A friend said, “Your mood is lighter, even buoyant. Even in moments of stress, you’re still present. You’re more flexible. Your texts and e-mails are chill and friendly, polite. You don’t seem to stew. Even when you’re faced with irritation, you’re still quick to smile.” Stewing less, smiling more. Not bad.
I have felt different and I have been different. Whether it’s the microdose, or the placebo effect, over the past month I have had many days at the end of which I looked back and thought, That was a really good day.
When I began this experiment, I wanted to find a solution to an intractable mood problem, and in many ways I have. Microdosing with LSD worked—in the short term, at least. I have no idea if the positive effects would continue with consistent use, if in fact microdosing would be a permanent solution to the problem of my mental health. I realize now, however, that when I embarked on this month one thing I failed to consider, out of the million things I frantically considered and reconsidered again, was the ramifications of success.
Now what?
There is no doubt in my mind that if LSD were legal I would continue to take it. But it’s not. There is a paradox inherent in my situation. Here I am, living in the most drug-obsessed culture in the world, where researchers estimate that somewhere between 8 and 10 percent of the population are on antidepressants,*2 not to mention the myriad other substances people ingest every day, prescription and otherwise, but the one drug I have found that actually helps me I am forbidden to take. I could swallow habit-forming and Alzheimer’s-causing benzos by the handful, and that would be fine, but a tiny dose of a drug that seems at this point to have no discernible side effects? That’s a crime. I am a basically law-abiding citizen who prides herself on her honesty; do I spend the rest of my life breaking the law?
Even if I were to decide that the positive results are worth such an ethically problematic choice, how would I ever find the drug? Whoever Lewis Carroll is, he’s not been in touch with me again. For all I know, he’s dead and making ghostly appearances in the hallucinations of his old friends. I’ve proved definitively that I am too anxious and inept to buy drugs on the illegal market. Even if I want to continue, I have no source.
And yet, if I decide that I am not willing to embark on a program that would require the continual commission of a crime, what then? Once the Doors of Perception are slammed shut, will I necessarily slip back into despondency, irritability, and familial strife? Or might the positive effects linger? After all, the individuals in the end-of-life studies who took large doses of psilocybin experienced change that lasted for months, to the ends of their lives. Though my individual doses are tiny, I’ve actually taken a comparable dose to theirs over the course of the month. It’s not impossible to imagine that the benefits might linger, especially since one of the most important positive outcomes was my ability to take better advantage of the lessons of therapy. Perhaps the Doors of Perception, once opened to therapy, might not be so quick to slam shut.
What I long for is the kind of answer that only real research by legitimate scientists under controlled circumstances can provide. If this ad-hoc thirty-day experiment has any message, it’s that more and better research is needed.
* * *
*1 ?That was the day when I suddenly decided to describe this experiment to a physical therapist I barely knew.
*2 ?Julia Calderone, “The Rise of All-Purpose Antidepressants.”
Afterword
I began this experiment as a search for happiness, and though microdosing with LSD elevated my mood far more effectively than SSRIs, it actually did something even more important. Over the course of the month, I came to realize that happiness, though delightful, is not really the point. I had so many really good days, but they didn’t necessarily come from being happy. The microdose lessened the force of the riptide of negative emotions that so often sweeps me away, and made room in my mind not necessarily for joy, but for insight. It allowed me a little space to consider how to act in accordance with my values, not just react to external stimuli. This, not the razzle-dazzle of pleasure, was its gift.
A while after my microdose experiment ended, my husband and I took our children on a trip. After a long day driving on precarious twisting and turning roads, we pulled into the outskirts of an unlovely town. A grim drizzle started at precisely the moment when the indicator lights on the dashboard began to flicker. We stopped at a traffic light, and the engine cut out. The electrical system had failed.
We managed to pull over to the side of the road, but we were in the middle of a busy intersection and it was rush hour. All manner of vehicles trundled by us: trucks and cars, three-wheeled auto rickshaws, and scooters. We sat in the car for a while as I tried to call someone at the office of our tour operator and rental-car company. When I finally reached the emergency agent, she promised me that a replacement vehicle would be brought to us, but warned that it might take an hour. Or two. Maybe a little more.
I glanced out the window. The drizzle was flirting with turning into rain. It was dark and wet, and we’d been driving for nearly ten hours. After a few minutes, my four kids and my husband decided to get out. Better a cool rain by the side of the road than the muggy heat of the car, they announced. I stayed inside, scrolling through my phone, trying to figure out how to hustle along the tour operator. Normally, nothing makes me so irritable as this kind of snafu. I love travel, but I’m far too easily bothered by its routine challenges. Delayed flights, missed trains, lost reservations have always made me blow my stack. As much as I love the “being there” part, I dread the “getting there,” because I know that if something goes wrong I’m likely to lose it.
But as I sat in that car, I realized that my searching was more pro forma than panicked. I hadn’t lost it. I wasn’t even really upset. What was the point, I thought, of getting all worked up? The operator had told me it would be an hour or two. What more could I do, other than drive myself crazy trying to solve a problem out of my control? At the time, I didn’t even notice how out of character this sensible thought was. Desperately trying to solve problems out of my control has always been my stock in trade.
From outside, I heard a loud (and familiar) noise. I got out of the car, tromped through the dirt by the side of the road, and walked around to the rear. My kids and their father were standing in a circle in the rain. Passing headlights lit them up, and I saw that they had arranged themselves into an impromptu “cypha,” and were taking turns beatboxing and rhyming freestyle. They spat rhymes about our car trouble, about the animal preserve we’d visited earlier in the week, about the beds they’d shared in different hotels, about the new food they’d tried (What rhymes with “egg hopper”? “Show stopper”! “Eye dropper”!), about each other.