Microdosing study shows the placebo effect of taking psychelics
I won&#x27;t discuss the study much itself (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;elifesciences.org&#x2F;articles&#x2F;62878" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;elifesciences.org&#x2F;articles&#x2F;62878</a> for the link to the actual paper btw), except to point out how sad this state of affairs is:<p>&gt; A key limitation of the present study is the lack of verification of the nature, purity, and dosage of the psychedelic substance used for microdosing. Psilocybin-containing mushrooms were used by 23% of the sample, 14% used legal LSD analogues (such as 1P-LSD), whereas 62% sourced their substance from the black market, mostly LSD (61%).<p>Oh, and this was interesting:<p>&gt; We note that according to our data the threshold LSD dose where participants guess better than random is 12 µg, see Figure 4, which is in line with the 13 µg threshold dose estimated by a recent dose controlled study<p>So in this group 12ug is roughly where the consciously notable effects begin (for this study population). For context, it&#x27;s commonly said that &quot;if you can feel it then it&#x27;s not a microdose&quot;; I consider ~5ug to be a microdose.<p>---<p>Anyway, I&#x27;ve got a lot of experience in this area because I microdosed ~4-5 ug LSD per day, every day, for about a year and a half. Also, this was from LSD liquid I made myself starting from raw crystal. So while I don&#x27;t know the purity of the crystal itself, I at least knew how much of &quot;my&quot; crystal I was taking. (Getting a proper purity figure requires performing GC&#x2F;MS - which you can only get done legally by sending a &gt;=50 mg sample to EnergyControl in Spain, and I elected not to because I didn&#x27;t want to have to sacrifice 50mg (= 500 doses) of crystal to send them)<p>For someone like me who is (relatively speaking) experienced with psychedelics, I can absolutely notice 5ug (it&#x27;s subtle, of course, but definitely there), so note that the ~12ug detectability threshold they found in the study depends on how attuned the user is to the effects, etc. Really when most people talk about &quot;noticing&quot; something they don&#x27;t actually &quot;notice&quot; it until they hit the point where they are incapable of <i>not noticing</i> it (for example, someone drinking for the first time will claim they feel the same 20 minutes after taking a shot, and when they finally admit that they&#x27;re &quot;drunk&quot; they&#x27;re properly drunk and not just &quot;buzzed&quot;)<p>Anyway, enough rambling. Microdosing had an effect, but I took it for the same reasons (albeit smaller-scale) that I would take a full dose of LSD: increased energy, an increased &quot;non-linearity&quot; of thought patterns that is counterbalanced by the more traditionally stimulating effects of LSD (LSD is a Dopamine receptor D2 agonist), improved visual acuity and vibrancy of colors (well, full doses don&#x27;t &quot;improve&quot; your visual acuity since a psychedelic dose cranks up the pattern recognition&#x2F;perception  transformation weights of your brain way past a functional state)<p>That is to say, that I wasn&#x27;t microdosing to miraculously change my life or anything like that. Microdosing won&#x27;t do that and the annoyingly-pro-microdosing-to-a-fault crowd really needs to get that.<p>While I&#x27;m rambling, I&#x27;ll add that I personally have almost never taken LSD for a &quot;spiritual transformation&quot; or whatever you want to call it; I find psilocybin mushrooms to be far superior in that aspect. Basically, relatively speaking mushrooms cause much more &quot;mindfuck&quot; and for me I had the distinct sensation of feeling the shrooms taking over my brain (in a benevolent sense, or at least neutral), whereas LSD is a more visual experience and more energetic (likely due to the d2 receptor agonism I mentioned earlier as well as the general structure of LSD looking like a sort of psychedelic phenethylamine, phenthylamine itself being very amphetamine-like).<p>That is to say, both shrooms and LSD are very similar; the &quot;magic&quot; of the classical psychedelics - LSD, psilocybin, mescaline - is primarily attributable to their action at the 5-HT2A receptor (read: &quot;serotonin subtype 2a receptor&quot;), and that is by far the most distinctive and noticeable part of the psychedelic experience. But comparing between the psychedelics, with shrooms it takes much more &quot;mindfuck&quot; to get to a certain level of &quot;visuals&quot;, and vice versa with LSD. Note I&#x27;ve talked to people who claim it&#x27;s the other way around for them, but frankly these have always been people with limited experience and&#x2F;or who don&#x27;t think about psychedelics very deeply (in the analytical sense of really trying to grok them) so I personally still consider &quot;take shrooms for the 3-6 hour mindfuck and LSD for the 8-12 hour aesthetic, energetic, kinesthetic experience&quot; to be canon.<p>I&#x27;ve kind of accepted that I&#x27;m not going to have a coherent message with this post, but psychedelics are largely misunderstood, either by their opponents as causing &quot;hallucinations&quot; (no) and by the zealots as being a magical cure-all or microdosing specifically being a life-changing practice. For me, taking 3g of psilocybe cubensis mushrooms on a beach as my first real trip flipped me inside out and rewired my value structures. No longer was the (unconscious) desire for social approval vis-a-vis a prestigious&#x2F;well-paying career at the top of my value structure; instead, spending a warm day on the beach with friends while wearing as little clothing as possible became what was most worthwhile and beautiful. Without trying to do so, I was analyzing my past, present and future.<p>You see, while I meant it when I said that psychedelics are <i>not</i> a cure-all, they <i>are</i> (or more accurately, can be) the cure for many things. One of the most well-accepted findings in psychology is that, in general, your personality is incredibly non-malleable, and tends to persist across time. Well, psychedelics are the only thing I know of that can reliably and radically change one&#x27;s personality, specifically the big 5 dimension of &quot;openness to experience&quot;.<p>Even an hour of sitting &quot;outside&quot; of your self can reveal things that sober you is incapable of noticing. And, just as once one human broke the 4 minute mile mark suddenly everybody started doing it, once you step outside of your &quot;issue&quot; du jour, however briefly - your neuroticism, your jealousy, your fear of emotional expression, your unconscious belief that you are incapable of love, etc - suddenly you&#x27;ve really <i>seen</i> that there&#x27;s a different way of living. Not seen it in the intellectual sense but really consciously experienced it.<p>So when sobriety returns, barring a day or two of afterglow, you&#x27;re soon largely back to your old self - and yet having experienced that alternate way, you have a chance to see yourself right now the way you&#x27;d look back on your life on your deathbed: suddenly the things you thought were the small things - a friend&#x27;s smile, the contented look on your dog when you scratch them just right - were the big things all along. And the big things, the things we tell ourselves are the serious things, the adult things - we see them for the tiny, insignificant implementation details that they are.<p>So, psychedelics can wash away a type of sickness that most suffer from unknowingly. But they can only do so when you take enough that you cease to be capable of operating in that old mode anymore. Which means invariably there&#x27;s always a period during the come-up when you realize you had no idea what you were signing up for.<p>But they are tools - very sharp ones - and like all very sharp tools can cause tremendous damage. One of my greatest regrets was selling two very strong tabs to someone who I had assumed knew what they were doing, and so didn&#x27;t spend time giving the usual disclaimers &#x2F; tutorial I&#x27;d give to clients. These were very strong tabs so it&#x27;d be something like 3-4 tabs of 100ug. I can&#x27;t give as much detail as I want, (let&#x27;s just say that I found much of this out from the news articles after the fact), but suffice to say that they took the tabs at night and ended up in a sort of &quot;fugue state&quot; (not sure what the right clinical term would be) where they stripped completely naked (a surprisingly common action of those on massive doses of psychedelics), knocked on the door of a random citizen asking for help, then started attacking them when they opened the door. As I later learned, they were ex-military and had diagnosed PTSD and god knows what else (one of the many myriad &quot;benefits&quot; of the war on drugs is never knowing the medical status of people who you&#x27;re selling powerful drugs to unless they proactively tell you). To be clear, even on ~400ug LSD it is not normal to perform violent home invasions while in a blacked-out-like state, and there were a LOT of things that had to go wrong (PTSD + probably bad at handling psychs in general + taking them in the middle of the night + other factors I&#x27;m unaware of) for such a freak incident to occur. When you move the equivalent of 10,000 hits, statistically speaking you&#x27;ll end up with one of those stories eventually.<p>So, don&#x27;t drink the microdosing kool-aid too much - do it for fun and the experience if you want but don&#x27;t pretend it&#x27;s going to be a radical transformation - and understand that psychedelics can cause positive changes in a way that can [help] solve problems that are resistant to every traditional tool we have. But they can also be quite dangerous. I actually think the risk of a &#x27;bad trip&#x27; is incredibly overblown and most people freak themselves out way too much about such things, but neither should one take a cavalier attitude.<p>[&#x2F;unstructured ramble]