However, when I started Dr. Fadiman’s protocol, I stopped using even the small amount of cannabis that was helping to soothe my shoulder pain. I didn’t want to confuse any results. Moreover, the consequences of mixing drugs, even nontoxic drugs, can be unpredictable.
When I woke up after my pain-filled, sleepless night, even before I got out of bed, I reached for my laptop with the arm attached to my good shoulder, and reread Dr. Fadiman’s protocol. This time I noticed something I had missed: the protocol can cause sleep disturbances. He writes, “Some people take something to get to sleep at their regular time.” This is something I have to figure out how to deal with.
Still, I have too many children to indulge in early morning self-pity. I flung back the covers and dragged myself downstairs. It wasn’t until I was in the kitchen, drinking my first cup of tea and ushering my kids out the door to catch their various buses and rides, that I noticed that I had managed much more easily than usual to shrug off my bad mood, even if my shoulder hurts too fucking much to shrug.
Something is happening. Whether it is all in my head remains to be seen.
* * *
*1 ?Two sentences and I’ve used the word “pain” three times. That about sums it up. Frozen shoulder hurts like a motherfucker. Worse than labor, worse than dental work.
*2 ?The term “opiate” generally refers only to those morphinelike substances found in opium (i.e., morphine, codeine, and thebaine). The newer and more inclusive term “opioid” refers to opiates, semi-synthetics (e.g., heroin, oxycodone, hydrocodone, etc.), and synthetics (methadone, fentanyl, etc.). Because this distinction can be distracting and confusing, I’m going to use the term “opioid” exclusively.
*3 ?And are probably what made Rush Limbaugh go deaf, though they can’t be blamed for the fact that the only voice he’s ever been able to hear is his own.
*4 ?They took most of the coke out of Coke in 1903, but it took them a further twenty-six years to perfect the process and entirely rid the coca leaf of its psychoactive substances.
Day 3
Normal Day
Physical Sensations: None.
Mood: Irritable, depressed, anxious.
Conflict: Picked a fight with my husband.
Sleep: Another bad night.
Work: Weirdly productive considering my crappy mood.
Pain: Ugh.
I know the protocol has a purpose, that the two days off are designed both to prevent me from developing a tolerance to the LSD, and to provide the experience of periodic “normal” days so I can better assess the quality of my mood on the Microdose and Transition Days, but it’s the first Day 3 of the cycle, and I already hate it. Once again, the pain in my shoulder woke me in the middle of the night. I miss the peace of yesterday afternoon, the peace that allowed me to wince in pain and then remind myself that frozen shoulder never lasts longer than a year or two. Three, tops. Today, rather than consider the therapeutic effects of time, I grumble that it’s already been a year, I cannot handle two more, and even after the shoulder thaws, there usually remain residual restrictions in movement. Today I have lost perspective. No. I have perspective. I have the perspective that, as bad as my pain is, worse is the humiliation of suffering an ailment whose risk factors are primarily being over forty and being a woman. As if turning the big 5-0 wasn’t bad enough, now I am forced to spend my nights tossing and turning from what the Chinese call “fifty-year shoulder.” George Clooney is fifty-five. Does he have to put up with this shit?
Last night, as I lay in bed trying to force myself to sleep, I felt an all-too-familiar sensation, one that I’d na?vely hoped the microdosing would short-circuit. I felt like I was crawling out of my skin. I tossed and turned, flinging my limbs around, groaning with frustration. My stomach began to roil, and I suddenly remembered the story I’d read recently in the Hypochondriac’s Bible (aka the Tuesday Health section of The New York Times). A woman experiences a heart attack differently from a man. Her symptoms aren’t limited to the left side of her chest and her left arm. Instead of chest pain, she may experience a sense of fullness. I felt full! Also empty. Or maybe neither. I certainly felt something. And my stomach hurt, another symptom. I was sweating, too.
It’s wrong to say I was sure I was having a heart attack, but I definitely considered it a possibility.
What kind of a wretchedly irresponsible idiot was I, taking an illegal drug, especially one so widely considered to be dangerous? I am a mother, for God’s sake! How could I even consider taking these risks? My mind jumped ahead to when EMTs would be strapping me to a gurney, asking, “Ma’am, are there any drugs you are taking that we should know about?” and me, in the midst of my heart attack, being like “Funny you should ask. Have you ever heard of microdosing?”
The reason I didn’t use as many drugs as so many of my college contemporaries was that I was afraid not just of losing control but of losing my mind or my life. Of all the drugs on offer, LSD was the one I was most terrified of. I believed LSD to be on a par with heroin and methamphetamine, or perhaps even more dangerous. Lying in bed last night, I felt that fear overwhelm me. I tried to breathe, to remind myself that I had carefully researched the drug before beginning this experiment. In my mind, I ran through everything that I had learned.
Though I don’t consider myself a gullible person, and though my work in drug policy reform has made me more familiar than most people with the way drugs have been represented and misrepresented throughout history—with some harms downplayed, others exaggerated—before beginning this experiment I had swallowed without question all the stories I had heard about LSD. I believed that people who took LSD experienced lifelong “acid flashbacks” that prevented them from leading normal lives. I believed they flung themselves off the roofs of buildings under the illusion that they could fly. I even believed a rumor I’d heard in high school, that a person who uses LSD more than seven times inevitably becomes psychotic. I was flabbergasted when I met my husband and he told me he’d dropped acid nine times. He’s pretty much the least psychotic person I’ve ever met. In fact, he’s almost disturbingly sane.
Those fears, I told myself sternly as I felt around in my wrist for my pulse,*1 are not borne out by the facts. Whatever I and so many others have heard, in the nearly eighty years since the drug was first synthesized, at least twenty million Americans and many more millions of people around the world have used LSD, to very little ill effect.