Microdosing for health, healing, and enhanced performance

Psychologist Fadiman and ghostwriter Gruber follow up 2020's Your Symphony of Selves with a thin treatise asserting that small doses of LSD or psilocybin mushrooms can improve one's health and boost creativity, among other benefits. The authors suggest that microdoses should be small enough that they don't produce visual distortions and that readers should wait at least two days in between doses. Discussions of microdosing's benefits are hamstrung by a lack of evidence owing to a decades-long ban on researching psychedelics. The authors rely on unverified anecdotes throughout, as when they report that a visual artist who contacted Fadiman through his website overcame a creative block while microdosing, and that Reddit comments from college students who regularly took psychedelics indicate the substances may have helped raise their grades by enhancing their focus. Fadiman and Gruber string together firsthand testimonies about psychedelics' positive effects on such conditions as chronic pain, depression, and long Covid without explaining how the drugs might cause such outcomes, making this feel more like a comments section than a cohesive report. Additionally, the few studies the authors cite are often of dubious quality, such as one that, despite lacking a control group, concluded microdosing might lessen ADHD symptoms. This fails to overcome the paucity of quality research on psychedelics. Agent: Jim Levine, Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary. (Feb.)