A Really Good Day(12)

And yet Strassman, after a thorough review of this study and others, concluded, “It appears that the incidence of adverse reactions to psychedelic drugs is low, when…patients are carefully screened and prepared, supervised, and followed up, and given judicious doses of pharmaceutical quality drug.” His conclusion is in line with other, more recent research, as well as what mid-twentieth-century scientists found.

One of the most important things the early LSD pioneers discovered is that the personality of the researcher administering the drug had a profound effect on the experience of the patient. If the examiner was cold and distant, the subject occasionally became hostile, even paranoid. The subjects of a warm and gentle researcher almost universally experienced feelings of love and joy. What are the implications of this finding in terms of my administering the drug to myself? No one is meaner to me than me. I was probably being cold and distant with myself when I hit the dropper!

In response to this discovery, researchers articulated the concept of “set and setting” in influencing subjective drug experiences, not just of LSD but of all drugs. Set refers to the subject’s own subjective mental state. How stable is she? What does she think she will experience? Setting is the environment in which she takes the drug. If the environment is threatening and chaotic, or clinical and cold, she’s more likely to have a negative experience. If the environment is safe and supportive, she is more likely to have a meaningful, positive experience. Not, for example, a sweaty bed freak-out in the middle of the night.

Though I’d much prefer to undertake this experiment in an official setting, supervised by psychiatrists and using pharmaceutical-grade LSD, I don’t have that option. The last decade has seen a renaissance in research into the effects of psychedelic drugs, including LSD, but microdosing is not being researched by anyone in the world. Though some might be in the early planning stages, there are at this time no studies going on, double-blind or otherwise. Dr. Fadiman’s collection of notes from experiments like my own is the closest approximation to a study out there. It’s the Wild West, and I’m running my own saloon.

I reminded myself that Dr. Fadiman has collected hundreds of reports, and though a few individuals have experienced some anxiety while microdosing, no one has ever lost her mind. Nor could anyone lose her mind from such a dose. Not even me.

I put aside my notes and took a few deep breaths. I was not dying of a heart attack. My preparation for this month-long experiment had been as thorough as possible. I did my research and took as many precautions as I could. There is risk, certainly, but so is there with any medication or drug. As a point of comparison, according to a thorough review of the literature by ProPublica, more than three hundred people in the United States die every year from taking acetaminophen (that’s Tylenol) and another forty-four thousand end up in the emergency room. Compared with this, LSD seems almost harmless.

Those stories I heard about people flinging themselves off the roofs of buildings, convinced that they can fly? Those are urban legend, not fact. And what about suicides? According to the 2008 literature review, “The incidence of psychotic reactions, suicide attempts, and suicides during treatment with LSD…appears comparable to the rate of complications during conventional psychotherapy.” There have been reports of people falling while on LSD, some fatally, but most likely because of disorientation and confusion. The myth of the flying tripper probably began with television host Art Linkletter’s twenty-year-old daughter, Diane, who committed suicide in 1969. Her father, perhaps unwilling to admit or confront her history of depression, was convinced that an experience with LSD six months before had caused her to jump to her death. He became a committed anti-drug campaigner, helping to spread the myth that people on LSD jumped off buildings to their deaths.

In fact, a recent study published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology found that psychedelic use is correlated with lower rates of suicidal thinking and suicide. According to researchers, “Lifetime classic psychedelic use was associated with a 19% reduced likelihood of past month psychological distress, a 14% reduced likelihood of past year suicidal thinking, a 29% reduced likelihood of past year suicidal planning, and a 36% reduced likelihood of past year suicide attempt.”*5

Given all the evidence of its safety, why is LSD so maligned? It’s most certainly because of the way, in the 1960s, LSD came to be associated with youthful rebellion and social upheaval. When Timothy Leary, a psychologist and former Harvard lecturer and early researcher who advocated widespread recreational LSD use, told the children of the middle class to “Turn on, tune in, and drop out,” they did, terrifying their parents. People were horrified to see their children protesting the war in Vietnam, joining in the civil-rights movement, smoking pot, and taking LSD. White America began to view their country as a fractured and scary place. They latched on to drugs, and especially LSD, as a symptom of the problem.

But I’m not my grandmother, clutching my pearls as I sip my saccharin-flavored Sanka and fretting about the bright and shining youth of America’s transformation into a bunch of dirty hippies. I am confident that this drug is safe at a dose far higher than the near-homeopathic one that I’m taking.

I took a few more deep breaths and finally drifted off to sleep. First thing in the morning, I picked a fight with my husband.

One of the reasons that I started this experiment was that I had come to feel, even in moments when my mood was fine, a faint sense of peril, as if I were perpetually at risk for a setback that could trigger an outburst. My temper felt like an angry bullmastiff, kept in check by a frayed muzzle. After my brutal night, the mastiff slipped the leash.