Forget muesli, taking acid could be better for your health
It may sound like a headline from satirical site The Onion, but psychedelics expert Dr James Fadiman Ph.D is deadly serious. The respected scientist claims a small dose of LSD with your morning cereal can help you be more productive, effective, happier and creative, among other things.
Fadiman started looking into LSD’s effects on creativity back in the early Sixties, before the government made psychedelics illegal and stopped funding for scientific research. He had a life-changing experience when his old Harvard professor Richard Alpert (now known as Ram Dass) fed him magic mushrooms in a Paris cafe. Fadiman saw psychedelic research as his calling, and worked hard for the next few years to demonstrate how LSD could help with a wide range of issues: from psychotherapy and addiction treatment to artistic ability, happiness and spiritual evolution. Fadiman is co-founder of and teacher at the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology and has taught at San Francisco State, Brandeis and Stanford.
In 1966 Fadiman, like scientists across the States, received a letter from the government informing him that psychedelic research was now illegal. Devastated, Fadiman retreated from the public eye for many years. In 2011, he published The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide: Safe, Therapeutic And Sacred Journeys and appeared at Horizons psychedelics conference in New York, where he spoke about ‘micro-dosing’ among other things. Unlike Terence McKenna, who advocated ‘heroic doses’ of mushrooms (taken alone in silent darkness) to potential ‘psychonauts’, Fadiman has homed in on the idea of taking psychedelic compounds in such small amounts that nobody would ever notice you were tripping. He calls these ‘chakra-enhancers’.
“Microdosing turns out to be a totally different world,” Fadiman said. “The rocks don’t glow, even a little bit. But what many people are reporting is that at the end of the day, they say: ‘That was a really good day’, that kind of day when things kind of work. You’re doing a task you normally couldn’t stand for two hours, but you do it for three or four. You eat properly. Maybe you do one more set of reps. Just a good day. That seems to be what we’re discovering.”
LSD is non-toxic and non-addictive. No-one has ever died from consuming the compound, but many have reported wonderful things: a heightened sense of love and compassion for the world and other people, a focused concentration, a feeling of elation and deep contentment, an ability to forget past hurts and live in the moment, addiction therapy, and more. Micro-dosing is a way of avoiding any negative side effects of high LSD doses (paranoia, disorientation, crazy visuals) while still giving you a happy (and very safe) boost for the day.
Former CNN journalist Amber Lyon, along with (of course) Bill Hicks, Joe Rogan and Terence McKenna all sing the praises of psychedelic drugs. As we reported here, many other scientists agree with Fadiman and are pushing for funding for scientific research into their many benefits. Could 2016 see the end of a fifty-year ban on their use for medicinal purposes?
The YouTube video from Psyched Substance is a short and useful introduction to LSD. Have you ever had a trip for breakfast? Let us know your experiences and any other comments on this story below.
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