12 ms·

LSD microdosing does not appear to improve mood or cognitive ability: study

203 points by basisword 4y ago

photochemsyn 4y ago
I'm not sure of the benefits or detriments of microdosing psychedelics but a little research indicates this study should be taken with several large grains of salt, regardless of your opinion on this matter. First, the study size appears to be so small (about 20 people for placebo, and for each of the two dose regimens) that it's not really that indicative one way or the other. Second, reading through the journal's articles on Google Scholar definitely shows it has a bias towards the traditonal 'addictive and dangerous drugs' mentality such as alcohol, heroin, marijuana, cocaine, meth, etc. Interesting, a search for 'Adderall' turns up 1 result, and a search for 'methamphetamine' turns up 327 results on Google Scholar (using advanced search and limiting to this journal). Heroin gets 445 results, oxycodone gets 35 results. All in all this looks like a journal for researchers who approach the subject from an abuse-centric perspective, basically the Nancy Reagan approach to drug addiction issues. If you want a more balanced overview from a more general journal, try this: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.10200 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.10200 > "The powerful hallucinogen LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) has potential as a treatment for alcoholism, according to a retrospective analysis of studies published in the late 1960s and early 1970s. . . Of 536 participants in six trials, 59% of people receiving LSD reported lower levels of alcohol misuse, compared to 38% of people who received a placebo. “We were surprised that the effect was so clear and consistent,” says Krebs. She says that the problem with most studies done at that time was that there were too few participants, which limited statistical power. “But when you combine the data in a meta-analysis, we have more than 500 patients and there is definitely an effect,” she says. In general, the reported benefits lasted three to six months. Their findings are published today in the Journal of Psychopharmacology." Now does this address the best option for therapeutic use? Is one strong dose followed by therapy best for alcoholics? Could microdosing be a means for alcoholics to continue to resist the urge to drink over longer periods of time? Those sound like good topics to study. As far as those who want to use drugs and alcohol recreationally, vs. those who want to use the police and courts and prisons to enfore their view of what are the acceptable substances to ingest, I'll side with the former, though I'd advise them to adopt the "less is more" mentality.
stjohnswarts 4y ago
This is going to make a lot of people on reddit and in silicon valley very angry.
kwatsonafter 4y ago
I think there's a generation of young people that are now in/approaching their 30's that got severely duped into believing that the drug culture of the 50's and 60's could somehow be responsibly reinvigorated in the contemporary age. I think it's going to be a long time before humans can responsibly do mind-altering chemicals at scale. It's quite like democracy (consider Dewey); without real education (moral education) psychedelic drugs seem to have the potential to upset culture more than heal/integrate culture. I'll leverage every shitty acid trip you've ever had at a concert as rhetorical evidence of what I'm saying here!
- stuntkite 4y ago
  Interesting take. I think I agree with you. I think the corporate and fashie interest in psychedelic magic bullets is seriously misguided. The alt-right seems to want to use it to reprogram people and the corporate interests want to give us LCD or DMT without the "fun" so they can make it a product. Why remove the fun? Imitrex (Sumatriptan) is a migraine medication that is DMT with some extras. It'll save you from a migraine but it SUCKS. Why? Why not just give people DMT? Maybe it's more effective, maybe it's a pro-drug. With the ongoing war on drugs and the abysmal outlook of just hacking the charm of psychedelics to make people into dispassionate monsters or work robots, I don't think we are on the right road to what the substances can do for society. Also, not everyone needs to trip. Fact. In most cultures that do have psychedelic substance rituals they are used by individuals that need to go to a shaman and sort out a complication such as loss, sickness, or mental disorder. Usually the shaman is the designated tripper for the community and that lifestyle is not considered to be a super sweet gig or constant party. Drugs being illegal has relegated them to parties, which I think is the wrong way to look at mind altering chemicals. Not that getting high as fuck at a party can't be super fuckin' fun but it commodifies the experience in a way that does a lot of harm that could be avoided without prohibition. Decriminalizing everything would open the door to building those structures into society and some places in the world have had good results with decriminalization and legalization.
  - kwatsonafter 4y ago
    "Drugs being illegal has relegated them to parties, which I think is the wrong way to look at mind altering chemicals." This a million times. We could build, "safe places" where people could productively use things like LSD and this activity could contribute to a body of active research. This might be a, "net loss" for society but you know what's even worse? Teenagers having a foundational spiritual experience sullied by being arrested or by being in the company of unsympathetic others. This ends up contributing to crime statistics (which is useful for the establishment, isn't it?) but does little in the way of furthering our understanding of the brain or cultural pharmacology; what to say of spirituality or freedom. It's also so bloody wasteful. Such a goddamned waste of magic and potential. The psychedelic brats with their dad's credit cards and the anal retentive aggressor lizards trying to steal my prostate energy. Hand's off!
Trasmatta 4y ago
I've been pretty interested in the nootropics community, and I've learned that it seems like the vast majority of effects people experience with nootropics are placebo. It doesn't surprise me that microdosing might be the same.
- Mo3 4y ago
  As someone who has spent a few weeks microdosing, the effects of LSD are definitely not a placebo effect, BUT! Psychedelics are not fire-and-forget like SSRIs, Adderall, or any other substance class known to the masses. Psychedelics bring up your subconscious processes into aware consciousness, and do so to lesser extent even at microdoses. What you actually do with this and use it for, is also precisely what will define the utility and benfit (or harm) for yourself. The effects and the benefits you can get off microdosing depend on the same things on which the outcome of real full-dose trips depend: Set and setting. Dosing acid every morning will do absolutely nil for you if you're just going to continue doing what you always did. You're going to do it with a little bit of an expanded mind, have comparably better creative and abstract thought streams, maybe get to see small glimpses of how your subconscious works during your daytime routine, and appreciate details and life itself more. You might also start interpreting too much into your experience or experience placebo effects. Nothing of that is permanent, and nothing will change, until you actually start to use it with clear intent as a tool to accelerate forming of new habits and thought patterns for yourself, which is MUCH harder than it sounds like. What LSD is really good at is opening up the flood barriers of your subconscious mind and removing filters off your perception, which then leads to exactly the effects you can use for benefit - that every experience you make while under the influence is immediately ingrained into your neural pathways 100x stronger than usually, and your stream of thought and inner monologue is very.. "clear" and accessible, so you can also apply this effect to your own inner unconscious monologue. This is for example where trauma is continued within yourself. You might have noticed that, if you let your mind chat and run unchecked and unwatched, sometimes it will start to form thoughts and inner monologue that resembles closely how you were treated by your parents in early childhood. Coupled with downsides of microdosing (and yes, there are downsides), it is a really delicate venture to undertake and you will need good knowledge and experience of psychedelics, psychology and a clear and direct intent, plan and motivation, or you are bound to end up just routinely microdosing for no purpose whatsoever and fuck up your brain chemistry for a while. Would recommend to some, but definitely not as a routine activity. Max 1 week.
gwern 4y ago
Fulltext: https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychedelic/2022-dewit.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychedelic/2022-dewit.pdf
_vdpp 4y ago
I think most people would be better served with the original nootropics - caffeine and nicotine (smokeless of course).
- manmal 4y ago
  Nicotine (no matter the form) is suspected to be cancer promoting: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4553893/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4553893/ It induces oxidative stress which is not necessarily a good thing.
  - user3939382 4y ago
    My possibly incorrect laymen understanding is that nicotine’s effect as a stimulant causes your heart to work harder, but unlike with cardiovascular exercise, your oxygen levels are not also increased. So rather than strengthening your heart nicotine simply taxes it.
- trompetenaccoun 4y ago
  Why?
- astrange 4y ago
  Sleep and aerobic exercise are the most effective nootropics, then balanced sunshine exposure.
ShamelessC 4y ago
Queue fifty anecdotes from HN about how this is wrong.
- hackernewds 4y ago
  Cynical take? None so far.
- vlunkr 4y ago
  Who are you going to trust, a scientific paper, or a bunch of people who take drugs every day because they think it makes them better programmers? /Snark
kieselguhr_kid 4y ago
I don't understand microdosing at all. The interesting and enjoyable effects of the drug are only pronounced at a macro level: significant disruption to normal thinking patterns, visual hallucinations, the suppression of the ego, etc. The mild psychological alteration at low doses does very little for me, and then I waste it by coding or solving business problems. Either way, why are you wasting this on making more money for your boss? It's much better spent having a fun weekend on the beach with friends, going for a hike in the woods (if you're highly experienced and can safely manage a solo trip), or literally anything else.
- dariusj18 4y ago
  The idea of microdosing is to get some of the effect of rewiring the brain while also not being inebriated.
  - ham-sandwich 4y ago
    Recreational and unsupervised brain rewiring doesn’t seem like a great idea
- monocasa 4y ago
  I'm sure there's people who do meth recreationally that say the same thing about my fairly small dosage but daily adderall usage. There's something to be said for a little bit all the time being as valid as a lot every now and then. They're focused on different effects and facets of life. In my mind it's 'doing large doses all the time' that's generally a problem (and even then only from a 'hey, you might need to work on yourself a bit and take a deep look at why you're doing that' perspective).
  - bozhark 4y ago
    There’s really not.
    - monocasa 4y ago
      I mean, I'm sure there are because I've met them and they've said that to me.
str3wer 4y ago
all persons in the test did not have any sign of anxiety or depression, it's like getting a medicine for headache without an headache hoping that you will feel even better
- mensetmanusman 4y ago
  People without depression can feel moods
  - UnpossibleJim 4y ago
    Moods are different than a person with clinical depression. That's comparable, in a hyperbolic way, to saying, everyone knows what it's like to break their leg because we've all stubbed our toe at some point. A person with a chemical imbalance cannot "just snap out of it", nor is it just a feeling of depression. There is a range of symptoms symptomology to go along with the diagnosis of true depression [1]. If left untreated, depending on severity, this can lead to suicide, delusional thinking, schizoid breaks, homelessness and very often self treatment with illicit drug use. [1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/depression/symptoms-causes/syc-20356007 https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/depression/sy...
    - mensetmanusman 4y ago
      All I’m pointing out is that this study isn’t necessarily focused on people with clinical depression. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s probably not worth criticizing a study that is looking in a different subset domain of interest.
      - pseudalopex 4y ago
        It's worth criticizing an article that omitted a major limitation until the end.
        httpsterio 4y ago
me_me_mu_mu 4y ago
I just drink coffee but that’s just me
uranium 4y ago
I'm just so happy a journal actually published a negative result.
- nabla9 4y ago
  Negative results for drugs that are not covered with patent are quite common.
  - boomskats 4y ago
    Indeed. Quoting from the original study text courtesy of gwern below [0]: --- CONFLICT OF INTERESTS HdW has served as scientific advisor to Schedule | Therapeutics, Gilgamesh Pharmaceuticals and Awakn Life Sciences, and she serves on the Board of Directors of PharmAla. None of these are directly related to this study. The other authors declare no conflicts of interest. --- HdW being Harriet de Wit, the lead on the study. Who sits on the Board of Directors of PharmAla [1]. PharmAla according to their website manufacture clinical-grade MDMA and novel (_patentable_) MDXX compounds for the scientific research community. Compounds that it could easily be argued are threatened by LSD for therapeutic purposes. ...I wonder why the original PsyPost article doesn't mention this. [0] https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychedelic/2022-dewit.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychedelic/2022-dewit.pdf [1] https://pharmala.ca/ https://pharmala.ca/
- aaron695 4y ago
BobbyJo 4y ago
I find the title a little confusing. In the article it states: > The researchers found that the higher dose of LSD (26 μg) produced a small decrease in false alarm rates for recognizing fearful emotions and a small decrease in feelings of social rejection. The higher dose of LSD also produced heightened feelings of vigor and some participants who received the higher dose reported feeling a modest “high” during the drug sessions. Then the following paragraph: > Under these limited conditions, the effects did not differ from placebo. If the study was placebo controlled, doesn't the first paragraph contradict the second? I'd also like to point out 1) that modest decreases in negative emotions (implied by the first paragraph) over a period of time can cumulatively alter one's perception of life for the better pretty significantly and 2) most microdosing protocols use 25ug, which is the high end of dosing for this study.
- smaryjerry 4y ago
  What’s also interesting is that at the end they mention this was only a 2 week study. I don’t know how microdosing is supposed to be done but Ive always imagined it less frequently, like once a week, and over a longer period of time.
- afro88 4y ago
  The second paragraph means that the placebo group experienced similar effects as those in the 26μg group. So the 26μg group could well just be placebo anyway.
  - sva_ 4y ago
    I wonder if those groups were together? Or separate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_high https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_high
    - netizen-936824 4y ago
      They are likely testing individuals
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
victor22 4y ago
I'm on LSD microdose while posting this. Have done microdoses at least 100 times in the past 10 years. This article is 100% bullshit. Just ask literally anyone who does it.
- frereubu 4y ago
  How would you know the difference between a pharmacological effect and a placebo effect in yourself? By definition a placebo effect is indistinguishable from a pharmacological effect, so you don't know which one it is. The idea of research like this is to tell one from the other because anecdata - which is effectively "asking anyone who does it" - is impossible to rely on. If I've missed your point, I think you need to unpack "bullshit" before anyone can take your comment seriously.
  - MacsHeadroom 4y ago
    This is a really hard problem. It's surely possible (maybe even probable) that these people who adamantly self report a benefit are a self-selected sub-sample of the wider population who largely would have no benefit. Nootropics, and many nutritional supplements generally, have the same problem.
  - throwaway98797 4y ago
    why lose trust in yourself and become owned by whatever science is popular? believe in yourself or become owned by the world. ignorance may be the price to pay but the alternative is worse
  - eurasiantiger 4y ago
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
sdze 4y ago
Same for me with Psilocybin. Microdosing never worked for me.
FollowingTheDao 4y ago
One of the greatest antidepressant is having agency in your life. When you take anything that is supposed to make you feel better it is telling your mind that you are back in control. So that might be what is happening when people microdose. The fact that they “removed any expectations that this was a psychedelic drug” is tantamount to removing the agency. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/intuition/vol13/iss2/10/ https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/intuition/vol13/iss2/10/ However, the fact that they did not test this on depressed patients is, well, depressing. When someone has depression, it is very easy to know when it leaves.
trompetenaccoun 4y ago
There are so many misconceptions about psychedelics. Microdosing is a trend and it doesn't seem the people following it currently even understand how and why it started. For example the fact that many unironically believe LSD improves mood. It's not alcohol, it radically alters your perception but doesn't sedate you. That can improve your mood or it can make it much worse.
- bgandrew 4y ago
  it's like saying "a book can improve your mood". It definitely can, and most often will but reading 15 pages a day probably won't do too much.
  - eurasiantiger 4y ago
    Depends on what you read, but that is a really bad analogy in any case.
    - trompetenaccoun 4y ago
      On psychedelics you're the book reading yourself. And sometimes what is written isn't pleasant ;)
sydthrowaway 4y ago
Lions Mane is best
superb-owl 4y ago
Environment and expectation play such a large role in psychedelic experience that placebo-controlled studies are not well-suited to measuring their effects. For instance, there's a huge experiential difference between hearing "you just ingested LSD" and "there's a 50% chance you just ingested LSD," and the resulting mindset (e.g. constantly wondering if you're in the control group) almost definitely affects the outcome.
- skohan 4y ago
  Is that how they do placebo controlled studies? I thought they would tell all participants they had received a genuine dose.
- dahart 4y ago
  Indeed, the article mentions they explicitly refrained from setting those expectation precisely because they affect the results. “We removed any expectations that this was a psychedelic drug,” de Wit explained. “Because in the real world, people’s expectations can strongly influence their responses.” The goal is to know whether the drug itself actually leads to improved mood & cognition, without any prior bias. I don’t know why you’d want to include expectational effects. Why is a placebo controlled study not well suited? If you don’t have a control group, you can’t know if the results are due to the drug, or due to hopes or “contact high” as they put it.
  - superb-owl 4y ago
    I missed that! Good catch. Michael Pollan points out a few of the factors that make studying psychedelics hard in How to Change Your Mind. For macrodoses, there's the obvious problem that you probably know whether you got placebo (he mentions a control drug that gives people "chills" but even that is pretty obviously not LSD) But the bigger issue is that LSD has a huge dynamical set of effects that depend heavily on mindset, expectations, environment, and probably randomness. It's not as straightforward a casual mechanism as say, aspirin. The positive effects of psychs can't be isolated from the supportive environment, the coaching from staff, etc - doing those things wrong can easily negate - or even reverse! - the effect (i.e. bad trips)
mise_en_place 4y ago
This seems to make sense to me, as I’ve read that tolerance for all serotonergic psychedelics builds up drastically after using any quantity/dose of LSD-25. SWIM has micro dosed before in the 50 ug range, and anecdotally had felt the salient features of the drug, while not necessarily experiencing a full trip.
- verall 4y ago
  50ug is half a hit, it's not a microdose at all.
  - mise_en_place 4y ago
    60 - 200 ug is listed as a trip dose in TiHKAL. 50 ug is subjectively quite different from 100 ug. It’s enough to warrant a distinction from a full dose, whatever you want to call that.
    - LocalH 4y ago
      50 is closer to a threshold dose than a micro dose.
    - 2-718-281-828 4y ago
      microdose is already defined and means a dosage so low that trippy sensations are barely perceptible. 50ug is very much perceptible. it's simply called a low dose.
jokoon 4y ago
I've read there are FDA-approved places where you can get LSD therapy for depression. Does it really work?
- hippich 4y ago
  Not sure if these work (I would assume it does work often enough to get approval from FDA?) but majority of studies I saw using psychedelics used regular or "hero" doses, not microdosing. So it is quite different from the topic of this study.
- jey 4y ago
  I've never heard of this. Are you sure you're not mixing it up with Ketamine therapy clinics?
  - timbit42 4y ago
    No. Both are used. Well, not at the same time.
    - jey 4y ago
      Can you point me to a link about FDA approved LSD treatment for depression?
      - timbit42 4y ago
        No. I'm not an American. Ask one of them.
- eigenrick 4y ago
  Oregon State has approved the dosing of psilocybin during therapy sessions, but only to be administered by licensed therapists. So far, there is quite a bit of evidence that two sessions of psilocybin dosing in a controlled environment does provide permanent relief for anxiety, depression and PTSD symptoms. I have a lot of other anecdotal evidence that this is also the case in less.. controlled settings.
stazz1 4y ago
Expecting to see a "robust effect" for what is effectively wizardry seems a little silly.
floatinglotus 4y ago
No one in SV does microdosing anymore. The new in-thing is macrodosing, basically every three days you take 10x a normal dose. It definitely improves creativity.
- astrange 4y ago
  Presence of creativity is not demonstrated in SV if you go outside and look at any of the built forms. Liking of brown low slung buildings built in 1960 maybe. It is possibly the explanation for the Flintstones House, which isn’t in SV.
aaron695 4y ago
jquaint 4y ago
The placebo effect in relation to LSD is interesting. Similar to the placebo effect, your expectation alters the effect of LSD. So I don't think it having placebo effects necessarily negates the validity of micro-dosing. LSD doesn't work in the same way as other drugs. Though even if it's snake oil, its pretty cheap snake oil. The cost ends up being around $1 every 3 days which is pretty reasonable.
- kolinko 4y ago
  If placebo’s effect is as strong as lsd, then it’s even cheaper and safer to buy sugar pills.

203 points by basisword 4y ago

I'm not sure of the benefits or detriments of microdosing psychedelics but a little research indicates this study should be taken with several large grains of salt, regardless of your opinion on this matter. First, the study size appears to be so small (about 20 people for placebo, and for each of the two dose regimens) that it's not really that indicative one way or the other. Second, reading through the journal's articles on Google Scholar definitely shows it has a bias towards the traditonal 'addictive and dangerous drugs' mentality such as alcohol, heroin, marijuana, cocaine, meth, etc. Interesting, a search for 'Adderall' turns up 1 result, and a search for 'methamphetamine' turns up 327 results on Google Scholar (using advanced search and limiting to this journal). Heroin gets 445 results, oxycodone gets 35 results. All in all this looks like a journal for researchers who approach the subject from an abuse-centric perspective, basically the Nancy Reagan approach to drug addiction issues. If you want a more balanced overview from a more general journal, try this: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.10200 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.10200 > "The powerful hallucinogen LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) has potential as a treatment for alcoholism, according to a retrospective analysis of studies published in the late 1960s and early 1970s. . . Of 536 participants in six trials, 59% of people receiving LSD reported lower levels of alcohol misuse, compared to 38% of people who received a placebo. “We were surprised that the effect was so clear and consistent,” says Krebs. She says that the problem with most studies done at that time was that there were too few participants, which limited statistical power. “But when you combine the data in a meta-analysis, we have more than 500 patients and there is definitely an effect,” she says. In general, the reported benefits lasted three to six months. Their findings are published today in the Journal of Psychopharmacology." Now does this address the best option for therapeutic use? Is one strong dose followed by therapy best for alcoholics? Could microdosing be a means for alcoholics to continue to resist the urge to drink over longer periods of time? Those sound like good topics to study. As far as those who want to use drugs and alcohol recreationally, vs. those who want to use the police and courts and prisons to enfore their view of what are the acceptable substances to ingest, I'll side with the former, though I'd advise them to adopt the "less is more" mentality.

stjohnswarts 4y ago

This is going to make a lot of people on reddit and in silicon valley very angry.

kwatsonafter 4y ago

I think there's a generation of young people that are now in/approaching their 30's that got severely duped into believing that the drug culture of the 50's and 60's could somehow be responsibly reinvigorated in the contemporary age. I think it's going to be a long time before humans can responsibly do mind-altering chemicals at scale. It's quite like democracy (consider Dewey); without real education (moral education) psychedelic drugs seem to have the potential to upset culture more than heal/integrate culture. I'll leverage every shitty acid trip you've ever had at a concert as rhetorical evidence of what I'm saying here!

stuntkite 4y ago
Interesting take. I think I agree with you. I think the corporate and fashie interest in psychedelic magic bullets is seriously misguided. The alt-right seems to want to use it to reprogram people and the corporate interests want to give us LCD or DMT without the "fun" so they can make it a product. Why remove the fun? Imitrex (Sumatriptan) is a migraine medication that is DMT with some extras. It'll save you from a migraine but it SUCKS. Why? Why not just give people DMT? Maybe it's more effective, maybe it's a pro-drug. With the ongoing war on drugs and the abysmal outlook of just hacking the charm of psychedelics to make people into dispassionate monsters or work robots, I don't think we are on the right road to what the substances can do for society. Also, not everyone needs to trip. Fact. In most cultures that do have psychedelic substance rituals they are used by individuals that need to go to a shaman and sort out a complication such as loss, sickness, or mental disorder. Usually the shaman is the designated tripper for the community and that lifestyle is not considered to be a super sweet gig or constant party. Drugs being illegal has relegated them to parties, which I think is the wrong way to look at mind altering chemicals. Not that getting high as fuck at a party can't be super fuckin' fun but it commodifies the experience in a way that does a lot of harm that could be avoided without prohibition. Decriminalizing everything would open the door to building those structures into society and some places in the world have had good results with decriminalization and legalization.
- kwatsonafter 4y ago
  "Drugs being illegal has relegated them to parties, which I think is the wrong way to look at mind altering chemicals." This a million times. We could build, "safe places" where people could productively use things like LSD and this activity could contribute to a body of active research. This might be a, "net loss" for society but you know what's even worse? Teenagers having a foundational spiritual experience sullied by being arrested or by being in the company of unsympathetic others. This ends up contributing to crime statistics (which is useful for the establishment, isn't it?) but does little in the way of furthering our understanding of the brain or cultural pharmacology; what to say of spirituality or freedom. It's also so bloody wasteful. Such a goddamned waste of magic and potential. The psychedelic brats with their dad's credit cards and the anal retentive aggressor lizards trying to steal my prostate energy. Hand's off!

Trasmatta 4y ago

I've been pretty interested in the nootropics community, and I've learned that it seems like the vast majority of effects people experience with nootropics are placebo. It doesn't surprise me that microdosing might be the same.

Mo3 4y ago
As someone who has spent a few weeks microdosing, the effects of LSD are definitely not a placebo effect, BUT! Psychedelics are not fire-and-forget like SSRIs, Adderall, or any other substance class known to the masses. Psychedelics bring up your subconscious processes into aware consciousness, and do so to lesser extent even at microdoses. What you actually do with this and use it for, is also precisely what will define the utility and benfit (or harm) for yourself. The effects and the benefits you can get off microdosing depend on the same things on which the outcome of real full-dose trips depend: Set and setting. Dosing acid every morning will do absolutely nil for you if you're just going to continue doing what you always did. You're going to do it with a little bit of an expanded mind, have comparably better creative and abstract thought streams, maybe get to see small glimpses of how your subconscious works during your daytime routine, and appreciate details and life itself more. You might also start interpreting too much into your experience or experience placebo effects. Nothing of that is permanent, and nothing will change, until you actually start to use it with clear intent as a tool to accelerate forming of new habits and thought patterns for yourself, which is MUCH harder than it sounds like. What LSD is really good at is opening up the flood barriers of your subconscious mind and removing filters off your perception, which then leads to exactly the effects you can use for benefit - that every experience you make while under the influence is immediately ingrained into your neural pathways 100x stronger than usually, and your stream of thought and inner monologue is very.. "clear" and accessible, so you can also apply this effect to your own inner unconscious monologue. This is for example where trauma is continued within yourself. You might have noticed that, if you let your mind chat and run unchecked and unwatched, sometimes it will start to form thoughts and inner monologue that resembles closely how you were treated by your parents in early childhood. Coupled with downsides of microdosing (and yes, there are downsides), it is a really delicate venture to undertake and you will need good knowledge and experience of psychedelics, psychology and a clear and direct intent, plan and motivation, or you are bound to end up just routinely microdosing for no purpose whatsoever and fuck up your brain chemistry for a while. Would recommend to some, but definitely not as a routine activity. Max 1 week.

gwern 4y ago

Fulltext: https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychedelic/2022-dewit.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychedelic/2022-dewit.pdf

_vdpp 4y ago

I think most people would be better served with the original nootropics - caffeine and nicotine (smokeless of course).

manmal 4y ago
Nicotine (no matter the form) is suspected to be cancer promoting: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4553893/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4553893/ It induces oxidative stress which is not necessarily a good thing.
- user3939382 4y ago
  My possibly incorrect laymen understanding is that nicotine’s effect as a stimulant causes your heart to work harder, but unlike with cardiovascular exercise, your oxygen levels are not also increased. So rather than strengthening your heart nicotine simply taxes it.
trompetenaccoun 4y ago
Why?
astrange 4y ago
Sleep and aerobic exercise are the most effective nootropics, then balanced sunshine exposure.

ShamelessC 4y ago

Queue fifty anecdotes from HN about how this is wrong.

hackernewds 4y ago
Cynical take? None so far.
vlunkr 4y ago
Who are you going to trust, a scientific paper, or a bunch of people who take drugs every day because they think it makes them better programmers? /Snark

kieselguhr_kid 4y ago

I don't understand microdosing at all. The interesting and enjoyable effects of the drug are only pronounced at a macro level: significant disruption to normal thinking patterns, visual hallucinations, the suppression of the ego, etc. The mild psychological alteration at low doses does very little for me, and then I waste it by coding or solving business problems. Either way, why are you wasting this on making more money for your boss? It's much better spent having a fun weekend on the beach with friends, going for a hike in the woods (if you're highly experienced and can safely manage a solo trip), or literally anything else.

dariusj18 4y ago
The idea of microdosing is to get some of the effect of rewiring the brain while also not being inebriated.
- ham-sandwich 4y ago
  Recreational and unsupervised brain rewiring doesn’t seem like a great idea
monocasa 4y ago
I'm sure there's people who do meth recreationally that say the same thing about my fairly small dosage but daily adderall usage. There's something to be said for a little bit all the time being as valid as a lot every now and then. They're focused on different effects and facets of life. In my mind it's 'doing large doses all the time' that's generally a problem (and even then only from a 'hey, you might need to work on yourself a bit and take a deep look at why you're doing that' perspective).
- bozhark 4y ago
  There’s really not.
  - monocasa 4y ago
    I mean, I'm sure there are because I've met them and they've said that to me.

str3wer 4y ago

all persons in the test did not have any sign of anxiety or depression, it's like getting a medicine for headache without an headache hoping that you will feel even better

mensetmanusman 4y ago
People without depression can feel moods
- UnpossibleJim 4y ago
  Moods are different than a person with clinical depression. That's comparable, in a hyperbolic way, to saying, everyone knows what it's like to break their leg because we've all stubbed our toe at some point. A person with a chemical imbalance cannot "just snap out of it", nor is it just a feeling of depression. There is a range of symptoms symptomology to go along with the diagnosis of true depression [1]. If left untreated, depending on severity, this can lead to suicide, delusional thinking, schizoid breaks, homelessness and very often self treatment with illicit drug use. [1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/depression/symptoms-causes/syc-20356007 https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/depression/sy...
  - mensetmanusman 4y ago
    All I’m pointing out is that this study isn’t necessarily focused on people with clinical depression. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s probably not worth criticizing a study that is looking in a different subset domain of interest.
    - pseudalopex 4y ago
      It's worth criticizing an article that omitted a major limitation until the end.
      - httpsterio 4y ago

me_me_mu_mu 4y ago

I just drink coffee but that’s just me

uranium 4y ago

I'm just so happy a journal actually published a negative result.

nabla9 4y ago
Negative results for drugs that are not covered with patent are quite common.
- boomskats 4y ago
  Indeed. Quoting from the original study text courtesy of gwern below [0]: --- CONFLICT OF INTERESTS HdW has served as scientific advisor to Schedule | Therapeutics, Gilgamesh Pharmaceuticals and Awakn Life Sciences, and she serves on the Board of Directors of PharmAla. None of these are directly related to this study. The other authors declare no conflicts of interest. --- HdW being Harriet de Wit, the lead on the study. Who sits on the Board of Directors of PharmAla [1]. PharmAla according to their website manufacture clinical-grade MDMA and novel (_patentable_) MDXX compounds for the scientific research community. Compounds that it could easily be argued are threatened by LSD for therapeutic purposes. ...I wonder why the original PsyPost article doesn't mention this. [0] https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychedelic/2022-dewit.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychedelic/2022-dewit.pdf [1] https://pharmala.ca/ https://pharmala.ca/
aaron695 4y ago

BobbyJo 4y ago

I find the title a little confusing. In the article it states: > The researchers found that the higher dose of LSD (26 μg) produced a small decrease in false alarm rates for recognizing fearful emotions and a small decrease in feelings of social rejection. The higher dose of LSD also produced heightened feelings of vigor and some participants who received the higher dose reported feeling a modest “high” during the drug sessions. Then the following paragraph: > Under these limited conditions, the effects did not differ from placebo. If the study was placebo controlled, doesn't the first paragraph contradict the second? I'd also like to point out 1) that modest decreases in negative emotions (implied by the first paragraph) over a period of time can cumulatively alter one's perception of life for the better pretty significantly and 2) most microdosing protocols use 25ug, which is the high end of dosing for this study.

smaryjerry 4y ago
What’s also interesting is that at the end they mention this was only a 2 week study. I don’t know how microdosing is supposed to be done but Ive always imagined it less frequently, like once a week, and over a longer period of time.
afro88 4y ago
The second paragraph means that the placebo group experienced similar effects as those in the 26μg group. So the 26μg group could well just be placebo anyway.
- sva_ 4y ago
  I wonder if those groups were together? Or separate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_high https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_high
  - netizen-936824 4y ago
    They are likely testing individuals
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

victor22 4y ago

I'm on LSD microdose while posting this. Have done microdoses at least 100 times in the past 10 years. This article is 100% bullshit. Just ask literally anyone who does it.

frereubu 4y ago
How would you know the difference between a pharmacological effect and a placebo effect in yourself? By definition a placebo effect is indistinguishable from a pharmacological effect, so you don't know which one it is. The idea of research like this is to tell one from the other because anecdata - which is effectively "asking anyone who does it" - is impossible to rely on. If I've missed your point, I think you need to unpack "bullshit" before anyone can take your comment seriously.
- MacsHeadroom 4y ago
  This is a really hard problem. It's surely possible (maybe even probable) that these people who adamantly self report a benefit are a self-selected sub-sample of the wider population who largely would have no benefit. Nootropics, and many nutritional supplements generally, have the same problem.
- throwaway98797 4y ago
  why lose trust in yourself and become owned by whatever science is popular? believe in yourself or become owned by the world. ignorance may be the price to pay but the alternative is worse
- eurasiantiger 4y ago
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

sdze 4y ago

Same for me with Psilocybin. Microdosing never worked for me.

FollowingTheDao 4y ago

One of the greatest antidepressant is having agency in your life. When you take anything that is supposed to make you feel better it is telling your mind that you are back in control. So that might be what is happening when people microdose. The fact that they “removed any expectations that this was a psychedelic drug” is tantamount to removing the agency. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/intuition/vol13/iss2/10/ https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/intuition/vol13/iss2/10/ However, the fact that they did not test this on depressed patients is, well, depressing. When someone has depression, it is very easy to know when it leaves.

trompetenaccoun 4y ago

There are so many misconceptions about psychedelics. Microdosing is a trend and it doesn't seem the people following it currently even understand how and why it started. For example the fact that many unironically believe LSD improves mood. It's not alcohol, it radically alters your perception but doesn't sedate you. That can improve your mood or it can make it much worse.

bgandrew 4y ago
it's like saying "a book can improve your mood". It definitely can, and most often will but reading 15 pages a day probably won't do too much.
- eurasiantiger 4y ago
  Depends on what you read, but that is a really bad analogy in any case.
  - trompetenaccoun 4y ago
    On psychedelics you're the book reading yourself. And sometimes what is written isn't pleasant ;)

sydthrowaway 4y ago

Lions Mane is best

superb-owl 4y ago

Environment and expectation play such a large role in psychedelic experience that placebo-controlled studies are not well-suited to measuring their effects. For instance, there's a huge experiential difference between hearing "you just ingested LSD" and "there's a 50% chance you just ingested LSD," and the resulting mindset (e.g. constantly wondering if you're in the control group) almost definitely affects the outcome.

skohan 4y ago
Is that how they do placebo controlled studies? I thought they would tell all participants they had received a genuine dose.
dahart 4y ago
Indeed, the article mentions they explicitly refrained from setting those expectation precisely because they affect the results. “We removed any expectations that this was a psychedelic drug,” de Wit explained. “Because in the real world, people’s expectations can strongly influence their responses.” The goal is to know whether the drug itself actually leads to improved mood & cognition, without any prior bias. I don’t know why you’d want to include expectational effects. Why is a placebo controlled study not well suited? If you don’t have a control group, you can’t know if the results are due to the drug, or due to hopes or “contact high” as they put it.
- superb-owl 4y ago
  I missed that! Good catch. Michael Pollan points out a few of the factors that make studying psychedelics hard in How to Change Your Mind. For macrodoses, there's the obvious problem that you probably know whether you got placebo (he mentions a control drug that gives people "chills" but even that is pretty obviously not LSD) But the bigger issue is that LSD has a huge dynamical set of effects that depend heavily on mindset, expectations, environment, and probably randomness. It's not as straightforward a casual mechanism as say, aspirin. The positive effects of psychs can't be isolated from the supportive environment, the coaching from staff, etc - doing those things wrong can easily negate - or even reverse! - the effect (i.e. bad trips)

mise_en_place 4y ago

This seems to make sense to me, as I’ve read that tolerance for all serotonergic psychedelics builds up drastically after using any quantity/dose of LSD-25. SWIM has micro dosed before in the 50 ug range, and anecdotally had felt the salient features of the drug, while not necessarily experiencing a full trip.

verall 4y ago
50ug is half a hit, it's not a microdose at all.
- mise_en_place 4y ago
  60 - 200 ug is listed as a trip dose in TiHKAL. 50 ug is subjectively quite different from 100 ug. It’s enough to warrant a distinction from a full dose, whatever you want to call that.
  - LocalH 4y ago
    50 is closer to a threshold dose than a micro dose.
  - 2-718-281-828 4y ago
    microdose is already defined and means a dosage so low that trippy sensations are barely perceptible. 50ug is very much perceptible. it's simply called a low dose.

jokoon 4y ago

I've read there are FDA-approved places where you can get LSD therapy for depression. Does it really work?

hippich 4y ago
Not sure if these work (I would assume it does work often enough to get approval from FDA?) but majority of studies I saw using psychedelics used regular or "hero" doses, not microdosing. So it is quite different from the topic of this study.
jey 4y ago
I've never heard of this. Are you sure you're not mixing it up with Ketamine therapy clinics?
- timbit42 4y ago
  No. Both are used. Well, not at the same time.
  - jey 4y ago
    Can you point me to a link about FDA approved LSD treatment for depression?
    - timbit42 4y ago
      No. I'm not an American. Ask one of them.
eigenrick 4y ago
Oregon State has approved the dosing of psilocybin during therapy sessions, but only to be administered by licensed therapists. So far, there is quite a bit of evidence that two sessions of psilocybin dosing in a controlled environment does provide permanent relief for anxiety, depression and PTSD symptoms. I have a lot of other anecdotal evidence that this is also the case in less.. controlled settings.

stazz1 4y ago

Expecting to see a "robust effect" for what is effectively wizardry seems a little silly.

floatinglotus 4y ago

No one in SV does microdosing anymore. The new in-thing is macrodosing, basically every three days you take 10x a normal dose. It definitely improves creativity.

astrange 4y ago
Presence of creativity is not demonstrated in SV if you go outside and look at any of the built forms. Liking of brown low slung buildings built in 1960 maybe. It is possibly the explanation for the Flintstones House, which isn’t in SV.

aaron695 4y ago

jquaint 4y ago

The placebo effect in relation to LSD is interesting. Similar to the placebo effect, your expectation alters the effect of LSD. So I don't think it having placebo effects necessarily negates the validity of micro-dosing. LSD doesn't work in the same way as other drugs. Though even if it's snake oil, its pretty cheap snake oil. The cost ends up being around $1 every 3 days which is pretty reasonable.

kolinko 4y ago
If placebo’s effect is as strong as lsd, then it’s even cheaper and safer to buy sugar pills.