Sophia Korb on Microdosing

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Ethan Edelman, and this is Psychoactive, a production
of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. Psychoactive is the
show where we talk about all things drugs. But any
views expressed here do not represent those of I Heart Media,
Protozoa Pictures, or their executives and employees. Indeed, heed, as

(00:23):
an inveterate contrarian, I can tell you they may not
even represent my own. And nothing contained in this show
should be used as medical advice or encouragement to use
any type of drugs. Hello Psychoactive listeners. So today's episode

(00:45):
is about micro dozing, specifically of psychedelics, mostly LSD and
psilocybin mushrooms. My guest is Sophia Corb. She is a
psychotherapist working in two on Arizona, primarily with people you
know suffering from trauma. But my main reason for having
her on today is that she has been the point

(01:09):
person on a global survey of people who micro dos
now numbering up to eighteen thousand people from around the world,
and she's been working very closely on all of this
with James Fadiman, who many regard as the godfather of
micro docing. So I decided to have her on as
our specialist. So, Soythhia, thank you ever so much for

(01:30):
joining me on Psychoactive. Thank you for having me. So
let me just start off with some of the you know,
the kind of basics about micro docing. I mean, the
first one is what is micro docing? How do you
define micro docing? So, in general in medicine, when we
talk about microdocing, we're talking about a different response from
a large dose of something to a small dose. So

(01:50):
there could be micro docing of hormones, or micro docing
of another substance, or microdocing of psychedelics, So with microdocing
of psychedelics or not looking for a trip experience, but
there is a medical effect even at a very low dose.
Albert Hoffman, the inventor of LSD, had said that he
thought there would be a medical benefit of taking like
a quarter of a tab or a third of a tab.

(02:11):
So he had taught that to his students um and
so people have started doing these journals. They would take
like a quarter tab every few days and they would
write in a journal about their experience. So that's what
we thought microdosing would was going to be initially, then
later we found that it was much much smaller doses
that created a medical effect. Mm hmmm. So Albert Hoffman

(02:32):
kind of comes up with this idea, but it sounds
a bit like he's talking more about what we might call,
you know, not micro dosing, but mini dosing, where people
are actually experiencing the effect of the psychedelic but at
a you know, not a full blow in uh, you know,
macrodose level. But it's also something they're definitely aware of.
I think most of our listeners will know Albert Hoffman,
who sort of discovered or invented LSD back in the

(02:54):
nineteen forties, was he actually thinking about micro dose at
all on the way we think about it today. I
think it's impossible for us to know. The best evidence
that we have is from his students saying like he
was really interested in this, but wasn't quite sure what
it would look like, and was he himself doing it?
Not that I know of Hoffman's students did, but I

(03:15):
don't know if Hoffman did. I see. So I've typically
said that when it comes to l s D people
or any other drugs that we're talking about one tenth
or one what would be a normal macro dose level.
Is that basically what you say, Yeah, no visual difference,
no visual hallucinations. We initially told people there won't be
any perceptual difference, which is true in a way, but

(03:38):
we mean that there won't be you won't have hallucinations.
You might perceive that something is different, and that was
one part of confusion in the initial literature. We didn't
mean like you couldn't tell that you took a microdose.
Who just meant that you wouldn't be seeing things. What
Jim often says is like the laws are breathing even
a little, you've taken too much. So the idea is
micro dose that you should be receiving some difference, right,

(04:03):
this is this is going to get into this conversation
about placebo and double blind Right. So if what we
call breaking the blind is when someone can tell what
arm of a study that they're in, So in micro
Doo saying it's very hard to create what's called an
active placebo, which is where you'd effectively be able to
fool people into thinking that they weren't sure if they
had taken LSD or psilocybin or not. So that's very

(04:26):
very hard because people know what it's like to take
LSD or know what it's like to take psilocybin. And
it's hard to create an active placebo, especially if you're
using bladder paper because nothing else fits on bladder paper
that can cause like a very similar effect. So you
might think something like in the n y U studies
when they did the psilocybin studies, they used forty milligrams

(04:47):
of riddle in um as the control group. So that's
an active control. And if people had were psychedelics naive
and they had read something about psychedelics, they might expect
to have some different thoughts, to have more energy, and
they might expect the experience to last between four and
six hours. That I'll fit in with riddle in But
you can't get riddle of water paper and it won't
work for a microdoce. So that's one of the major

(05:09):
struggles in creating an effective double blind experiment. I see.
And what if one were to design studies that did
both a kind of total placebo, you know, with nothing
of sugar bail type effect and with a low dose
amphetamine and then with you know, different micro doses of
varying levels, I mean, with that help to get at it,
or that might that be a design of future Yes,
I think that that could be a design in future studies.

(05:31):
I think that when we're looking at things like depression,
we need to think about what exactly a placebo effect
for the treatment of depression would mean. How could someone
have a placebo effect? Do they think that they're not
as depressed as they are? Yeah? That becomes a little
bit tricky, right, because the perception of well being is

(05:52):
placebo effect and is also the opposite of depression. Huh.
So then you get into like, Okay, what what are
we doing and what is the what's the exact thing
that we're trying to get at right now? And if
you're creating a sense of well being in people, no
matter how we're doing it, that's going to take away
the their sense of depression. So with micro dosing, right,

(06:12):
it's not just about taking this lower dose, which I
think if I've often seen described this one or one
the kind of normal dose for a second. So that's
what we had, that's what we had normalized. After this
idea of like a third or a quarter, we realized
that people were still like they were like, I can't
sleep at night if I take like a quarter of
a tab, so we reduced it. We said, maybe tried
ten percent, maybe tried, and that seemed to still have

(06:35):
medical effects for people, but not be so overwhelming. Right,
So if people have a normal dose to say on
always going to be a hundred micrograms, under fifty would
mean taking ten or fifteen or maybe less, maybe as
low as five, right, And we've seen we've seen medical
benefit as low as two. And like, I'm pretty skeptical,
so I of course didn't think that people could effectively

(06:56):
dose themselves at too. But like this woman's husband was
a chemist and he did the dosing, so I trust
that he was able to get two micrograms. Yeah, and
I guess some of it depends on tolerance. You know,
watching your talk at Horizon Sofa, one of the best
laugh lines when you talked about, you know, well, the
normal dose from micro dose for many people with LSD
might be you know, five micrograms to micrograms. But when

(07:17):
lady Amanda Fielding, you know, who was just recently a
guest on Psychoactive, you know, she said that for her
a hundred micrograms was a micro dose because her tolerance
was so substantial. With respect exactly did you get other
people reporting that. Or is Lady amandas or the far
end of this. No, I think that she's the far end.
She's a great explorer. Um and she Yeah, she said
that for her, a hundred would have been a micro dose.

(07:38):
But I'm not sure anyone's using at that level right now.
I don't really know if people are using in the
way that she used to, which is to take ls
every twenty four hours. Uh huh. Now it's also not
just the dose, right, but it's also the frequency. And
I've read about there's a kind of two types of protocols.
Is the fatamin protocol and then there's the STA it's

(08:00):
the polls protocol. And I just explain more about that
and your thoughts about about those two. I remember when
I was creating this with Jim, so we didn't really
know because you don't know, you don't know. So we thought, okay,
we think from mk ultra that LSD lasted the system
around twenty four hours because you developed tolerance and it
stops working if you take LSD every twenty four hours.

(08:21):
So we thought, okay, let's give people like a day
in between their doses to let get out of their
system and see what happens because you're you know, we're
not going from anything. So that's what we suggested to people.
And then Paul Stamit's I think his protocol was a
day in betweets. I thought it was more like twice
a week or every third day. It was every third day,

(08:42):
so it was like one day of effect, one day
of just seeing how things turned out, and then the
next day was dosing again. So every third day. Okay, okay, right,
So that's the Fatamin protocol and the Stammits. I think
what I was reading was something like three days a
week and then off for the rest of the week
or something like that. The idea so sort of stack

(09:03):
them up and then um and then let people experience it.
I know that for us, we were doing it based
on this idea of tolerance and also an idea of learning.
So if people are having like a learned effect from
micro dosing, it might take some integration to be able
to to learn whatever they're learning. Um, So we wanted
to give them some amount of sober time. So we
asked people in the fought them in protocol to do

(09:23):
this for a month, right, so dose every third day
or whatever felt right for them for about a month
and report back their findings. So after that period, we
asked people what they continued to do, how did they
continue to micro dose after the study period, And what
we found was two major groups. One was people who
dosed once a week and one was people who done
who dosed once a month. So almost no one continued

(09:45):
at that initial level of of twice a week or
three times a week. Now, just explained a little more
about this survey. When did it take place, and how
many people and from what types of countries and what
types of drugs and all of that. Yeah, absolutely all right.
So when I started working for a gym, I was
a grad student at the Institute of trans Personal Psychology
and I have a strong background in math and statistics,

(10:06):
and as you might imagine people at the Institute of
Transpersonal Psychology, that's a pretty unusual background. So UM, I
needed money as a grad student. So UM I had
this professor, Jim Fattman, who seemed cool enough, um, and
he said, oh, do you want to work study job
doing math for my research group? And I said sure.
So I set out to try to prove all of

(10:27):
this drug stuff was just placebo nonsense. So we first
did some studies with like macrodocing, Like you know, he
was giving toxic colleges and we're asking college students like
what they did and what their motivations were. And then
I got the micro doce thing. So what was happening
initially was someone was sending out these journals. They were
mailing journals to people who are micro docing. What do

(10:48):
you mean by journals, Oh, I mean handwritten like notebooks.
You mean something for people to fill in. You mean
they blank blank notebooks books. Yes, they writing journal entries
and and my job was to digitize these handwritten journals.
And so that is no way to run like an
international study on drugs. So I was like, no, Jim,

(11:11):
we're not doing this. So I set up a Google
form and I used snowball recruiting. So snowball recruiting means
that if you're, say, doing a study of a population
who's doing something illegal or who might not trust you,
you have to establish trust with some members of the
group first, and then they introduce you to other members
of their group. So Jim Fadiman was well known within

(11:32):
the psychedelics community. I was not. So we gave out
this survey and so I know, designed a survey or
a couple of surveys, put it in on Google forms,
and then we handed the information out to people and
that that way I didn't have to like type up
people's handwritten journal entries. Um. And we could also get
some hard facts, so we could do depression screenings, we
could do anxiety screenings, we could get before and after snapshots.

(11:55):
And as we had more questions about what was going on,
we could survey the people who had filled out the
study in the past, like we could go back to
them and ask them, oh, we also have this question,
have you had a stroke? So then the next time
I looked at it, we had hundreds of entries, and
then very rapidly we had thousands of entries. Because people
love to share about their psyculic experiences. People love to

(12:17):
share about what helps what helps them. Uh huh, yeah,
I'm just thinking about errowd right though, fantastic source where
people go for information about different types of psychaelics. And
just as I don't know, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds
of thousands of accounts now over the many years. Yes,
So basically with the people feeling these journals, you're going
back and forth with them as or and they were

(12:39):
contributing questions. Also, we wanted to have them be a
really active part of this study because it's you know,
for them. So we're like, what do you want to know? What?
Why are you trying microdcing? What are you trying to do?
And so we could find out more information about what
people who were doing this wanted to know. And that
was really really useful because we would find out things like, oh,
even the people who say that they not depressed, they're

(13:01):
actually showing up as depressed on a depression inventory. Even
people who say, oh, I'm doing this to be more productive.
If I check in with them in a couple of months,
they've quit their job at a bank, and I don't
need to worry about them using psychedelics to be more
productive for capitalism, like they've you know, they've resolved that
in themselves in some way. So that was a really

(13:22):
interest and some of the things that people wanted to
study didn't pan out, of course. So we had like
a whole group from Louisiana who wanted to know if
microdocing would help them control their blood sugar better, and
the answer was no, it doesn't, not at all. Based
upon what you were hearing from other people in the surveys. No,
we we we did like a little study with them.

(13:43):
So we had like the subgroup of people who were
micro docing and they were taking their blood sugar um
and there was no effect of Yeah, so we were
able to do a little study and like eliminate that
as a possibility, um, which is a really useful thing
to do in terms of what we call pre clinical research.
This type of it's not a double blind, but we
can start to generate hypotheses about what clinical so you

(14:04):
should look at. So, so you just put this in
some time context. When did this survey begin and is
it did it come to an end? Is it still ongoing?
Still ongoing, it's just looking this up so um, it's
still ongoing because people find it really meaningful to fill
in the responses. So when did you start? Two sixteen? Maybe? Uhh?

(14:24):
And and how many people have participated something? Right? So
it's also there's different different tools, right, So there's like
a tell us about your experience in general, and then
there's a daily check in tool that some people are
still using even though we don't use that data for anything.
They just want to check in and let us know

(14:45):
how they're doing. One of the things we know about
psychedelics science is that psychedelists aroused the part of the
brain that wants to communicate. People want to share about
their experiences. That's probably why errowit is so popular. So like,
I'm happy to listen to people's experiences, especially if it's
on the Google form, and I don't need to individually
listened to each person. I appreciate that, And we're able
to build like AI to read these people's stories and

(15:07):
see if there's just like, can a computer program tell
the difference between a mushroom psychedelics, a microdocing experience, and
an LSD one? Right? Can the artificial intelligence do that? Now?
Is there some kind of macro daddy you have now? Like,
for example, are the large majority micro docing psilocybin or
micro docing LSD? So the large majority of people that

(15:29):
we studied are doing one of those two things, either
LSD or psilocybin. Because we collected as much data as
people wanted to contribute, so we have data about lots
of like what we call the alphabetamy and so to
see I T C B people who are microdocing d
M key. Those are not large samples, but they're the

(15:49):
only samples that we have, so it's maybe not statistically
significant to compare them to the LSD ones. But we
can start to take a look and say, oh, this
is starting to look pretty similar. Maybe there's this major difference.
Maybe someone had like a bad reaction, you know, we
can start to get some information. Is there any sort
of significant third place after LSD and psilocybin in terms

(16:11):
of what people are micro docing. Some people are are
micro docing mushrooms um in combination, so like lions main,
that kind of thing. So there's a difference in our
example between people who are using psilocybin mushrooms and extracted psilocybin.
I've seen the phrase stacking I guess, which is also
associated someone with Paul Stammit's but where people combine psilocybin

(16:35):
with lions main mushrooms, which has a reputation in terms
of I guess memory or your cognitive abilities as more
for example, chocolate or cacao, which I think is you know,
kind of connected with sort of indigenous traditions of psychelic
taking in in the Americas, or with niacin, which is
also known as vitamin B three. So did you see
a fair bit of that popping up in your surveys.

(16:57):
We only in the end now that we start to
see this like stacking effect, it makes the statistics much
more complicated if people are doing lots of different substances
like it makes it much harder on my end, that's fine,
but in order to get to be able to know
things for sure, we kind of need to separate variables out.
So the problem with stacking is that it's hard to
know what's having the effect. I can say pretty conclusively

(17:19):
that the best, uh what we call new tropic like
things that help people think better is probably caffeine. It's
going to be really hard to beat caffeine. And when
people think that they're microtising and they're improving their cognition.
And I went through this with a bunch of different
people who wanted to study this. I gave them like
little cognitive tests to take every day, and they were
so excited they were getting better, and they did get better,

(17:41):
But they didn't get better because of the LSD. They
got better because they were practicing, because they were what
practicing if you practice, because it's the cognitive task. So
it'll be like, can you remember digits in sequence? So
if you practice it over and over, of course you
get better. But when it comes to stacking, then if
caffeine's a key one, it seems like caffeine is so

(18:01):
much a background drugs that two people even remember to
report it or is it just exactly part of the
lives of you know, a majority of all the people
in the world, or at least in the in the survey.
I think it's a really important thing for like the
clinical research to be able to start to sort out.
I'm also I'm not sure what we're looking at in
terms of the neotropic effect and caffeine, Like if we're

(18:23):
looking for stuff for people with dementia, I'm not sure
that caffeine is that helpful. But if people are looking
to enhance their work abilities, then of course those are
the people who are looking at things like medefanel and
adderall and caffeine. The medefanel is another stimulant or has
a stimulant like effect without being an amphetomy. Medefine is

(18:43):
a non stimulant that's used for a d h D.
It's a cognitive enhancer. It shows a lot of promise
for Alzheimer's and dementia. It is used off label for
antidepression right now. We think perhaps because it's pro cognitive,
so when people are to us, they don't think clearly.
So it's possible that as they take modaphanel, which was

(19:04):
originally designed as a anti narcolepsy drug. It was designed
for fighter pilots to be able to not fall asleep
while they were flying and to still make good and
not aggressive decisions. So it prevents people from sleeping without
being a stimulant, because eventually, if you take stimulants, people
start to make foolish decisions. So it's it's used pretty
extensively in geriatrics, and I know that it's being investigated

(19:27):
for a number of things now that it's off patent.
So yeah, dafinitely is definitely part of those stacks. Yeah.
It was basically long distance pilots I think in the U. S.
Navy who were allowed to use amphetamine oral amphetamine and
low does and by and large the Navy was finding
that effective that there were no accidents involving pilots using amphetamine.
Where is the number one clause of accidents I think

(19:48):
was fatigued and so the amphatic with amphetamine with amphetamine.
But then I think as amphetamine became more and more
controversial in the use of it, I think the the shifted.
This is my understand that they shifted to meda panel,
which supposedly did not have any kind of uplifting effect
in the way that amphetamine can have, and basically had

(20:10):
the intended desire of keeping these long distance pilots from
falling asleep. You know, you're in a plane for ten
twelve hours and your board to tears. They needed to
make sure things didn't happen there. How about micro docing
m d m A. So what I understand is that
from the initiatives, and this is why we excluded m
d m A from the initial m d m A trials.
So when you do a globle blind study, you want

(20:31):
to have an active placebo like we talked about, So
you want something that has the effect of the drug,
but not the full effect. So it's really common to
use a lower dose of the substance that you're studying.
So in the m d m A research, they tried
to use a low dose of m d m A
as their control group. So what happened is that people
had panic attacks that low doses of m d m
A cause panic attacks without having a positive benefit, and

(20:54):
so it's not used and this was arose of m
d m A or a mini doos of m d
m A. You we would have to check the n
y U study, but I want to say it's something
like forty or fifteen of MBMA caused panic attacks and
that so that's a mini dose. That's not a micro dose, right,
I mean, I wanted to understand why that we might
have that effect when you begin to have the impact

(21:15):
of the n DMA coming on. But it's kind of,
you know, not quite there. There's really nothing really knowing
about many micro dosing of m d m A at
this point. Nothing I don't know because that we didn't
include m d m A and our samples. Jim feels
like it's not a traditional psychedelic so it's been pretty excluded. Yeah,
and what about anything involving I've seen some articles about

(21:36):
micro dosing of THHC or cannabis. Did that show up
in your study at all? People wrote about it all
the time. It's really impossible to distinguish that from a
background effect. So many people use cannabis, and cannabis is
so complicated because there are so many compounds inside of it,
inside of all of these botanicals, that it would be really,
really hard to distinguish what's going on there. I'm excited

(21:56):
about the cannabis research, but I don't know that much
about it. M So I'm guessing with your survey in
the eighteen thousand, that's a vast majority or that's the
substantial majority come from the US, and then you get
Canada and Britain in Australia. But what other countries were
popping up in interesting ways? Oh, there's lots of countries,
and there's lots of people who don't want to disclose
their country. But there's like Egypt and Bahrain, and China

(22:20):
and Japan, and there's lots of Western Europe. Of course,
Russia was popping up in some places. I'm sure Ukraine also,
Um and lots of people who didn't disclose. And just
that I'm using a VPN, I'm in Europe, which is fine.
I don't want people to get in trouble for using
minor doses of of any substance. There wasn't a control group,
right that you had basically a survey. We actually did

(22:43):
set up a control group, so I asked my grandparents
for help because I looked at the average age on
these some of these studies, um, and so we're looking
at people who are a little bit older. So I
was like, all right, can I just have a group
of older people take some cognitive tests like once a
week and compare them to the people who are micro
to thing? Um? So I had my grandparents, friends and
their elder community do these like cognitive tests and mood

(23:06):
tests and see what happened and what we were able
to find out, which, of course you never designed something
this way, but filling out a mood survey once a
day is a positive intervention. It makes people feel better
just because you're checking in about how your mood is.
So we saw a mood elevation effect just from the
survey without any drug effect. Then we saw on top

(23:27):
of that and improvement on mood for the people who
are micro docing. But are people writing in about their
experiences not micro docing. There's we're so what are they
comparing it to? Is what? What is the control or
so we didn't control yet. So we controlled the cognitive aspects,
like we did a survey of the cognitive part. But no,
we didn't get journal entries from people not micro docing.

(23:49):
What did you find in terms of yes people why
they started micro docing, What did you tend to find
about that? So there's a bunch of different motivations, including
people who wanted to do it for creative read sends,
people who wanted to do it to get better at
their job. So we had sixty five percent people say
they wanted to improve their physical or mental health. We
had people say that they wanted to enhance wellness. Below that,

(24:12):
there's things like curiosity and creativity and treating their d
h D and so would you say that the large
majority of people in the survey were people who we
would define is basically fairly psychologically or mentally healthy, who
are just trying to improve things, or people are actually
suffering from some significant impairment and are trying to fix it.
The vast majority of these surveys were people who, um,

(24:35):
we're doing fine, and wanted to improve their lives in
some way. As this became more popular and we got
more media attention, we got more survey responses from people
who were desperate, who had really serious medical or psychological
problems and wanted to treat them. And of course we
included those people also because they were also using microticity
to try to enhance their lives. So the initial population

(24:56):
was very, very healthy, and we excluded and this is
in portant to know. We excluded people who have had
bad psychedelic experiences in the past. So when people ask
me about micro docing and say things like, oh, I
had a bad acid trip, should I try micro docing,
It's like, absolutely not. We don't have any data on
people like you, Like if people are allergic to LSD,

(25:16):
they're excluded from my sample. So I don't know. Until
we do double blind experiments, we won't know how many people.
This is really helpful for because our data is limited
by the fact that we tried to exclude people who
might come to harm. But the initial question was why
are they doing the first place? And you're saying basically
to improve well being, to improve you know, I don't
know effectiveness whatever I mean. Was it also just things

(25:38):
like I read about it in the newspapers or I
saw media reports about it, or friends doing it, or
did you ask how people heard about micro docing in
the first place. Yes, we did ask people have they
heard about it? I don't think that that many people
trying micro dozing because they read about it in the paper.
I'm not sure, but I think that people make changes
to their lives because they something they want something to change.

(25:59):
I'm not sure that just reading about LSD in the
papers enough to like go source LSD, figure out a
way to get a very small dose into something take
it like a regimented schedule. That doesn't sound like something
that people do if they're not super committed. I think
that people would need to be committed in order to
do it. Did you ask people how they went about
sourcing the material then, because I mean, I mean, it's funny,

(26:21):
you know when I think about I mean, you know,
I've had experience, uh you know, getting for example of
friends who gave me a little container of liquid l
s D, you know, and one drop is supposed to
be ten micrograms, and so just you know, for the
hell of it, I did one of the drops an
hour or so before I got into this interview with you.
In fact, I may have mistakenly done two drops. So
we'll see if I have any more above you know,

(26:42):
sub perceptual effect, right, if you have to be sort
of connected in order to get that and then when
it comes to mushrooms, I mean, I don't know where
people are getting you know, basically powdered psilocybin. And if
you're doing mushrooms, you're talking about you know, this dried
plant product oftentimes. And how do you know about how
much to even cut? You know, what what pieces? Is

(27:02):
it a part of the stem or what do you
take a part of the cap or this part of
I mean, how do people learn that? Or did you
give advice about that? Yeah, these are really good questions.
So because we assume that things like the government and
the car Serrale State are reading our email, we did
not provide any information about sourcing anything. What we did,

(27:23):
and this is my standard response to people who want
to learn more about psychedelics, is google psychedelics interest group
and your city, So psychedelics interest Group San Francisco, Psychedelics
Interest Group, Tucson, whatever. Go to those places, meet those people.
If you're connected to the community, and then this is
true about drug users in general. If you're connected to
a community, you're much less likely to undergo harm. So

(27:47):
those people are able to act in safe ways, they're
able to source things, and then they're part of the
community that can help them. I also know that in
that psychedelic space there are people who sell mushroom kids.
So this is very helpful for my study because people
were able to be their own control, so they would
do the survey, say for thirty days as they were

(28:09):
growing their mushrooms, and then haven't thirty days micro docing
journey with the mushrooms that they grew out of a kit.
So I know that those things exist. I know that
it's not illegal to buy scores in the United States.
I know that it's not illegal to buy one p
LSD in Canada UM and I did not get involved
in any sourcing until the very end of this, which
is when Compass came on the scene. What is exactly

(28:32):
is the thing that's legal in Canada because there's no
analog Act in Canada UM, so they have to ban
each substance individually. So LSD is illegal in Canada, and
one key LSD, which is LSD with another part added
on to it, is completely legal. So you can get
one p lsduishable from normal l s D without the one. Yeah,

(28:57):
it's about so like one. I think it's hundred and
fifteen micrograms of one p s the same as a
hundred micrograms of LSD. It's a little bit and this
is basically essentially legal in Canada. You can get it
on the internet or I mean people to people actually
sell it in shops or is it just an internet thing.
I don't know what kind of shop you would buy
it in, but maybe it's just an internet thing. I

(29:17):
know that the researchers in Canada were able to source
one p ls D for their study and at a
very high level, meaning good manufacturing practices, which is the
standard of substance that we use in human trials in
the US and Canada and Europe, without a problem, whereas
LSD would have been more of a problem for them
to get permission from Health Canada. M I guess we

(29:37):
should just say for the benefit of psychoactive listeners. You know,
the United States does have the Controlled Substances ZACK for
many years, and it would be illegal to import even
the one p l s D from Canada, although I
am a large number of people are doing so, and
I hear remarkably few reports of anybody getting arrested for
something like that. I think that that's true, and I
think it's really important to know that there are natural

(30:00):
substances in our world that you can extract psychoactive materials from.
So I'm here in Tucson, Arizona, and San Pedro cactus
is legal and sold at the home depot here, and
you could extract d m T from that without that
much work, and it's not illegal unless there's distribution. We'll

(30:20):
be talking more after we hear this add So, supposing
I had a bag of dried mushrooms psilocided mushrooms in
my freezer, how would I know how much to take

(30:42):
for a micro dose. If you know how much to
take for a dose, then you're in good shape to
know how much you want from a micro dose. So
if you know a dose is this much of the mushroom,
then you want a tenth or twenty that The problem
is for people who are psychedelics naive, right, which is
why it's important to connect them to these larger communities,
because how are they going to know what's a good dose.
But if they know what a good dose is, then

(31:04):
they can take a that I mean, I have to
tell you I tried eyeballing it um from my mushrooms, Sophia,
and I was unsuccessful and I'm gonna be honest that someone, Yes,
someone gave me what was supposed to be a microw
dose of mushrooms in a chocolate and I was tripping
extremely hard. That was not a micro dose, and there
was still sort of mistake in the labeling, right. And

(31:26):
I've also know that you know, one bag opposed to
another depending upon either you know how potent is originally
or else how long it's been hanging around. You know,
they can vary by a factor of two or even
five in terms of podency. Sometimes absolutely, Yeah, So I
think it's hard to eye, but I think it's better
to start low and go slow, which is a general
principle of drug use. So in your survey, can you

(31:46):
say the large majority of people doing it doing microdocing
where people who had already done macro dosing in their
life or vice versa. We didn't think to ask that
question in the beginning, and then we went back and
ask people that question. So, yes, a lot of blue
Head macrodoced years and years before, so like thirty years before,
and then they tried microdocing, And a lot of people

(32:08):
tried macrodocing during their project of microdocing, which uses the
data a little bit, but not everyone. Not everyone who
tried microdocing had MACROWDOCE, and not everyone wants to. It's
a large time commitment, could be a large emotional and
psychological and spiritual commitment as well. Mm hmm. Now I
noticed and just sort of prepping for this interview of
Sophia and reading about microdoc thing, there was one term

(32:30):
I wasn't familiar with before that kept popping up, and
it's flow state. Just explain what flow state is and
why that kept popping up and discussions of microdocing, So
we only started popping up in after two I think.
So the idea of flow state is that when the
task meets the situation exactly perfectly, you can get into

(32:52):
this state where everything just sort of works. There's energized focus,
there's full involvement, there's enjoyment in the process of the activity.
It's characterized by complete absorption in what one does, and
there's a resulting loss in one sense of space and time.
So in a sense of being like in the zone,
would that be a comparable friend exactly? So when you're

(33:13):
when you're writing one night at also and everything is
just flowing, or when you're playing an instrument or giving
a talk, and just the words are just coming in
as you want them to. I'm a therapist, and I
would say that when I am really feeling connected with
someone and like I I just know what to say
and I know what questions to ask, and there's not
that effortful part of it like there might be when

(33:34):
I first meet someone. So it's like, oh, I just
know them really well and I just know what to say.
And then the session is over and it didn't feel
like either one of us did that much work, but
things really improved, and so we start seeing a lot
of those reports and people who are microdorcing for over
two weeks as people would microducing. I'm experiencing this um

(33:55):
more or the way I'm doing my job has changed
quite a lot. I used to be like really focused
and I would get like concerned about details, and now
that I'm microticing, I can see the bigger picture. I
can really put my effort where it's needed. Let's say
some more about that. I mean, you say it in
the work contest. What are the contexts and were the
people artists who are experiencing this writer's experiencing this uh

(34:17):
therapist experiencing this. I mean, you know how prevalent was this,
you know how how many different ways did to manifest.
So people are saying the effect of their relationships, they're
able to see how they want to interact with people
and take a step back in a different way. Um, definitely,
there are a bunch of artists who are like, oh,
I can change how I'm doing my work. There were

(34:37):
other therapists who wrote in there's a lot of students
in our survey, which is not that surprising because it
was a snowball study of people who are using drugs,
and if you get one student, they're likely to give
the information to more students, and so that that flowst
It was mentioned by a bunch of other people. Um,
do you want to hear about the other themes that
we saw? Okay, So the other two that we saw

(35:00):
a lot of where first, the cognitive experience of psychedelics use.
So you might not expect that if someone's micro docing,
they're going to have the same cognitive experience as someone
who's macro docing. So I would characterize the psychedelic cognitive
experience in two important ways. One that there's uh, there's
altered associations, you see things from novel perspectives, and the

(35:24):
other is that you're able to see hierarchy as wholarchy.
So people take apart their families, like in their minds
and think, what would it mean if I were the
dad right? How would my family be different? And they're
able to see things in a different way. So people,
even people who are micro docing, we're saying, oh, I'm
looking at problems in different ways, and like curiosity is

(35:46):
outweighing fear. Difficult problems are easier to start right now,
I don't mind making a mess in order to find
an examine solutions. So there's this like eagerness and curiosity
that went along with the cognitive experiences of microdencing. The
other thing that we consistently sub was about psychodynamics. So

(36:06):
people having a history of trauma in their own families
or in their own hearts, and they were able to
go into that in a way that was controllable for them.
So what we don't want is people to have these
like emotional outbursts and not be able to bring themselves
back right. But people who were microdcing, we're able to say,
I can open it up a little bit at a time. Now,

(36:29):
in terms of the experiential effect, I mean, if people
are typically doing this every third day, are they feeling
the effect the day they take it, the day after,
two days later, or is there any pattern to this?
So that's a really important question. What we thought was
that there's going to be like only a learning effect
on the third day. So we thought, Okay, the first

(36:51):
day they're going to use the substance, the second it's
still going to be in their assistant. The third day
is going to be they're going to be clean, will
just be able to see what they learned. Um. But
we don't know that that's true. We don't know how
fast it's eliminated by the system, and we don't know
how the learning exactly is going to work here. So
what we saw is that over time there was there
was more of an effect. So in the first week

(37:13):
people are reporting effects that seem really improbable. It's possible
that this is placebo. You know, we talked about placebo.
Different placebo effects, one of which might be people are
taking charge of something that's bothering them in their life,
so they start to feel better because they're doing something
about it. So that's one placebo effect is like, Okay,
you're finally doing something. So that's maybe where some of

(37:35):
the mood elevation the first week of micro decing starts
out with, and then after two or three weeks we
start to see a sort of less anxiety, we see
less depression, but we also see an evening out of moods,
so like less less low lows and also sometimes less
high highs. Now two, people just keep doing this, you know,

(37:55):
for months and months and months or of most people
kind of do it for a few weeks or a
month or so and quit. And why would they do
either way. It's a really important question, and we have
done and we are continuing to do a lot of
work on that topic because one of the problems of
this type of survey research is that if people drop
out of the study, we don't know why. So you

(38:16):
can have really positive results because all the negative people
dropped out of the study. So we followed up really
extensively with people who lost touch with us and trying
to find out what was going on. So the of
people who micro dose for say a month and then
continue to micro does afterwards. There's these two groups, the
once a month people and the once a week people.

(38:36):
My basic summary is that the once a month people
are having like headache syndromes, So they're having migraines or
having cluster headaches, or they're having like lyme disease or
some medical problem that's able to be controlled with very
low levels of microdocing. The microdocing once a month to
prevent having these headache syndromes, and they're not interested in

(38:57):
taking anymore because that's the amount that they need to
do to control their headaches. Then there's the one to
weak people who seem to be more on the depression
and anxiety and of things. Those are people who who
are using microdocing for motivation and for mood. Um. I
think that that's a that's large majority of people who
continue to microdoce after the first month. The people who

(39:19):
don't micro doce who don't like it UM. So there's
a couple of groups. One is people who find it
to be anxiety provoking. So when we look at people
with post traumatic stress disorder, you can sort of classify
people into two groups. One is the people who are
sort of depressed and out of it, and the other
is the group of people who are having flashbacks and

(39:39):
are really um they have high neurological arousal. So people
who were depressed and out of it, they did fine
with micro docing. People who were having flashbacks did not
do well with micro docing and made them more upset.
So if they work with the therapists, say, and they're
able to control the neurological arousal, it seemed like microdocing

(39:59):
wo is a good tool for that group. But there's
definitely some people who find it to be too anxiety
provoking and it brings up too much for them. That's
one good yeah, But I'm a little confuseder because you
said it's the large majority of people in your survey
who said they were micro docing were people who were
basically doing fine and we're looking to just increase their
performance or mood or other things in general ways. But

(40:22):
the categories you've just described people who has severe migraines,
people have depression, that's not part of that first group.
These are people are really looking to try to treat
some type of really you know, substantial problem they're having
in their lives. I would say that in the people
who are like well functioning and using microdocing to enhance
their lives, in that once a week group, So some

(40:43):
of those people are depressed and they don't know it.
Some of those I think if we would survey the
American population as a whole, there might be lots of
people who are depressed and don't describe themselves as depressed.
But we didn't see a difference in depression inventory scores
from people who labeled themselves as depressed in people who didn't.
Just pretty sick difficant to me, So I think that
the vast majority of people are doing fine, and those

(41:05):
people would fit in that like once a week. They're
trying to use microticity to enhance their life in some way,
and they'll continue to do so for months or even
years at a time exactly, and they might take a
break and they might you know, try other things, or
might start stacking as a result, but they report really
positive benefits and they continue to be in touch with
us and send us art and music like That's one

(41:26):
of the things that Jim and I most value is
people continuing to send us their stories and continuing to
send us like what they got out of microdcing, so
that those are the positive experiences. So there's also some
negative ones, and like I said, there's the people with
the g I problems. There's also people who um. We
know from the literature that people who have taken LSD

(41:47):
and lithium together have had seizures. So there were a
number of people who didn't listen to that advice and
took LSD with a number of other substances. So we
kept track of who had a bad experience in substances
they were taking at the same time. So some of
the people who went on to use LSD and lithium together,

(42:07):
they did not have such a great time, and we're
not exactly sure why. So that that's useful information for
us UM and some people who say the experience psychosis. Yeah,
people who experienced psychosis can sometimes really like psychedelics, and
there's a theory behind that, which is that they're able
to explain their own disturbing experience by saying I took drugs, right.

(42:31):
So micro docing isn't great for those people because they
can't blame the psychedelics for their psychosis because they're not
taking enough, So they didn't get a lot of relief
out of that like they might be expecting to. So
people with psychosis did not like microducing all that much. Okay,
So now Sea, let's turn to the big question that's
been popping up in the last year, which is you

(42:51):
now have these three published studies, right, and I think
of them, one is the one where the first author
is abolished saghetti, I think a Hungarian researcher. The second
is when I think out of Chicago and the thirds
of Dutch study, and all three of these, you know,
we're done. Oftentimes the researchers who are leading figures in
psychedelics research, and obviously I think to some exam advocates
of the benefits of macrodo saying and it's not clear

(43:14):
that any of them had it in for micro dose saying,
and some of them came away disappointed, saying, you know,
when all of a sudden done, we're finding that it
seems to be overwhelmingly placebo effect, and that even you know,
when you have controlled double blind studies, that far more
significant than whether or not people got the actual micro
dose as opposed to placebo, is what they thought they

(43:36):
were getting. Um, So what's your take on these studies?
I mean, I mean, first of all, you know, you know,
and even the authors of this you know, are kind
of wishing it didn't come out this way. And so
they're saying what could be wrong with their own studies,
how might we find a stronger impact, and what would
be the limitations here? But what's your your sense of
of what these studies? You know what they mean, and
did they give you pause in terms of how you

(43:58):
were thinking about the work that you and Jim are doing. Yeah, definitely.
So I encountered one of these proof Like I was
speaking at a cannabis conference with some other researchers and
they had just come out with a study, and I
was like, Wow, that's really bizarre because if if it's
true that it's just placebo, we would have needed way
more people in my study to get such a strong effect, right,

(44:21):
So you would need like a huge number of people
statistically to create any sort of power if it's just
a placebo effect, because it could be just like a
low level effect on depression. So that's possible, and I
will say that there's lots of depressed people, so we
don't need like really high power. If we're improving depression
just a little bit, that would help people a lot.

(44:41):
It's not like prozak is a good drug, right, Prozac
is like notoriously bad, So even if we help people's
depression a little bit, that would still be worth it.
So that's one thing that that's what I thought of initially,
where most of these control double blind studies involved what
a few dozen people or something like that, right exactly,
So like even if we're only looking at okay, you
need like a lot of people to show any effect

(45:04):
on depression. Okay, people are really suffering from depression, and
that might still be worth it for us, because it's
not like there's great alternatives in the psychopharmacopia, and especially
since there appeared to be relatively few negative consequences that
have been exacted so far off micro dosing, and most
of those negative consequences things like, as you were saying,
g I or anxiety or what have you, just go

(45:26):
away once you stop doing it right exactly, and as
opposed to things like discontinuation syndrome from SSR eyes, which
could be really significant in a lifelong way. So that
was my initial thought, and then I spoke to Jim
about it that evening because I was speaking at this conference,
and he said, oh, did you look at how many
broke blind? And I said, no, what's the what's the result,

(45:47):
And he said it's over seventy percent. So if we're
looking at over seventy or eight percent, just explain that.
When you say break block, that means they were cheating
and looking or it means that the dose was sufficiently perceptual.
There's actualize that they were taking something they were able
to figure out. Yeah, breaking by means that you're able
to figure out what arm of the steady you're in.

(46:07):
So if people can tell if they're in the placebo
group or not, then we're not looking at a placebo
if that were it just a drug effect can include
knowledge of taking the drug. Should find fifty percent breaking
blind are fifty percent basically being consistent. You think you
ask people how how sure they are? Yeah? I think

(46:29):
they ask people have sure they are? And sometimes people
say like I don't know, um, and yeah, if we're
looking at and I'm like, okay, well we need to
look at like this, that's not really a double blind experiment.
And so but what are the implications if people figure
it out? Wouldn't that with that bias in favor of
finding a result, Yes, it would buy us in favor

(46:50):
of finding a result, but not necessarily a positive result,
So it depends on the person's association with substance. So
if they are able to figure it out, then they'll
be Okay, I'm in the active group, or I'm in
the active group today, right, So they're more likely to
pay more attention to their own experience, so they're more
likely to have every sort of side effect. They're more

(47:11):
likely to also have a drug effect, So it could
break both ways if people know that they're in the
active group. And this was true in all three of
the big control double blind studies I think, so I'm
not sure that they all ask people how often they
could tell. And some of those studies involved gaving. I
think both did. I think I can't remember now exactly,
but maybe one involved givings, say maybe with LST five micrograms,

(47:34):
whereas another group might get twenty micrograms or something. Yes,
And the British study, the one that I'm thinking about,
they did this like complex thing with QR codes and
envelopes where they had people like I think, get on
video and shuffle the bladder paper and like the envelopes
of bladder paper that contained bladder paper in like a
really complicated and scientific way so it's possible that just

(47:56):
wasn't super effective as a way of blinding the study,
so people were able to figure out which of the
water paper really had LSD on it. Mm hmmm. But
I saw that a couple of guys involved these study.
Van Elk, I think is one of the authors in
David Ritsil I think in the UK's another. Both said
it was it was actually a pretty good New York
Times article about this a few months ago. I thought

(48:16):
that was fairly fair minded. And they both said Erotsi
and Van Elk said, you know, they think they're just
gonna stop working on microw doos for now, that they're
going to go back to studying macrowdos because they even
though they weren't convinced that microw doos had no effect,
that it was just placebo, they thought it was potentially
less interesting to be working on in the future. Yeah,
So Ariso, who's is who I'm thinking about in the
British study where it was like seventy year eight percent

(48:38):
of people broke the blind there, So it's possible that
macrodocing just has more potential, right, So, like it's possible
that what we're seeing is a slow effect with microdocing
of the same thing. And so maybe, just like with ketamine,
what we want is for people to do like a
low dose thing in a doctor's office, have a relief
from depression for six months, and then do it again

(48:59):
and six months. That might be a better thing than
micro docing once every three days or once a week.
We don't know yet, but I think looking at both
of those possibilities makes a lot of sense. Yeah. I
saw made an interesting comments though, and I just wanted
what your reaction to this is. He said, He said,
you probably only participate at this point in a trial
in micro docing if you really have a strong belief

(49:21):
that this might help you. And when people expect to
benefit from a trug, they typically do. Yes. I think
that that's absolutely true. I think that people don't participate
in drug trials because they don't want to get better,
but also the element of believe, wanting to believe that
this drug is helping. Yeah, and that's always a that's

(49:42):
always an issue in these types of surveys and or
this type of study. And there's also the issue of authority.
So we know one of the placebo effects has to
do with feeling like you're undergoing a medical treatment by experts,
So like a placebo shot is more effective than a
placebo pill. Right there, there are placebo like sham surgeries,
Like if you feel like someone really cares about you,

(50:04):
then you're likely to get better even if it's the placebo.
So when we're talking about placebo effect, we need to
really figure out what is the thing we're talking about.
Because if people are getting better from depression by taking
like one microgram every month, like why not? I think
there's very little Yeah, there's very little harm to that,
but there is a We don't want to fetishize the

(50:26):
substance itself, right, We want to tell people that the
power that they have to control their own depression that
has to do with the inner work that they're doing.
It's not the substance itself. Let's take a break here
and go to an ad. What's out there in the ethos,

(50:53):
the media ethos, the cultural ethos is that this that
this works, macrodo thing or in this case microne saying right,
the more likely it is to work, and the more
likely and the more powerful the placebo effect, right because
of that broader media cultural context. And conversely, if a
reverse narrative gets going that we've done three control double
line studies and they're showing that, you know, micro docing

(51:14):
is no more than placebo, and we're actually seeing any
real difference. When you really can blind for all of
this stuff, then in fact it has the opposite effect
that people are less likely to believe in the intervention,
and that therefore micro docing, you know, whether with real
micro docing or the placebo effect of micro docing therefore diminishes.
And I wonder if it's possible to track that because
a lot of these three studies, I think the control

(51:34):
double lines have just come out in the last year
and a half or so, and so a lot where
is the coverage of the issue? A couple of years
ago was much more upbeat and positive. You know, you
had Iolett Waldman's book coming out a really good day,
and when she talks about how micro docing, you know,
saved her life. You know all that, and so you know,
so you have all of this positive stuff, and now

(51:55):
when you google micro docing, you know, you know, no effect,
no better than places bow is likely to pop up
when you do any kind of research. Is there any
way you think you'll be been to pick this up
in your surveys, that people having less faith in it
and therefore getting less benefit. It's an interesting question, especially
if you think about the contemporary landscape around depression treatment

(52:16):
in general, because if you would google say S s
R I, I'm not sure how much you would see
about placebo. But we know a huge part of what's
happening when people take S s RI s and have
a benefit, there is placebo, and that has to do
with medical authority as well, because that's a mainstream treatment,
So it might be less effective than than microding. So

(52:37):
I don't know how we'll be able to sort that out.
I'm I'm not super worried about it because it's like, Okay,
I'm not a psychedelics advocate, So if micro docing isn't
helping people, then don't do it. And if it is
helping people in them, let's do it. But in order
to figure this out, we're going to have to do
double blinds in a way that makes more sense. And
what we're looking at right now is some like really

(52:58):
intense medical stuff. So when you do surveys of thousands
and thousands of people who have a variety of different
medical conditions, and just ask them what happens. This isn't research,
this is just search. We just found out. So there's
this idea of HARKing or people called pa hacking. So
HARKing means hypothesis after results known, right, So that's not

(53:20):
what I'm talking about. I'm talking about like we, right,
we surveyed like eight people who are micro docing, and
then some of the people are like, oh, I'm a
VET and my phantom limb syndrome is getting better. It's
like that might be random, right, but we weren't looking
for it, and then we can design a follow up.
So we're working with the v A on not phantom

(53:41):
limbs specifically, but people who have paralysis who started when
they were micro docing getting twitches in their paralyzed limb.
We don't know why that occurs, but we see that
pretty consistently. So like, that's an interesting effect, and so
I don't think it in terms of the medical I
don't think it's place because we're seeing a bunch of
weird stuff that consistent with itself, right, right. You also

(54:05):
mentioned things like people who are you know, suffering terrible
pain from shingles, finding that significantly alleviated right, or that
people would startart finding um, you know, they were finding
little improvements people. Yeah, So we're looking at what people
call the garbage pale diagnosis, which is not meant in
any sort of derogatory way. There's a set of diagnosis

(54:27):
diagnosis not meant any sort of derogatory exactly, different phrase
for it, thing you have a guy's exactly. So it's
these stigmatized conditions m and people who get sort of
um shifted to the back of the line, so things
like fibro and myalgia, toxic mold sensitivity, UM, chronic fatigue syndrome.
So there's these comorbid conditions that we don't understand very well. Um.

(54:50):
So what I mean by comorbid is that these people
will be diagnosed with more than one of them, and
so it's not clear what the correct diagnosis is. It's
probably stuff we don't understand that well medically. So we're
doing a survey of those people with those sets of
syndromes in particular because we don't know what's going on.
But they're pretty desperate and they're seeing some effect from microdiscing.

(55:11):
So that's one group, um, and those people are are
really suffering and doctors aren't listening to them. There's the
people with paralysis, and there's the people with traumatic brain injury,
and then there's the people dimension Alzheimer's, and so those
are some really important groups. For the headache suffers, we
kind of know what's happening because of SUMA trippedan because

(55:33):
because migraines. We don't know exactly what causes migraines, but
we do know that one of the most effective treatments
is on the market is something that's related to LSD.
So it's not really surprising to us that low doses
of LSD would also alleviate migraines because puma tripped and
is related to LSD UM and cluster headaches the same.
So we're looking at fast tracking for those two conditions

(55:53):
for cluster headache and migraine suffers, but for depression, like
then we get into this like what if it's a
placebo effect thing? And so I am very curious about
like how this is going to turn out. How do
we distinguish what is the placebo when we're talking about
depression in the first place. You know, I have to
tell you so in reading about all of the stuff
in micro docing, it got me thinking a fair bit

(56:14):
about the whole phenomenon with CBD. Right, So, we know
from the medical research that CBD actually can have very
significant therapeutic effects for particular conditions, and that is fascinating
research going on about this. But meanwhile, there's been a
multibillion dollar industry that has emerged that's largely unregulated, with
people selling CBD and drinks and food and motions and

(56:38):
lozenges and you name it. And and virtually none of
these are backed by any types of control, double blind studies. Right,
you know, this will heliar on fright, this, this this will
make you feel better, all this sort of stuff, and
and you know, and and in a way, I think
many of the people in the CBD industry, not all,
but most of them may prefer that they're that these
studies don't happen because they're doing pretty well based upon
all the hype around CBD. And I'm thinking, you know,

(57:00):
once again with microdoc thing, there is clearly something happening
and going on there um, but it's actually you know,
it's an extent that the hype is out there, the
positive stuff, and the extent that there's a really powerful
placebo effect, whether or not the actual substances making a difference.
This is potentially an industry worth billions and billions and
billions of dollars, and we think about, you know, all
of the way in which you know, compass a tie.

(57:22):
The for profit companies are all coming into the psychelics thing.
You know. One of the points that people make is
that for a lot of these studies, this is not
something with macro dooz saying that it has to be
done therapeutically, you know, day after day, week after week,
months at two months. Sometimes it's just doing one trip
or five trips or ten trips or periodic trips where
there's not a big profit upside on that right where

(57:44):
the profit is gonna come and creating the setting and
the psychotherapist and all that sort of stuff. But when
it comes to micro dozing, where people are potentially doing
something three days a week and maybe not just for
a month, but maybe over sustained periods of time, or
doing it this month, taking a break another month, it
taught that there you have a market of people consuming

(58:05):
a psycholic substance in very lowest doses where the where
the level of potency right is crucially important so you
want this to be illegally regulated industry because people want
to know whether they're getting five micrograms or eight micrograms
or twelve micrograms, or they're not getting something else exactly,
both both the both for the purity and also for
the potency stuff. So it seems to me that in

(58:25):
the psychedelics, like the profit driven side of the psycholics,
renost science has a huge interest in there being something
to this micro dosing. And as you step back, how
do you think about the way in which the micro
dozing plays out in this ever growing capitalist market of psychedelics. Sure, yeah,
I've got lots of negative things to say about capitalism,

(58:49):
but specifically about the I'm really curious that this micro
docing piece of it essentially. I mean, you know, as
I've had various you know, guests talk about what are
the consequences of all the for profit investment and how
most of them any driving the researches for profit and
they're paying and giving money the university programs. But on
the micro dos thing thing, it seems like a particularly
acute issue because it's something that could be ongoing for

(59:11):
profit you mean, yeah, and because people are going to consume,
you know, not just you know, three doses once or
three doses a year. They're potentially going to be consuming
fifty or a hundred doses a year and maybe for
long periods of time. Yeah. Absolutely, FDA became really interested
when we started saying, like, okay, the doses that we're

(59:32):
looking at for a medical effect. Even if you would
give people like film, right, like like strips of LSD
like once a week and they would combine all of
them for the month. Like, when we start looking at
doses that people could never get high on, then the
FDA is like, oh, now we're interested. I mean they're
worried about things like people abusing and diverting their doses. Right,

(59:57):
So we are looking at a huge there's a huge
profit opportunity here for capitalists. Um And like I know
personally as a researcher, my name was included in a
company that I was not affiliated with and was being
used to sell something or to propose selling something. I
think that the encroach of capitalism is a huge, huge

(01:00:19):
problem here, and I think that what we did together
as the psychedelics community to try to control that in
certain ways was really positive. So we signed an ethical
pledge Altogether, we worked on that and that included things
like all the research needs to be open and upfront.
When Compass took anti competitive action, I got on the

(01:00:40):
phone and started calling pharmaceutical companies in Canada and got
research grade LSD for other survey for other studies. So like,
we need to work together to prevent the encroach of capitalism.
But in the realistically, what are the profit motives? So
if people are looking at an indication for depression, that's
a huge market. That's what motivates these studies. So in

(01:01:03):
order to take a drug to market, but that's a huge,
huge investment of time and money, and because LSD is
not under patent, you would need a sponsor to do that.
So that's when you look at things like Compass patenting
one version of LSD or psilocybin and then trying to
take that to market. But if we were to use
different statistical tools and pool research and pool studies in

(01:01:26):
a different way, then we could start to not need
the same type of pharmaceutical sponsors for indications. The other
thing is that if people were able to say, Okay,
maybe it's a placebo, but I'm gonna take my health
into my own hands. Right now, I'm gonna try to
talk to my psychuloics community, figure out my own micro
do saying, figure out a stack that works for me,

(01:01:47):
that reduces the power that we give to these pharmaceutical
companies who are going to try to sell as LSD
as a treatment for depression. So if people are able
to rely more on their own communities and themselves, then
there's less of a profit motive. But this is a
really really hard issue. I think people need to get
together and work on this together. You know, I'm normally
an advocate that you know legalization, legal regulation is the

(01:02:10):
right way to go. Yet I can also point to
counter examples. We're having. A decriminalized situation can actually be
the preferable one, although it's hard to sustain that for
a long period of time. And one can imagine a
world in which you have micro docing and a world
where no no for profit legal company like Compass has

(01:02:30):
succeeded in improving that micro dosing works, or has succeeded
in disproving and sowing that it doesn't work. That allowing
that to happen, I mean, you don't have the risk
in the psychelics like you have, for example, with opioids,
right with the fentinyl market now where a hundred thousand dead,
you know, seventy of them because of an adulterated drug
supply involving fentanyl. That's not the risk you have with psychedelics.

(01:02:52):
And then so I'm thinking that to the extent that
this actually stays, we might still have a risk of
adulteration though right, you still have a risk, but it's
a fair really minimal risk. We're not necessarily things fatalities.
Taking a step back to the adulteration question, so it's
true that we're not seeing fatalities, but when we see
rich celebrities who are dying um from fentanyl from taking ketamine,

(01:03:14):
we know that there's fentyyl and everything. Right, and because
of the current supply chain management issues in the car
Serra state, it makes most sense for drug smugglers to
try to get as much across in as little package
as they can, which means fent atyl. So fentyl might
be in everything really soon, and I wouldn't say that
it's necessarily safe. We recommend that everyone test their substances.
You can buy testing kits on Amazon. Test your substances,

(01:03:36):
No I actually just saw a report in the papers recently,
was about early June here of three kids dying of
the federal overdose where they thought they were getting M
D m A. So yeah, there's been a lot of
stories of the coups and putting out there about fentonyl adulteration,
especially evolving cannabis sometimes other drugs that have proven i'm
coming to be false. But the fact is, you know,
there's both. But whether it's drug dealers making mistakes, I mean,

(01:03:58):
there's not much reason to see why they'd have incentive
to put it. You know, nobody only figure out why
there's sentanel in the stimulant drugs, for example, in cocaine,
or especially why there's an M D m A or
things like this, I think assume that people who are
packaging drugs aren't working under lab conditions. So that's hypothesis
of what's going on there. Yeah, so that's one aspect

(01:04:18):
of things. So let's talk about the greatest good for
the largest number of people. So what I'm suggesting that
people do, like what I've suggested over these years, is
that people get in touch with like some group in
their community. They connect with those people, they perhaps sour
substances and knowledge through that. It's like, that's a lot
of privilege, right, That's a lot of safety. There's that's

(01:04:39):
not available to most people, So people who are people
of color, people who are not connected to a community
because of neurodivergence or geographic distance, So it's not possible
to do what I've suggested. It's not possible to be
safe in the same way as and I disagree with
Michael Pollen that the psychedelics community is white. I think

(01:04:59):
that that towards the contributions of people of color and
indigenous people who have been part of our community all along.
But I do think that if you're not connected to
the psychedelics community, how are you possibly going to source
a microw dose. So it's becoming more and more possible,
but you have to be pretty savvy to like go
online and order a mushrooms kit and grow your own

(01:05:20):
mushrooms like that. That requires a lot of information um
and a lot of expertise. And because of the car
serial state, we would expect there to be more police
attention on people who are already in stigmatized groups. So
those are the people who are gonna get punished legal
regulation in some capitalist encroachment might be the way to
get this to the largest number of people. Like, let's

(01:05:41):
imagine someone who is disabled by their depression, right, someone
with serious and persistent mental illness that isn't well controlled
with medication, which is why they want to two micro dos.
So they're not going to be able to source things
and do things the way that we're suggesting. They may
not be able to source things in any area though,
mean exactly are that being obliged to go on the
internet is going to be the most challenging of of

(01:06:03):
the opportunities to try to find ways to deal with
their depression exactly. So if if there was a drug
that their their doctor could give them, that might be
something that they're able to do. But definitely if we're
talking about increased access, that would mean working within the system.
Moved to one last area here, you are yourself a psychotherapist,
and I'm curious about to the extent you can talk

(01:06:24):
openly about this, what's your own experience in psychotherapy and
especially in helping people are dealing with trauma, and more broadly,
what do you encounter in the broader psychotherapy PEWT to community,
either in terms of stigmatization or in terms of curiosity,
what's your own sense about where this is right now? So, yeah,
I work as a psychotherapist. Right now, I work with

(01:06:45):
people who are pretty pretty ill. I get a little
bit bored by people who are too healthy. So I
like working with people who have have complex trauma in
in pretty intense environments. But I work with an integrated team,
and I speak about you like within the larger psychotherapeutic community.
So one of the most common questions that I get

(01:07:05):
is whether or not someone who's microdocing can participate usefully
in therapy, Like do they have to to micro dose
and then go to therapy or can they micro dooce
as part of therapy? Like will they be too out
of it to be able to participate usefully in therapy?
So just that question alone indicates to me that psychotherapists
do not know what's going on. Because, of course people

(01:07:26):
who are microdocing can participate usefully in therapy, right like,
there's no reason to assume that they shouldn't be able to.
But because there's there's not a lot of information that's
out there, sometimes therapists think, oh, I should tell this
person never micro dooce on the days that you're going
to see me, and maybe you should just micro doce
and see if that treats the depression and then come
to therapy. So I'm able to reassure a therapist that no,

(01:07:47):
you're able to treat people with with depression and with anxiety, whatever,
with trauma as their micro docing, and what we see
is an increase in positive benefits to people are able
to use therapy to better effect. I'd recommend the work
of Heather Hardgraves and Canada. I'm shed dos a neurobiofeedback
with people, and what she sees with micro docing is

(01:08:09):
that people's brain waves are able to adapt much more
quickly as they microw dose. So that's one aspect of things.
There's a lot a lot of stigma in the medical
community about psychedelics use. There's this perception that that we're
just giving people permission to use drugs. So I do
a lot of work with medical professionals explaining the basic

(01:08:31):
harm reduction stuff like that people are going to do
drugs no matter what, and we better use this to
good effect. But I'm also curious about here is a
lot of attention I think is focused on macro dozing,
And the question is when it comes to micro dozing,
is the micro dozing receiving even a tiny part of
the attention in the world of clinical psychology or psychiatry,

(01:08:55):
or is it still just a very small number of
people interested in the micro dosing element of you know,
micro docing assisted psychotherapy. So I think that psychiatrists are
much more open to microw docing than macrow docing. So
for them it feels a lot safer, right, like the
person is still going to feel connected to reality. If
they want to try it, they can try it. So

(01:09:16):
I think psychiatrists are much more open to microdocing than
macro docing. I still encounter psychiatrists who think that psychedelics
uses psychoto mimetic that were what we're doing is mimking
the psychotic state in an individual. So there's a lot
of education that still needs to happen around that issue.
I will say that like a lot of people with

(01:09:38):
psychotic conditions are very interested in both micro docing and
macro docing, and that that's a large struggle for clinicians.
I didn't want to say one other thing that we
haven't brought out, which is that So I was in
Fraud speaking at a psychedelics conference and I walk into
this room where people are talking about it again. I

(01:09:58):
didn't know anything about it again. When I walked into
the room, I just had heard that it's pronounced it again.
So I walk in. There's all these people from Africa
who start hugging me, and I was like, I don't
get what's going on here, and they were like, your
research in microducing validates our traditional practice of using it
again because they and this is the whety people of
gut Bone have been using it, began to treat a

(01:10:21):
number of conditions, most importantly addiction, and they have microdocing
as part of their traditional practice, so they use both
macrodoses and microdoces. So when we had created the Psychedelics
Ethics Code, I had all these calls with different people,
and I remember this one call that I had with
the people from the Santo Diame Church, the Ayahuasca Church,

(01:10:42):
and I said something like, are there any words that
anything that needs to be said here that hasn't been
said before we end the call? And they said, yeah,
we need to bring out the voice of the Grandfather Vine.
And I said, great, how do we do that, so
then they taught saw this song. So I'm not going
to teach you this song. All of these there's lots

(01:11:04):
of these songs on YouTube and other places. But I
think part of having psychedel excuse in a more open
way means validating the voices of these traditional practices and
people who have different exposure, different experiences than our own,
and allowing those voices to come forward to learning those
songs and learning what that can give us. And I
think that that presents a model of depression treatment or

(01:11:28):
psychedelic excuse that isn't just about the substances, about the
entire context of it. So, Sophia, is there anything else
we've left out here? Sure? I want to say something
that's really important, which is that we can't measure the
amount of any given neurotransmitter in a living being's brain.
When we look at mass studies, if we're looking at
how much serotonin a mass has in its brain, we
kill the mass and then we autopsy the brain in slices.

(01:11:51):
So when we talk about, oh, there's been this increase
in this chemical, this increase in that chemical, or these
are the parts of the brain that light up. That's
one way of looking at it, but we need to
validate that with people's experiences. So sure our brain lights up,
and what you were talking about before is an increase
in connectivity between different parts of the brain, but what
is the lived experience of that. So if people are saying, oh,

(01:12:13):
I'm more creative and we also see increased blood flow
between different halfs of the brain, that makes a lot
of sense to me. But I don't think we should
look at it as it's just a chemical that's occurring
in the brain, Okay, Sevilla. I mean, I really enjoyed
our conversation, So thank you so much for having this
conversation with me on Psychoactive, and best of luck with
your future research as well as with your future you know,

(01:12:35):
therapy effort involving or not involving these substances. Thank you
so much. Yeah. I've worked in harm reduction in New
York City in San Francisco for a long time and
I've really respected the work of Drug Policy Alliance, so
I'm very happy to be here. Yeah. Oh fantastic. Well,
thanks so much. If you're enjoying Psychoactive, please tell your

(01:12:56):
friends about it, or you can write us a review
at Apple Podcast or where you get your podcasts. We
love to hear from our listeners. If you'd like to
share your own stories, comments and ideas, then leave us
a message at one eight three three seven seven nine
sixty that's eight three three psycho zero, or you can

(01:13:17):
email us at Psychoactive at protozoa dot com or find
me on Twitter at Ethan Natalman. You can also find
contact information in our show notes. Psychoactive is a production
of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. It's hosted by
me Ethan Naedelman. It's produced by Noham Osband and Josh Stain.
The executive producers are Dylan Golden, Ari Handel, Elizabeth Geesus

(01:13:41):
and Darren Aronofsky from Protozoa Pictures, Alex Williams and Matt
Frederick from my Heart Radio and me Ethan Nadelman. Our
music is by Ari Blucien and a special thanks to
ab brios f, Bianca Grimshaw and Robert BP. Next week

(01:14:06):
we'll have a special episode of Psychoactive. It's when I
invite my dear friend Julie Holland to co host Psychoactive
and answer questions with me from you the listeners for
nine years, every Saturday night and Sunday night, I was
the doctor in charge of the psychiatric emergency room at
Bellevue Hospital. And I was in charge of it like
a fifteen to sixteen hour overnight shift. And far and

(01:14:30):
away the substances that reaked the most havoc and in
the psychiatric patients that I saw in Bellevue number one alcohol,
no question, and number two cocaine. Subscribe to Psychoactive now
see it, don't miss it.

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