LSD Might Save The World (But Microdosing Won’t)
In 2015, microdosing seemed set to take over Silicon Valley. Rolling Stone declared that it was the “hot new business trip”; Forbes worried about the “disturbing new trend”. Jumping on the public fascination with the topic, Paul Austin founded his company The Third Wave in late 2015, creating a resource for people interested in microdosing. Microdosing promised a better you, and particularly a better you at work. Faster, calmer, more productive: a drug for the capitalist age, without the asshole factor of coke.
But new research by neuroscientists like Mendel Kaelen, a post-doctoral researcher at Imperial College London and founder of Wavepaths, as well as The Third Wave’s own slow change in direction, suggests that microdosing is not the solution that we were promised — or perhaps that we were looking at the wrong problem. Both men are looking at the potential of not the micro but the macrodose. Kaelen is working to use psychedelics to revolutionalise the mental health industry; Austin wants to reform the very idea of industry today.
But let’s take a step back.
Microdosing involves taking very minute doses of LSD or psilocybin mushrooms — say 15 micrograms, versus a normal dose of 100–120 micrograms — in what’s called a sub-perceptible dose: while your sense of smell or touch may be enhanced, there are no real visual effects, and you won’t trip. People may do this for a longer or shorter period or time; twice a week for six months, for example. A lot of microdosers — including Austin — credit the practice for increased productivity, better self-discipline, alleviating social awkwardness, and helping address mental health issues like depression or anxiety.
It is still very early days for the concept of microdosing and nearly all evidence of its potential is anecdotal. Kaelen, whose research explores the use of psychedelic therapy to improve mental health and wellbeing, stresses the lack of research around the subject.
“The microdosing model is in fact following the conventional pharmacotherapeutic approach, in which a drug is taken regularly and for long stretches of time,” he explains over email. “There is currently no scientific evidence for any of the claims the microdosing community makes, or for its safety, let alone for its potential to treat mental illness.”
Austin is more enthusiastic, though now hesitant to push microdosing as a solution in itself.
“We don’t have any longitudinal data or research about whether or not low-dose consistent psychedelic use is safe,” he says. “Speculatively speaking, it’s likely fine. But it’s good to err on the side of caution. So usually what I say to people is, utilize a microdosing regimen but don’t rely on having to microdose for the rest of your life. Instead, utilize microdosing as something that can help you build better sustainable habits, like meditating, breathwork, eating well, exercising, getting enough sleep.”
Even Austin, who advocates for microdosing with much more certainty than Kaelen, sees it as a tool, or better yet, a stepping stone.
“Microdosing is non-threatening,” Austin says. “But one of my big hopes is that people who microdose go and take that bigger step, and take a macrodose.”
And it is in the larger doses of psychedelics that we can begin to see the possibility for a huge, transformative shift of our culture. For Kaelen, the all-important focus is the mental health field, which needs innovation urgently. 300 million people suffer from depression every year, 30% of whom don’t respond to any form of treatment. In 2010, global costs for mental illness were €2.2 trillion; this is projected to increase to €5.4 trillion by 2030.
Kaelen’s project Wavepaths seeks to explore some of the potential breakthroughs psychedelic therapy can offer, twinning a medium to high dose of a classic psychedelic (usually LSD) with music, which the patient listens to for four to seven hours under the supervision of a psychotherapist.
The potential for psychedelic therapy is, Kaelen believes, huge. “Many mental health problems are characterised by a desire to move away from oneself, which is understandable when the body, or more broadly speaking, the present moment, is riddled with trauma, discomfort and confusion. Healing takes place when one can in fact return to the body, and listen to it.”
Austin, too, is following closely the links between psychedelics and mental health, and the ways in which this research will shift long-held cultural baggage around psychedelic use. Cannabis, which was approved for medical use in 1996, is a good model; its medicalization led to widespread acceptance and familiarity with cannabis after patients spread the good word. Psychedelics are entering a similar period, with MDMA recently being granted breakthrough therapy status by the FDA. But there will be a need for more educational resources built on scientific evidence for a new and curious audience — “and that’s why we created the Third Wave.”
But it doesn’t end there. “As more and more education develops, that’s when we begin to push legal initiatives to first decriminalize psychedelics, but then also to create a legal, regulated framework where individuals can go into a pharmacy and potentially get psychedelics to use at home as they wish,” Austin says. “That’s kind of the 10–15 year plan, so to say.”
Kaelen is more cautious. A cultural and political challenge as psychedelic therapy steps into the mainstream, he says, will be “to instill an appropriate understanding of what psychedelic therapy is and what it is not. Psychedelics may be safe in the particular context of psychedelic therapy, but these findings should not be loosely extrapolated to recreational use.” Psychedelic plants have been used in spiritual ceremonies for millennia, but for the modern west, we’re only beginning to learn how to use these tools.
It’s early days. Kaelen’s scientific, strictly controlled approach is undoubtedly what psychedelic therapy needs right now, and it’s gratifying to know that the bulk of psychedelic research is going towards the people who need it most: those suffering from mental illness or trauma, particularly those for whom conventional mental health treatment options are not working at all.
But Austin too presents an interesting, transformative look at the future, and how psychedelics may transform other realms of 21st century existence. “What’s the applicability of [psychedelic use] within a 21st century business context?” he asks, and is asking, in his public speaking and a new series of retreats for professionals. “What lessons can we learn from the psychedelic experience that can teach us how to do business in a more sustainable, healthy way?”
Austin is speaking quickly, passionately, lining up the possibilities as he sees them. “I think because of what psychedelics do — this process of ego-dissolution, this paradigm shift… I think that holds tremendous potential for then how we facilitate leadership from a business perspective [and] for how we approach work, where instead of it being ‘how much work can we do?’, it’s ‘how can we do really impactful work that aligns with a deep sense of purpose or meaning, and how can we enjoy the other beautiful parts of life, the relationships that we have, the nature that we have, the food we eat?’”
It’s likely that it’s on the macrodose level, not the microdose, that we’ll find these answers, if the answers are out there. Certainly the mental health revolution that Kaelen is looking for won’t be found amongst the microdosing communities of the Silicon Valley. The future — and the wild potential — of LSD lies not in how it will help our daily life and work run smoother, but in how it will transform these days entirely.
Written by Mikaella Clements/images by Rosalba Porpora
This month’s theme is HAPPINESS, because March = spring and with it, the knowledge that you’ve made it through the waking nightmare that was winter 2017–8 (RIP).
