I have recently found myself prone to bouts of situational depression (lost job, getting divorced, etc…), and responded extraordinarily badly to the anti-depressants my doctor prescribed me. While researching out-of-the-box solutions, I came across micro-dosing LSD as a potential candidate to inner peace. The nutshell summary is that by taking very low doses (i.e 1/10th of a ‘recreational dose’) semi-regularly (i.e. every 4 days), some neurological alchemy happens whereby your brain subtly re-wires itself to help the psychonaut become better-endowed with perspective, stability and all-round emotional well-being. The idea is specifically to not get high - the micro-dose is supposed to be so small that you either don’t feel it, or barely do.
(I should note that I had never done LSD before now. It’s not that I’m a pearl-clutcher when it comes to recreational drugs - rather, that reports of its effects have never sounded very appealing. When people describe how it 'melts the fabric of time and space" (etc…), my immediate thoughts are “I have no beef with the fabric of time and space - why would I want to melt it?”)
Welp, after 3 weeks I can report that…
- I do feel better, but maybe that’s because placebo, or maybe because my living situation has been steadily improving. It’s difficult to know how much to assign to it.
- LSD is a ridiculously potent drug, doses of which are measured in micrograms/microlitres. Portioning out a 10-microgram dose of anything, knowing that if you get it wrong you could end up on a one-way trip to loopy-ville, is a terrifying process involving bacteriostatic water, insulin syringes and fairly obsessively-calculated and re-checked mathematical formulae.
- Even then, sometimes I have got it wrong. A few days ago I got back from the gym after micro-dosing first thing in the morning, noting that I felt a bit light-headed upon my return. It was the living room furniture that informed me that the treadmill wasn’t to blame, and that I had in fact failed to measure my micro-dose with adequate caution. I was mildly tripping balls for the rest of the day, and had a lot of psychic conversations with inanimate objects. This was not in any way ‘therapeutic’. Amusing? At times. Unsettling? That too. At the end of it all I didn’t feel like Buddha; I felt tired and a bit silly.
- Actual scientific research on this is inconclusive at best. I shall dare to summarise thusly: micro-dosing LSD certainly does something to the brain, but controlled trials do not replicate the wildly enthusiastic self-reported results found on Reddit, YouTube, etc…Maybe it works for some people but not others. Maybe it does work, but the research methodology has been flawed. Or maybe it’s just yet another snake-oil solution that belongs in the realms of pseudo-science and alternative medicine.
- I am, like the science community, unsure and divided. But I have a little bottle of diluted LSD which will keep me going for at least another decade, so might as well use 'em while I got 'em.