The Remarkable Results of Microdosing: James Fadiman

[Music] and just this morning as I was driving the freeway and my iPhone said I'm not gonna tell you where to turn off and I thought I'm at the mercy of this little object whose electromagnetic radiations are slowly destroying either my brain or my crotch depending on where I'm T so I pulled over and we had a talk and I explained that this was really an important group to talk to and it said I'll give you an alternate route that the other map app won't know so it's nice to be here and just to be clear how many of you have never had any psychedelic experience okay oh it's wonder I rarely meet you and of those of you who kept your hands down how many of you have experienced micro dosing okay now one of the things that you have noticed is that there's no science yet just world wide use though there is something I call citizen science which is the thousands and thousands of people who have talked to each other and help each other as well as as the the mushroom companies who write me thank-you notes for all the kids they're selling so a micro dose of a psychedelic and I'll just use the term micro dose from here on is a tenth to a twentieth of the amount one would take if one were having a recreational dose if one is talking about a transformational dose we're really dealing with much higher numbers but we're talking approximately ten micrograms of LSD between a tenth of a gram and a four tenths of a gram of mushrooms and you can take it from there the discovery and and like everything else when you deal with the natural world and with the plant world it's always rediscovery by by ignorant white people that's our our system [Applause] but for me the discovery was Robert fort told me that Albert Hofmann had told him about a low dose and I thought that was interesting my entire career has been with relatively high doses you know if it isn't transcendence and you don't vanish as a being and you're not one with all things I'm not that interested so what does the universe do for me it says why don't you look at the absolute other end at the most boring use of psychedelics ever created no mystical visions no snakes eating you alive no angelic being saying you're really special and I and everyone else is too but you can't fear is that so micro dosing it turns out makes you feel better and as as islets great book says it's called a really good day and those of you who have not micro dosed have had really good days so you know what I'm talking about now the first question was why does this little teeny bit have any effect at all and one of the nice things is is there's research and there's a lot of research on very low and micro doses there's a book coming out in a couple of weeks called the science of micro dosing and the research is all very clears there are no effects below 25 Mike's now the problem with all that research is that they were looking only for what we would call classic psychedelic effects so they missed everything else but being good scientists they said there are no effects rather than here are the things we look for and there weren't those would have been a little more correct the other problem the other question was given how amazing micro dosing is and I'll go into it in a little bit why hadn't we been noticing at least for the past 50 years because remember most LSD work in the world comes in two phases one up till the government stopped it and it was the most research psychiatric drug on the planet several thousand research papers and there was the period of enormous use which is at least in the United States since it became illegal 26 million Americans have tried LSD and that figure goes up four to six hundred thousands each year no matter what's going on in the in the drug world but nobody was paying attention to micro doses well it curiously I was going back to what Sandoz had done because in the good old days you wrote Santos and they sent you some LSD and said tell us how you're using it and the government if you were doing it that way gave you a an exemption to do that you're on your way Santos only provided LSD in ampules that's a little bit of glass a little bit of liquid 25 Mike's or tablets 25 Mike's no one ever considered that there was anything else below that well there is and in fact there's a lovely thing which you might just think about with other pharmaceuticals you may have been given Albert Hoffman said on the package when Santos sent it out it said before you give this to anyone else you must use it yourself now that's packaging but of course what happened in many cases you use it yourself and you said why am I gonna give this right to a bunch of overweight sophomores to see if their blood sugar changes now the nice thing about micro dosing is it's been used for thousands of years by indigenous people and I was brought this was brought home to me in a very somewhat embarrassing way I was feeling jim the explorer had discovered this new way and was promoting it fairly wildly an anthropologist said to me did it ever occur to you that digitus people might have tried small doses given that they've tried every other level of dose and I said until you mentioned it and then when you begin to look really carefully at some even of the anthropologists they have a little throwaway line there's a 1977 article about the Huichol in National Geographic and it says they they they consider peyote a you know a major sacrament and they use it to to make it easier to have long hot walks just to see to have visions and to see their gods and I thought well those are dosage levels because some of you may know that if you took a fairly large dose of LSD or peyote you would not take a long hot walk you might lie in the Sun and a hope that your eyeballs don't get burned out so low doses are out there and obviously in any hunting and gathering society South America hunters really do a lot better with something that increases stamina increases visual acuity and increases the willingness to focus very very carefully for long amounts of time so it's an obvious use but what happened is I started asking people would you be interested in trying this very low dose and like some of you I have a lot of friends who said oh sure man that's cool yeah I haven't tried that how about next week I'm kind of stoned this weekend with something higher so I began to get reports and the first reports were yes there were effects and that was at that moment rather exciting then I kept asking people and then people would ask people and then people who didn't know me would ask people and I began to get reports from other countries and from people I wouldn't normally meet and I began to compile the lists of things they said it helped and it began to get very puzzling and let me read you a list and this was most of this is from 2015 this is things that were improved by the use of ten micrograms or slightly less every third date the the the kind of protocol I suggested for for exploration and for exploration only was one day on in two days off by the way that's become and I read about it the Fadiman protocol in which your entire life is now committed to that schedule I only ask people to do it for a month and said do what you want after that and let me know and it turns out after a month most of the people in our sample we're talking thousands do it less often so turns out it's it's major addictive properties are vastly overblown so what does it help anxiety not not general Angus I not if you're just anxious but academic anxiety party anxiety social anxiety Asperger's more ease in social situations and people who are kind of serious because most Asperger's people are fairly serious and also like to keep really good records they tend to want to take more than that for the same effect that for the rest of us ten is enough bipolar mood elevation during the depression which is most people we recommend not doing something during your manic phase and usually you're perfectly happy done to my favorite in the early ones was no post Burning Man crash [Applause] and as this young woman wrote a first creativity this is technical creativity coding machine design a lot of others recently we've been looking at concussions and maybe we'll have time to get back to that but if not we'll we'll take it in the question time but concussions turn out too often are alleviated in in many ways with micro dosing and that's something I want to really do a study on people stopped using or decreased their use of coffee cigarettes adderall a lot of antidepressants and what people now write in they say I want to buy Mon this horrible pharmaceutical I want to micro dose I write back the word is taper the word withdrawal by the way does not appear in the pharmaceutical literature but how you get off something is to take less and less and less of it because most of the antidepressants are incredibly addictive as some of you unfortunately know icepick headaches that's a headache where it feels like there's an icepick going into your eye they take about one minute but they can be alleviated in a couple of seconds for the microdose the long version of that is called a cluster headache usually that takes a much higher dose of psychedelics but a number of people have reported that micro dosing solved their clusters as well and we'd like to look at that one of the things that's that you look for when you're getting these reports is changes that nobody asked for because those are really interesting in general when people are micro dosing they improve their health habits food choices exercise yoga meditation early on a wonderful guy who used to write about 2,500 words a day to me I know a lot about him and his children his ex-wife from Salford but he was a junk-food kind of guy when he wasn't smoking dope and he said I looked at the menu and by God I wanted the salad so what I want you to get out of that is these changes in habits are not by willpower they seem to occur as an effect there are no by the way there are no side effects there are only effects of things learning languages advanced math a lot of people said I was much better able to focus in class even my lousy teachers got interesting and a couple of people have said I was able to look at the PowerPoint once and then just make notes I didn't have to keep going back and forth and people's basically talked about better grades and easier exams and so forth one of the ones that was wonderful because is you just don't think psychedelics menstrual periods troubling emotional or physical PMS a lot of people are reporting improvements to the extent of from horrible to normal and we have a little sub study going on that physical skills musical instruments drumming composition flying a plane driving trauma this is not gonna eliminate trauma but it seems to decrease the triggering and one of the ones is that miss peculiar was much less procrastination and when I looked at this I thought that's really cool but then I thought oh my god what if the pharmaceutical industry sees this and decides the procrastination is a disease they'll be out there a few people improved in stuttering writer's block a lot of journalists who have done articles on micro dosing indicate that it's great for first drafts and either two groups of journalist ones who would write I am micro doze for a month and then I talked to this guy the others where I talked to this guy and then afterwards I wrote him that I was microdose and people basically have improved work amount discrimination flow quality they also indicate that there are they're more comfortable with those awful people at work there also I have a couple of notes that say boy if people know that it what it did for your libido you would have a product we haven't seen that as a generalization but you're welcome to check it out so what happened with this research as we started reporting it reported it Maps report in Prague and England Berlin and most recently Fuchs go to horizon and what happened at the same time was what you might call a media feeding frenzy which is there was one article and then there were eight articles that either quoted it or just stole it and then there was just an endless round of articles until every magazine had to have had their micro dosing article and each article of course led to more people trying it and more people trying it would write to our site micro dosing psychedelics calm that's where the plural psychedelics and they would sign in for information and join our study and the study was take it for a month every couple of days and since we were now doing a more formal study tell us of all your emotional states for the prior month tell us why you wanted micro dose and then of course we can see from your numbers what happened so what happens in general is that and we used a very standard instrument called pumice it's positive and negative effects States and we picked a very general well-known instrument so people wouldn't say why didn't you use a general well-known instrument it's not that great but what it basically said is when people are micro dosing their positive emotions go up and their negative emotions decline now antidepressants for the few of you they work for have a partial similar effect they tend to make negative emotions go down which is you can you you are much better able to stand being unhappy mic ragosa's work differently which is you not only are less unhappy but you're more happy and that's remarkable and as the media frenzy continued and it continues to this day right now there's a little sub unit on reddit of 20,000 people talking to each other about micro doses if you go to the YouTube the the highest a single and nah not bad how do micro dose has six hundred thousand hits there's a there's a group called the third wave that's one word third wave calm who give classes on how to micro dose and are generally setting up kind of friendship units kind of like psychedelic societies around there's also a lovely guy on England who sell you a micro dose kit in case you don't know how to measure ten micrograms he also includes sterile gloves and I think it's in even a little wooden box it's really quite lovely well and because of this huge interest in arts our sample as from 59 countries so when I say it's one of the things I've learned is psychedelics are available worldwide and what's my time okay I got to tell you just one story then there's I got a letter from Namibia okay everyone who knows they could immediately go to a map and put their finger on Libya don't raise your hands you'll embarrass the people around you he had had again those of you know psychedelics he had had shingles shingles if you don't take care of them for some people it's basically pain its pain pain pain this was his third month he was no longer pretty much sleeping I mean it was terrible you don't know all the things you can do if you start too late he'd never had any psychedelic experience and he wrote he said I had a friend in the Capitol who had some mushrooms and I just thought it might be a good idea this is why I think you know divine and plays with us 45 minutes later he was out of paint that's what I said whew and I was so excited I wrote him back and other things I was so excited because I wanted to tell my colleague Sofia who is presenting in Prague and when she got back to the states I called her and you know I tell you this terrific story and I said other shingles she said you know in Prague two women came up to me hugged me and wept I said yeah she said shingles now those of you who are into neuroanatomy and brain chemistry and all the things that have not actually proved very useful yet but you get those great pictures you can figure out why ten micrograms of LSD can help shingles and I'll give you one more even geekier one this is a negative this is people who shouldn't micro those people with red-green color blindness some of you may know what a tracer is those of you that don't when you take a regular psychedelic you see a light source and you move your eye away and then and there's a little thin line of light that follows you it's a tracer people with red-green blindness with colorblindness with micro dosing have those tracers for days because we they we had a few of them in our study and they all dropped out and Sofia wrote them and said why'd you dropped out and they said traces and Sofia being a real scientist she said let me talk to you Jim in a couple of days on a couple of days ice she said I had a friend who has red-green blindness yes it's true she called him would you please microdose yes there are tracers what we're doing now here so we're we you know so it's out there we've explored the island the the event space of micro dosing has come into being it's like exploring a tropical island there's just all kinds of things in it that we don't understand but they're there the next thing that happens after first there's the people who say I don't believe anything actually even the sunrise unless there's a double-blind study and they always at their end of an article as someone who says well there hasn't been a double-blind to study how do we know that all these thousands of people it isn't just a placebo one of one of our many subjects wrote in and said I don't care if it's a placebo I haven't felt this good in 20 years and I just loved them to do the one on a shingles and see if there's a placebo but anyway that's what's happening is there are 12 countries in which the usual correct double-blind cross bra blah blah studies are starting Canada New Zealand maybe even the USA it's a little harder because it's very it's costly if you have to keep watching people and in the US as someone says very hard to talk to our University and say we'd like to give people a Schedule one drug every couple of days and just let them go home and the University says if I say no what's it gonna cost me if I say yes what could it cost me so anyway 12 other countries are working on it and we were about to go out of business and then we thought what could we do that nobody else can do well we have thousands of people who have micro dosed and we have enough of their information and they microdose up to maybe year and a half ago but we only asked them to tell us for a month and many of them didn't tell us that long so we are asking approximately 8,000 people to tell us what were the long-term effects for you if you micro toast if you stopped how often you do it what's going on now because we're the only group we can really do that because we have this huge base to start from and that will that will actually be a better data than is available for most pharmaceuticals little dirty secret most pharmaceutical research does not go beyond the six months that which you have been taking for 15 years no data so we're trying to move things along because it is available as as someone pointed out mushrooms do not know they're illegal and that's probably what we're going to stop with because there's so many people now that want to do the research and they're in positions to do so and the first group did a beautiful little study in Amsterdam there was a meeting of a psychedelic society and they the researcher said would you mind if we made this a research evening everybody gets a little bit of truffle psychedelic truffle is actually it's a mushroom that just grows underground and for peculiar reasons it's legal more legal than the mushroom so people took some intelligence kind of tests and then they truffled might as well make up a verb when you have a moment and then later in the evening they took the test again super clean research called open you know open source so they knew and it turned out of the three kinds of intellectual activity they were looking at to improved and one didn't it's a very beautiful clean research and what's wonderful is it took about three hours to get the data see my friends in the in the hard science world they do a study and you've read some of them you know twelve subjects how long does it take you to get the subjects a year what it costs eighty thousand dollars and I say well I've got five to ten thousand subjects and it costs awfully little particularly at my salary and we have a whole different way of doing a science which is called citizen science which is you find out you tell us you help other people we now have a few things where we say don't use micro dosing as I say for anxiety color blindness very few else and that's where we're going so that we are returning to the indigenous model which is you work with people you know and you work with people in your own life and you find out how something works and if it it's the nice thing about micro dosing if it doesn't work you stop if it's unpleasant in any way you stop and that's the end of it so I'll see some of you later and for the rest of you this is really an amazing event just amazing and I'm so glad to be here thank you [Music]

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Views: 494,053

Rating: 4.8911419 out of 5

Keywords: James Fadiman, science and nonduality, psychedelics, microdosing, LSD, psilocybin, Asperger's, emotions, shingles, creativity, citizen science

Id: 6AfFM8pfy4s

Length: 30min 40sec (1840 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 18 2019