 would be too much for me to go into work, no visuals but a head trip. I also know plenty of people who can take 0.5 and don't feel much.

Mushrooms have so much variance that giving range like you did is almost impossible.

During my youth, I had strong trips with .5g and meh one's with a few grams, sure it's not the norm but it's not an exceptional occurrence either.

My experience told me that the stem of the smallest mushrooms are a lot stronger than those of the bigger one but that an heuristic not an hard rule.

If I wanted to microdose psilocin (for which psylocibin is a prodrug), I would order 4-AcO-DMT¹ fumarate (another prodrug for psilocin) from a reputable Canadian chemical supplier. It's almost identical to mushrooms, the difference being that it is predictable and somewhat easier on the digestive system.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O-Acetylpsilocin https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/4-AcO-DMT

Bit of a tangent here but I noticed you used "her" instead of the default assumption of "him". Is this a new practice?

I think that's because the OP's handle is "EmilyHughes". Is "Emily" a name that's common for males?

I know some English names can go both ways like Evelyn or Shannon etc, but is Emily one of them?

Emil or Emlyn (Latin and Welsh) are similar male versions.

Assumption based on the username "EmilyHughes". Otherwise I would have used they/them or maybe a he/him would've slipped through, though I try to avoid that.

Does "if it works for you" also go for things like aspirin, antihistamines, antihypertensives, antibiotics, etc? I've never heard anyone say "if aspirin works for you then take it, but it doesn't work for me". I've only heard this kind of thing said for things like homeopathy, astrology, accupuncture, osteopathy, and microdosing, of course. Hence, I'm very skeptical.

[Edit: OK, I've heard people say that aspirin doesn't work for them, but what they meant was that they had pains that were too strong to respond to mere aspirin.]

psychoactive drugs are a whole different category. You bring your whole mental baggage with you when you take them, unlike aspirin.

How do you define "psychoactive"?

Anything that influences your psyche in an obvious way.

Isn't Aspirin psychoactive in the same way? I.e. it takes away pain, which influences your psyche in an obvious way.

You could argue that. there is no clear line of course, but most people would agree that a beer influences them more than aspirin or an antibiothic.

I see. To me, it is not very useful to talk about "psychoactive" substances, since sugar, caffeine, or nicotine are also "psychoactive". I would recommend the term "entheogens" in your original post.

Entheogen is even worse, that specifically means psychoactive drugs used for religious purposes. And guess what: nicotine is an entheogen!

It's nit psychoactive in the sense that is has any direct perceptible effect on the brain. It reduces inflammation, which can be perceived as less pain indirectly altering your mental state.

Whereas psychoactive drugs generally affect the actual underlying processes in the brain through various interactions with receptor, enzymes, or neurotransmitters.

I hope that distinction makes sense.

This is so disingenuous. Psilocybin directly affects levels of different neurotransmitters in the brain. Aspirin is an anti inflammatory.

It's not about disingenuousness, it's about the proper terminology. Caffeine is "psychoactive" yet very few people would say that you need to clear your mental baggage before you start drinking coffee.

It's a difference in the degree of effect. it seems there is some intentional focus on being pedantic and perfunctory.

Thank you for replying, but I would like to understand what "mental baggage" is and why it makes a difference. Why doesn't "mental baggage" affect aspirin?

Also, just to be clear, I don't think you're saying that you have to be in a special frame of mind for psychoactive drugs to make a difference. For example, I've been told that homeopathy doesn't work for me because I "don't believe in it", but I'm pretty sure that a sufficient dose of psilocybin would get me just as high as anyone else (modulo tolerance), belief or no belief.

Your prior mental state, past trauma, physical state and comfort, will have a significant impact on how your experience develops.

Any neuroticism can bubble to the surface and you might find yourself obsessing over a bad habit you have instead of enjoying the mystery and pattern of the universe.

Sorry, that sounds too mystical to me and I don't believe in the supernatural. I note you're not the OP though?

The phrase is “set and setting” meaning that it is strongly advised to only take psychedelics when you have a good mindset and a good setting. The thing about psychedelics is that you will have powerful mental imagery during the trip, that’s just how they work. So what is on your mind that day will affect what you think about, and with the power of psychedelics I’m told it could get scary or bad if you’re in a particularly bad mood.

For example I’ve twice taken mushrooms while I was lonely. About 1 gram. In both cases I ended up just feeling an amplified sense of loneliness that was very difficult to handle. Another time, and this wasn’t particularly bad, but I ended up thinking about my parents dying (they’re still alive) and it was a powerful feeling. That was good though, because after that I began to put more effort in to seeing them and spending time with them.

But my point is that the experience is a powerful mental experience that is affected by what is on your mind. So they strongly recommend only doing a trip if you have a good mindset and a good setting to do so. Otherwise wait.

By the way the parent comment is correct. Psychedelics bring up a powerful feeling of connectedness with the universe. You feel like you’re seeing patterns of the matter around you and you feel one with it all. I’m not a mystical person but that’s how I’ve felt on a strong trip.

Thanks for taking the time to explain, but if I understand correctly in the instances you relate, you were taking mushrooms specifically in order to get high, correct?

Whereas the OP (root of the thread) is talking about microdosing, which is, if I understand it correctly, taking drugs in an attempt to not get high, but get other benefits?

As to the "powerful feeling of connectedness with the universe", well, I've been drunk and I found that I loved everybody around me and I felt a strong emotional connection with total strangers. But, I was drunk. It's relaxing, it's disinhibiting, it's fun, it's making yourself deliberately and temporarily mentally impaired, why not? But there's nothing more to it.

In fact, I'd go as far as to say that the defining characteristic of intoxication, in my experience, is of being dumber than usual, which can be suprisingly enjoyable. Certainly not something to be desired as a constant state, though.

the importance of "set and setting" is almost universally known and easily verifiable. I've had terrible trips when stressed out and beautiful revelational ones when in the right frame of mind. shrooms are not as benign as alcohol. you're usually even less in control of your mental state, which can be both amazing and scary

I don't dispute the "set and setting" idea. I am asking why that makes a difference in the therapeutic or otherwise beneficial use of psilocybin and why it doesn't make any difference with other drugs like aspirin.

To clarify, as far as I understand, "set and setting" matters when taking psilocybin to get high, but microdosing is taking psilocybin (or other similar drugs) to very deliberatly not get high.

So what does "set and setting" have to do with microdosing, and why doesn't it matter with aspirin, which also doesn't get you high?

In the context of taking psychoactive mushrooms to get a proper trip, there are the concepts of a good trip, a bad trip, and steering your trip towards the former and away from the latter, based on your thought patterns and emotions (so actively pursuing the intent to have a good trip in your mind).

Now I've never microdosed mushrooms, but it's not hard for me to imagine that this same concept applies, of actively pursuing a good experience, which can steer that experience in a good direction. It will just be at a much smaller scale.

For myself I think of this phenomenon as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy (not meant as a judgement about others) which helps me to keep in mind that I'm the one in control (assuming doses are not excessively high, I think others in this thread call those "heroic doses").

I just want to say that “getting high” is a very crude way of describing a mushroom trip. I don’t really take them to have fun. It’s more serious than that. I take them because there are long term mental health benefits when taken with the right set and setting. (Research supports this claim.) When I had those thoughts about my parents dying, it was a subconscious fear of mine coming up from my mind, and it caused me to change my behavior to call and visit my parents more.

So I really don’t see it as “getting high”, and that’s why people call it a trip rather than getting high.

My point about the connectedness is that it’s not mysticism, that’s just how people really feel. Don’t misunderstand those descriptions as the person being more mystical than you. That’s how you’d feel on the right dose of mushrooms too.

> Does "if it works for you" > also go for things like > aspirin, antihistamines, > antihypertensives, > antibiotics, etc?

A lot of the time, yes. For example, I have a bad physical reaction to aspirin -- it makes me vomit. I've tried several times over my life, and each time I had the same result. It does not work for me in the common use, plain medical sense of the phrase.

It's really common, AFAIK, in psychiatry. Try this try that, gotta "find the molecule that works for you, we're all different". I believe that is a common occurrence. In my experience when my general practitioner wanted me to try something, it kinda felt like a shot in the dark as to which one we were gonna try, to be reevaluated at a later time if we should go for another.

It is quite common for different people have differing responses to medications like aspirin, antihistamines, and antihypertensives. For example my brother and I both have bad seasonal allergies. My brother takes Claritin for his and gets relief from the worse of his allergies when he does. If I take Claritin it doesn't reduce the impact of my allergies to any noticable degree. If I take Zyrtec my allergy symptoms are mostly eliminated.

I think you're right and not all medicine works on everyone, but if one antihistamine doesn't work on you, then another one probably will. Like you say, one works on you, the other doesn't. That seems to be down to genetics, or some kind of biological characteristic, I guess.

But, for example, I was told that homeopathy doesn't work for me because I don't believe in it. And I think what the OP says that it's OK if "it" (in this case, microdosing rather than homeopathy) doesn't work for you then that "is OK too" is something I hear the most not from people who find that, say, aspirin doesn't work for them but ibuprofen, or paracetamol, does; but rather what I hear from people who take a remedy that not only has no effect on others, but has no documented effect on most people and has no clear mechanism of action, other perhaps than the placebo effect (which I understand to be regression to the mean).

So that's why I'm skeptical. With normal medicine, drugs will have an effect on some people or others regardless of whether someone believes they will or not, but with alternative remedies, they will only have an effect on those who believe in them and we can only observe the effect by asking them how they feel (for example, no homeopathic remedy will ever reduce blood pressure).

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