I spent the afternoon with Jim Fadiman in Santa Cruz, at his modest work retreat, a small, unrenovated apartment with a million-dollar view of the Pacific. The surfers were out, bobbing and paddling through the swells, as seagulls pinwheeled through the sky. The view of crashing surf is so compelling that Fadiman has had to turn his desk to face the wall in order to accomplish anything. Maybe I should stop kvetching about feeling claustrophobic facing a wall in my husband’s studio and pretend that I have to sit that way because there is something behind me so breathtakingly beautiful that I could not do a lick of work if I faced the other direction.
Fadiman uses the apartment as a private space to work, away from the distractions of home and, presumably, of his wife of many decades, Dorothy, a documentary filmmaker. Together they have two daughters, both of whom are grown. He speaks of them fondly and with charming paternal pride.
His bookshelves are stuffed with many of the same volumes that I’ve been accumulating in my own psychedelic library: Hofmann’s LSD, My Problem Child, Tom Shroder’s Acid Test, Ram Dass’s Be Here Now, and Henri Michaux’s Miserable Miracle. I wonder if, when his daughters were young, their reactions to the books were the same as my children’s, a puzzled frown, a rolled eye, a sniff that somehow manages to encompass both disgust and curiosity.
In addition to having a similar library, Fadiman drives the same car as I do, a silver Prius—which, to be fair, is the least coincidental of coincidences. We live in the Bay Area. I once parked my car in a row of half a dozen identical ones in the parking lot of my local Whole Foods.*1 Still, same books, same car, same psychedelic interests.
Over Chinese food at his favorite local restaurant, Fadiman told me the story of his life, from the time the government shut down his research and derailed the career for which he had been trained at Harvard and Stanford, until his recent work collecting narratives of microdosing. He is the most companionable of conversationalists. Even when talking about his own life, he makes room for questions and opinions. For a man who does so many interviews and speaks in public so often, he seems uninvested in listening to the sound of his own voice. He asks questions in a nonjudgmental way that encourages confidences. He seems trustworthy and, above all, interested. Though, honestly, how do I really know that? I’ve only interviewed the man a few times. Maybe his daughters complain that he monopolizes the conversation and never evinces any interest in what they have to say. For all I know he might have given them a box of tapes of himself droning on to his therapist about forced collectivization in the Ukraine.
Fadiman told me that when the International Foundation for Advanced Study shut its doors, he began a career as a successful management consultant, working for companies like Lockheed, Dow Chemical, and Foster’s Freeze on human resources issues. He cofounded the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, now known as Sofia University, focused on integrating concepts of spirituality and transcendence with emotional and personal development. He published textbooks and even a novel. He was invited frequently to lecture on the topic of his early psychedelic research, but he was not part of the psychedelic underground, not a member of any of the groups of sixties “psychonauts” who continued to experiment with various mind-altering drugs. He wrote, he taught, he lectured, and he worked.
And then, in 2008, Fadiman was invited to Chicago to give a lecture about the history of psychedelic research. There he met a woman he refers to as “Madeline,” whose narrative of microdosing he included in The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide. Madeline worked, took care of her children, was a partner to her spouse, all while consuming tiny doses of LSD. She had been regularly microdosing with LSD for years, taking the drug on average six days out of every month, sometimes more if she was working on “a project requiring extraordinary focus.” Madeline came to microdosing on her own, without guidance, but eventually she learned what Fadiman had already, that Albert Hofmann himself had regularly microdosed for the last decades of his long life.
Fadiman found out about Hofmann’s novel use of the drug from one of his neighbors in Santa Cruz, a man named Robert Forte. According to Forte, Hofmann believed that, had Sandoz Pharmaceuticals been willing, they could have brought to market a version of LSD in a small dose that could have competed with stimulants like Ritalin and Adderall. Imagine a world where frazzled school counselors call parents to say, “Listen, we really think you need to put your kid on LSD.” Terence McKenna, an ethnobotanist and psychedelic lecturer, also reported that Hofmann had informed him that he made a regular practice of microdosing—particularly, Hofmann apparently said, when walking among “tall trees.”*2