Good Life Project - Ayelet Waldman’s Really Good Day [on psychedelics]

Episode Date: March 20, 2017

Suicide or psychedelics?Those were the options this week's guest, Ayelet Waldman, found herself facing.A married mother of four and novelist living in Berkeley, Waldman struggled with bipolar, anxiety and depression her entire life. According to her, mental illness ran wide and deep in her family. Over the years, she'd found a pharmaceutical regime that made life tolerable, until peri-menopause destroyed her ability to time her medication and things spiraled rapidly out of control.Waldman found herself increasingly mired in suicidal ideation. Nothing seemed to be working any more. Then, she heard about decades old research on psychedelics and a non-trippy therapeutic approach called microdosing.Through a series of events, Ayelet found herself in possession of a vial of pure LSD and, seeing few others options, decided to try following a 30-day psychedelic microdosing protocol shared in James Fadiman's The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide.Those 30-day changed everything. Within hours, the gray numbness began to lift. Life got more vivid, connected, stable and alive. Waldman wrote about her psychedelic microdosing journey, its affects, her fears and concerns, along with the politics, history, mythology and truths, how microdosing affected her work, mindset, relationship with her husband and kids and more in her latest book, A Really Good Day.Head's up. This is a raw, unfiltered and provocative conversation. The bigger questions, issues and potential applications extend far beyond Waldman's immediate circumstances and life. This episode is neither an endorsement, nor an indictment of her choices or the use of psychedelics, but rather an exploration of deeply-challenging, yet critical issues from mental health to parenting and drug policy to science-fiction vs. fact.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You know, some people send their kids out, they're like, drive safe, honey. As my kids leave the house, my teenagers, I shout after them, use a condom and test your molly. Because these drugs are criminalized, there is no body testing it and verifying purity. So imagine being in such an unrelenting state of depression that the only thing that was stopping you from ending it all was the thought of leaving your children motherless. Well, that's where today's guest, Islet Waldman, found herself. She tried pretty much everything through years and years and years, nearly every kind of medication, every kind of therapy. And she reached a point in her life where what was working for a long time stopped and she just didn't know where to turn until one night she had a major wake-up call.

And she decided to try something that she never in her wildest imagination would have thought that she'd be open to trying. And that is psychedelics. That journey that unfolded from that point forward became the subject of a book called A Really Good Day. And it documents in fierce and funny at times detail her 30-day microdosing experience with LSD. We go a lot of places in this conversation from the nature of these types of medicines and chemicals to the history of it, to the politics of it, the legality of it, and also on a really personal level, what it did to and for her and what she was thinking about as she was doing this and how it affected her relationships with her family and with other people. It's a real episode. It's a real conversation. It's raw. It's unfiltered as always here. And she has some really strong

opinions that really made me hit pause and think, what would I do if I hit that point where everything I had tried wasn't working anymore? And the only hope that I saw was something that was very illegal. What would I do? Interesting conversation, something that still got me thinking about a lot of things. I'm Jonathan Fields. This is Good Life Project. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary.

Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him.

Y'all need a pilot. You actually, it's funny, you actually tell kind of a funny story in your new book about how you ended up in the house that you're in in Berkeley. Yeah, so there was this lunatic. We had moved up. We were living in LA. We had lived for a year in, we'd met in New York. I was working in New York at a big law firm. Michael was trying to desperately to finish a novel. He ended up throwing away and he was living in upstate New York. And we met on a blind date in New York City. We moved together to San Francisco and then we moved down to LA because I had a job there. And when I quit my job and started writing and teaching, we sat down with this list of everything you could think of that would make you want to live in a place. Everything from like what the public schools

are like to what your state senator is like to what your hair looks like in different climates. We gave everything a point value and it was New York, LA, San Francisco. And of course, because life likes to mess with you this way, they were all identical. All the points were, there were thousands of points and they were within a dozen points of one another. So then we kind of arbitrarily picked the Bay Area. We moved up, we got a temporary rental for this, the Wu's, this couple of these academics from Berkeley who were in China for a semester. So we had a semester, we thought plenty of time to buy a semester. So we had a semester.

We thought plenty of time to buy a house. And I was hugely pregnant with our second child. And we started like shopping for houses, but it was at the beginning of the first housing boom, or at least the first in mine. When was this? This was in 97. Right.

So before everything really- Before the tech craziness. Yeah. But we kept like bidding on houses and being, I remember the nay dear was when Harrison Ford's son made a cash offer on a house we bid on. And I was like, we're never going to – You're like, what am I supposed to do with that? And I'm like so pregnant. We're never – so there was this house that was being renovated around the corner from the Woo's house.

And we kept sort of walking by it and it had this redwood tree in the front yard covered in roses, which I'd never seen anything like that. It was exquisite. And there was this rose vine that had been planted at the same time as the redwood tree and it had kind of wrapped itself around the redwood tree and then grown up with it. And we tried to sort of ask about the house, but it turned out that this guy had bought it and he was renovating it for his sister-in-law. And then we found out that the sister-in-law had moved to LA and didn't want the house after all. And he was going to finish the renovation and then put it on the market.

And we started begging him to sell it to us and upping our offer. And eventually we hit, I'll just tell you the numbers because this is New York and everybody likes to know how much you paid for a house. We had $690,000, which was 90,000 more than my top, no way we can afford more, we'll be in debt the rest of our lives. Right. And that's 20 years ago numbers. Yeah, 19 years ago. It was way more than we could afford. He was like, nah, I'm sure I can sell for more. And then I was literally weeks away from giving birth. And I just burst into hysterical tears in the front yard. And I sat there, stood there sobbing. And then finally he was like, oh, all right.

I'll sell you the damn house. And that's the house we live in. And that's the house I plan to live in until the day I die. Yeah. It's such a great area. I mean, unless, you know, Armageddon comes and we all need to run away to Berlin. Of course. Or Canada.

Yeah. It's actually, I love just that part of the world, that part of the country. I love it too. It's funny because for the first, I mean, even to this day, anybody in California meets me immediately. They're like, are you from New York? Because I guess I just give off that sort of tri-state vibe. I grew up in New Jersey. And you speak quickly.

Yeah, and I speak quickly. And I make sarcastic comments that people take seriously, even in the grocery store. But now I come back to New York and I'm like, why are you people all so stressed out? Just chill. Yeah. So I've imbibed a little of the West Coast culture, including apparently like the psychedelic culture. That was an unexpected, that was, I don't think that would have happened if I hadn't been living in Bay Area, but it certainly wasn't an expected thing for me to do. Yeah, although it's – as you write about it, it's sort of increasingly covered in various sort of – not so much mainstream media, but a lot of digital media these days. There's such growing interest all over the place.

Totally. And then medical journals and science journals. I mean, the research that's going on now at Johns Hopkins, at NYU, at UCLA Harbor on psilocybin and depression and anxiety is fascinating. Yeah. It's amazing stuff. And I want to dive into that. Let's get there though. Okay.

One of the things that you've written about and you've shared is that you've had pretty much a lifelong struggle with all sorts of mood and mindset challenges. So it's funny. I was a really unhappy little girl. And I used to say, like, oh, I was really unpopular. And by that, I would blame, like, the other people. Like, they didn't like me. But I realized at some point in my life that I was unpopular because I was unhappy.

I wasn't a fun kid to be around. I came from a really complicated family background. My parents were unhappy. When parents are unhappy, that makes the children unhappy. My parents, you know, like, you know, the lithium river runs wide and swift through my family history. There's a lot of bipolar disorder. And I think that I was suffering from a kind of mood disorder from really from the time

I could remember. So as a child, that was just kind of day to day, little girl misery. When you don't sort of, it wasn't like I was always unhappy, but I was unhappy enough that I didn't have any friends. I mean, were you sort of like self aware of the fact that you were existing in the world differently than people around you? No, I didn't know that I was different. I didn't understand why people didn't like me. And I didn't understand it honestly until like two years ago when I suddenly had this epiphany, oh, it was me, not them.

But when I hit adolescence, that was really when the storms hit. And that's typical for people. So then I just thought it was like typical adolescence. But my mood disorder has always been very closely aligned with my hormones. So adolescence was really a brutal time because that's when the hormonal waves started crashing and ebbing. And it was from that time onward that I think I was like clinically, I had a clinical mood disorder. Although I didn't start getting treated for it till I was pregnant with my fourth kid. Yeah. What was it that made you say, huh, there's something that I actually need to, like, we need to figure this out. Well, I should have said, huh, a lot earlier,

like maybe the time I threw a bag full of hangers across the dry cleaner because he, the dry cleaning guy ruined a shirt or the time I, you know, screamed at the top of my lungs, my top, I mean like the, one of the many times I screamed at my children or my husband. But what finally did it is so completely ridiculous. I had a reading from a book called Daughter's Keeper that came out at the same time as Alice Sebald's book came out. What is that book called? It was a massive hit. Yeah.

The one about the serial killer. I can't remember now. Anyway, when I knew Alice and like everywhere I turned, her book was for sale and mine wasn't or her book was being read and mine wasn't. And not to say that my book was anywhere near as good as her, but it just, it was a very striking contrast for me personally. And I was listening to her on Terry Gross as I drove to a reading one day. Envious, you know, writers are squirrely beings. And I was super envious that she was on Terry Gross. And I got to my reading and the sole attendee

was a homeless guy sleeping in the back row. Yeah. Who got up in the middle, looked at me, stricken, they made me read. I was like, yeah, I'm out of here. And trundled his shopping cart away. And I was like on the bridge on the way home. And I thought I was looking.

It was the Richmond Bridge. And I was looking over the water. And I thought, if I just steer hard to the right. And that was – I had like – I had sort of had suicidal ideation before. But that was the first time I wished I could drive off the bridge. And the only thing that kept me from doing it was my kids. And I called a psychiatrist like that day. Because you knew this was different. Yeah. Because like, come on, people have shitty readings. You don't kill yourself for that.

People's books do better than yours. You don't kill yourself for that. That's nuts. So I went and I saw a psychiatrist and he said, yeah, you're bipolar. You've been bipolar a long time. And then I embarked on this kind of Russian roulette of medications. And I have taken, like you name it, I've taken it with one big exception. And nothing really worked. Like something sort of helped a little bit for a little while, but nothing was the answer. Were you shocked by that diagnosis or were you like, oh, well, that makes sense. No, it made all the sense in the world.

My father's bipolar. My aunt's bipolar. My aunt's bipolar. Like, of course. I was shocked that I hadn't gotten around to getting the diagnosis before. It just made all the sense in the world. But the thing, you know, I would get it prescribed with an SSRI and one week a month it would work great. And then the other time, it actually seemed to make things worse. Like I would feel okay and then I would take the medication and I would feel edgy. Or I would feel okay, and then I would take the medication,

then I would be able to sleep. But I was always a very good patient. I never didn't take my drugs, because I knew that's how you got in trouble. I'd seen that in my own family. And at the same time, like sort of like bigger picture, you're married, you got kids, you'd left the practice of law this time, you're a full-time writer. But I was very high functioning. I mean, it wasn't like I wasn't working. I was working. I was being a parent. I was being a spouse.

Right. What was it doing to your relationships within the family and with friends and just with the world around you? I never had a problem with friends. Yeah. And that used to kind of drive my husband crazy. Because I could be losing it and be in a rage or in a depression. And the phone would ring and I would like put on this happy face.

And he would say, why can you be, you can be like that for them, but you can't be like that for us. Why do we see your dark side? And they get to see this light. And I mean, the answer is obvious. It's because your defenses are down with the people you love most, but it's, it's kind of a tragedy, right? It's the people you should be trying the hardest with that you actually don't try hard enough with. And I worked. I mean, I have always worked to try to be better, to try to be better. I have this eternal quest to be a better mother, to be a better wife, to be a better person, to not give in to the vicissitudes of mood. But it really kind of clicked in for me when I was – I think I was reading like the Hypochondriacs Bible, the Tuesday New York Times health section.

And I was reading an interview with a psychiatrist who specialized in women's mood and hormone. And she quoted the statistic that 67% of the women who are admitted to psychiatric facilities are admitted in the week before their period. I mean, and then, you know, if you wanted it to be purely statistic, if there wasn't a statistical correlation to hormones, it would be 25%. I mean, it's a dramatic difference. So clearly there's a correlation between hormone and mood. So I went to see a woman, a psychiatrist in her clinic. They changed my diagnosis from bipolar to something called premenstrual dysphoric disorder, which is kind of like bipolar, but just before your period. And then I had a lot of really good years. I had a great treatment protocol, a regimen that

required me to take a week of SSRIs before my period. And everything was copacetic until, I mean, I still lost it sometimes. I still yelled, but I was much better until I hit perimenopause when you don't know when you're going to get your period. Yes, you can't time the weekend. No, exactly. You can to get your period. You can't time the weekend. No, exactly. You can't time the week. You can't time the drugs. Then my mood just went into the basement and it got worse and worse and worse and worse and eventually I was suicidal.

Where do you go from there? I was Googling the effects of maternal suicide on children. I remember once standing in front of my medicine cabinet and assessing it. What could I kill myself with? Turns out Tylenol was the most... I had a lot of things in my medicine cabinet, but Tylenol was the thing that I decided would kill me the fastest. Eventually, what I decided to do was to try this microdosing thing. I'd been reading about it,

and I was a drug policy reform advocate. I had represented the AMA and the APHA on a variety of amicus briefs on different issues of drug policy, including the prosecution of pregnant drug users and some medical marijuana cases. So I knew a lot about drug policy. I knew a lot about drug reform, but always from the criminal justice perspective. But that meant there was a lot of stuff coming into my house, books, articles. And I picked up this book that had been floating around my house. And it was a book by Jim Fadiman called Psychedelic and Spiritual Journeys. Kind of a legendary book.

Legendary book. But not something I would read. Psychedelic, spiritual, that is not my world. I'm very like science-based. I'm a skeptic in all things. But for whatever reason, I picked that book up. And it really did change my life because he has a chapter in it about microdosing. And while I didn't have either the courage or the wherewithal to try to experience a real dose, a macro dose, a normal dose of a psychedelic drug, I could imagine a therapeutic small dose. And so I decided I was going to give it a try and see if it could work as an alternative to these antidepressants that were no longer working. All right. So take me down the rabbit hole a little bit more of what microdosing actually is. So microdosing is taking a small dose of a drug, a dose so small that it has no psychedelic effects, no perceptual effects, but has metabolic effects. So in the case of

microdosing for LSD, if a typical trip is somewhere between 100 and 200 micrograms, a microdose is 10 micrograms, about a 10th to a 5th to a 5th to 10% of a typical dose. Right. And what's the relative risk sort of metabolically, physiologically? There is no risk. You want to know the truth that I discovered from doing my research because I'm a nerd and a geek? There is no LD50 for LSD that has been clinically established. What's LD50?

An LD50 is the amount of a drug that will kill you. So every drug has an LD50. It's the figure that they say that is the fatal dose. It's how they determine a fatal dose. There is no clinically established LD50 for LSD because there has never been a clinically established verified overdose of LSD. One is clearly a guy who died of exposure because he was out in the cold for two nights. One is a complicated drug interaction question. There's the guy had taken a bunch of things and they say the LSD killed him, but there's no way to assess that. So many people, many researchers believe that there's never been a human overdose of LSD. An elephant died when it was shot up with a vast amount of LSD. Thank you, Ringling Brothers. But no human. So it's much safer than we believe it is. As far as substances goes, it's actually a fairly non-toxic one. information about toxicity and LSD is a group of morons in San Francisco snorted lines of what

they thought was cocaine, but that turned out to be LSD, which is tens of thousands of times a typical dose. They ended up in the hospital, a couple of them in comas, that internal bleeding, and within 12 days, they were all released perfectly fine. So it's not a toxic drug. It is a very intense drug though. Small doses can cause very extreme psychic reactions. So it mimics psychosis for the period of the trip. And that's actually what Sandoz, the company that marketed it at first

back in the 30s and 40s, that's what their initial marketing push was. It was to medical practitioners who worked with the mentally ill. And they said, do you want to understand what your psychotic patient is experiencing? Take this drug. It'll give you insight into the subjective experience. That was the origin of this? Yeah. That's how that was the first marketing. The origin was something even more peculiar. There, Albert Hoffman, a chemist who worked for Sandoz, the Swiss company, was investigating the ergot molecule. The ergot molecule, ergot is a fungus that used to, in the Middle Ages, it would infect stores of rye.

And entire communities would come down with ergot poisoning. And there were actually sort of two forms it took. One was this gangrenous form of ergot poisoning when their limbs would drop off in horrible, postulating ways, and then they would die. The other was the sort of psychological effects, they would go completely crazy. Both terrible ways to die. There's some hypothesis that the Salem witch trials were actually an incident of massive ergot poisoning. But anyway, Albert Hoffman was synthesizing variations on the ergot molecule or on ergotamine molecule to try to figure out whether he could find something that was medically useful. Could it be a stimulant? Could it lower blood pressure? He just, he wasn't sure. He was sort of looking around. And LSD-25 was his 25th synthesis, his 25th variation on this molecule.

And he synthesized it. His lab animals got a little wonky when he gave it to them. And he put it aside thinking, well, that didn't do much. And then sometime later, he thought, 25. I'm going to go back and look at 25. And he took it out again. He took out the chemical and was sort of perusing it and somehow absorbed some of it through his fingertips is the theory and started to trip his balls off. And that's when he thought, oh, this is interesting. This is unusual. This is something we've never seen before. And then he actually took it on purpose and had the first sort of documented LSD

trip. So where does it go from there though? Well, it goes from there to absolute clinical medical use for decades. So Sandoz is marketing it to professionals in the healthcare and the mental healthcare business as a sort of tool. There's research on using it to treat alcoholism that's actually very interesting and successful. There are all sorts of different uses. The CIA gets excited about it as a tool of mind control and starts giving it to unsuspecting people to see if it can be used as a tool in the assassin's kit. I mean, you sound like a conspiracy theorist when you talk about this stuff, but it's actually true. And then what happens is Timothy Leary happens.

It gets into the hands of Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert at Harvard and Ken Kesey in San Francisco, who is exposed to LSD first as part of a CIA trial. And those guys decide, wait a second, we need to spread this drug far and wide, you know, tune in, turn on, drop out. And that's when everything really goes to hell, because, you know, their attitude is purely, let's blow everybody's minds and change the world.

But when LSD started being taken by young white kids from middle class white families in America, when that became part of the kind of hippie counterculture, when people were demonstrating against the war and aligning themselves with the civil rights movement, that made the establishment, the white establishment and white families, middle class parents, very, very scared. And politically, this becomes really toxic. Exactly. So LSD becomes the proxy for the establishment's fear of protest, of an alignment between the young and the civil rights community, of a rejection of traditional Protestant values. And it becomes basically the scapegoat for that.

And it's criminalized. And fast forward till now, in the last decade, when we've begun to see all of this research, but the research isn't being done on LSD, even though that's what would make sense. There were thousands of studies of LSD in the 30s, 40s, 50s, up until the 60s. Very few studies on psilocybin, some, but not that many. If you were a clinician, the logical thing to do would be to study the drug that had been studied so thoroughly. Right, because you can build on an existing body of evidence. But LSD is toxic, not the drug, but politically toxic and culturally toxic.

So to this day, that kind of still governs. So the theory was, we'll use psilocybin because that doesn't have the same frightening connotation in the mind of the community to the FDA, to the DEA as LSD does. And that's why researchers are using psilocybin in all these studies and not LSD. Got it. Because they're virtually, the subjective experience of someone on psilocybin and someone on LSD is almost identical. And also, I mean, a complete newbie in my understanding of this world, but I think it

seems like some people get LSD also and say, well, this is man-made and psilocybin, well, this is sort of more naturally derived. So there's some level of... I think some people just like the idea of like, you know, people don't usually call LSD the mother, the earth, but they refer to psilocybin because it's natural, it's a plant. You know, for me, it was actually perversely the chemical nature of LSD that was comforting. I'd never had a trip. I really wanted to measure. I wanted to be able to very clinically say,

this is five micrograms. This is 10 micrograms. And with a mushroom, you don't know how potent that mushroom is. And I felt really anxious about brewing a tea and taking a little bit of it. I felt like that could end up resulting in me taking way more than I wanted. Yeah. But at the same time, I mean, you hear and tell me if this is all just mythology, like the stories about bad trips, the stories about all sorts of other stuff mixed in with whatever it is that you're taking. Yeah, for sure.

I mean, this is, you know, so there are two things. There's definitely a phenomenon of bad trips. A lot of people describe the most important psychedelic experiences they've had as the ones that you would kind of qualify as a bad trip, because it was stressful, and they had to confront ugly truths about themselves, and it was an unpleasant experience, but they learned from it. There are also just times that people just had really, really shitty, shitty, shitty experiences and it made them feel awful. So the adulteration is something else entirely. And that's a really, really important thing to talk about. Some people send their kids out. They're like, drive safe, honey. As my kids leave the house,

my teenagers, I shout after them, use a condom and test your molly. Because these drugs are criminalized, there is no body testing it and verifying purity. Why are people dropping dead of heroin overdoses? In large part, it's because the heroin is adulterated with fentanyl, which is much stronger. So the same is true of MDMA, Mali, ecstasy. When people buy Mali, they're nine times out of 10 or even more, they're not actually buying MDMA, which though it has some serious risks, is a relatively safe drug. I mean, as long as you don't take it, say, at a rave in the desert, you're not likely to experience the negative side effects of MDMA, which are raised core body temperature. Although some people do die just

because they have a bad reaction. But it's the chemicals that are sold as molly that are dangerous. So for example, at Wesleyan University, a group of students took something they believed to be pure MDMA. It turned out to be a synthetic cannabinoid, and it nearly killed them. One of them had to be intubated. They all went to the hospital. So it's really irresponsible to put anything in your body that you don't know what it is. And in a system of criminalization, you don't know what, like, your friendly neighborhood drug dealer is not likely to be testing your drugs. So if you're going to be taking these drugs, you need to test them first. And luckily, you can buy MDMA testing kits at DanceSafe.org, and you can buy LSD testing kits on Amazon. And that brings us back full circle to you

and your decision to say, huh, you know what? What was working for me for a lot of years is not working because something's changing internally and you get a hold of Jim Fadiman's book and say, this could be interesting. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also interesting. minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum.

Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the

difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. Yeah. So I'm desperate. I'm depressed. I'm suicidal. I'm reading this chapter. And honestly, what I thought was just fuck it. Fuck it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to give this a try. And I went to my husband and I said, is this crazy? And he said, just please, sweetie, do whatever you can to feel better. So I thought, I live in Berkeley. I thought I was just going to have to go out my front door and say, dealer? And like orange sunshine would rain down on my head.

Can I borrow some LSD from my neighbor? I mean, half the dads I know go to Burning Man and the other half go to the Maker Faire. Like, I thought it would be easy. But it turns out I didn't know anybody who used acid. Or maybe they just thought that, like, the lady with the yoga pants gripping this vanilla soy latte was not who they wanted to be selling their LSD to. My kids always say I'm a basic bitch. Acid and LSD, same thing. Same thing, acid and LSD. So I went on this like futile quest to find LSD, asking everybody I knew. And Jim Fadiman, his book is like, be discreet. And I was

discreet at first, but eventually I was basically standing with a placard in the middle of the road screaming, sell me acid, please, to no avail. And eventually this guy said to me, oh, I know someone who knows this professor. And this professor in the Bay Area somewhere, not sure where, he's been microdosing with LSD for decades. And as far as I know, he's like really, really old and dying. Maybe he has some extra. And I was like, that's not a thing. That's a stupid story. That is not real. Can you please really find me some LSD? And then a couple days later, maybe like a week or so, I go out to my mailbox and there, you know, in and among the Bed Bath & Beyond and Victoria's Secret circulars is this little brown paper package covered with many, many stamps, like the number of stamps an old person would put on a package to make sure it arrived at its destination, with the return address Lewis Carroll. And inside the package was a cobalt blue bottle about two inches tall, full of liquid LSD. And for those who don't get the Lewis Carroll reference. Alice in Wonderland.

Drink me. It didn't say drink me, but I sort of wish it had. I am not an idiot. I don't drink things that come in my mailbox. That would be lunatic. So I did order a testing kit from amazon.com, tested it. It was, in fact, LSD diluted in distilled water. And I embarked on this month-long experiment.

So you followed a protocol because there's sort of like a standard protocol. So the protocol is you take 10 micrograms the first day. You don't take anything the second day or the third day. And then you take it again on the fourth day. So I did 10 cycles of that. Right. Tell me about like the first day that you have it in your hand and you're thinking to yourself, am I really doing this? Well, first of all, I was totally freaked out about it because I was afraid that I would trip. And I never really had. I had taken something that I thought was psilocybin mushrooms in college and swung on a tire swing, but I didn't hallucinate or anything. So I'm not even sure what those were. And again, we're talking about microdosing here.

We're not talking about a psychedelic dose. And I had done all this research, and I knew that I wasn't going to trip, but I didn't feel. I was afraid. I was still nervous. So I had my friend Yael come over. And I'm like, I'm trying to do medication, Yael. Just hang out with me in case I have a bad reaction. And I took it and I was sat there and I'm like, is it going to happen?

What's going to happen? And nothing happened. And then I'm like, all right, fuck it. I might as well just go to work. So I sat down at my desk and I started working. I was working on a novel at the time. And I look out my window after about 90 minutes, and my dogwood is in bloom, this little dogwood tree I have. And I thought to myself, oh,

look how pretty the dogwood tree is. And it's not like the blossoms wore shimmer. It was just the dogwood tree, like you would see it. But see, I don't see the dogwood tree normally. I had been so depressed that I was quite nearly anhedonic. I didn't notice the beauty around me. All I noticed was the noise in my head. And all of a sudden, I could see something beautiful. Were you aware of the fact that that change happened in that moment? At that moment, I thought, this is something. And it really was like, all I wanted was to have a really good day. That's what Jim Fadiman said I would have.

That's all I wanted. And I had that. And what was so stark is that the day before I had been trying to convince myself not to commit suicide and like reading about the effects of suicide on children in order to keep myself from swallowing the contents of my medicine cabinet. And the next day, it's not like I felt happy. That wasn't it. I just felt like peaceful like I felt happy. That wasn't it. I just felt like peaceful. I felt calm. I felt like I could see things that were pretty and beautiful and see my children not as these fragile beings that I was going to destroy, but as these lovely,

hilarious people I liked to spend time with. And that was really, you know, it's hard for me to talk about that, getting emotional, but when you are so unhappy that you can't enjoy your children, that to be suddenly in the place that I could just love being with them, that changed everything for me. Where do you go from there? God, I wish I could still be on it. Like now especially, I sw I could still be on it. Now especially.

I swore that I wasn't going to make this interview about Trump, but if any time in my life I needed microdosing, it's now. Because you stayed on it. This was day one of a 30-day protocol. Every day wasn't perfect. Every three days I was like, oh, there you are. You're on for one and then you're off for two.

The second day you actually still feel the positive effects. Sometimes I felt a little irritable the first day, like a little – like not irritable, maybe like a little activated. The third day was just me, not suicidal, but like, oh, there you are. But like steadily my mood improved over the month. And like I had frozen shoulder, this really debilitating, painful shoulder. And I think it must have been a coincidence, but my shoulder pain went away that month, which in and of itself was enough reason to be in a good mood. And by the end of the month, I didn't want to stop. I wanted to be on it forever. But I am constitutionally capable of buying illegal drugs and Lewis Carroll wasn't sending me any more. So I tried. I found a dealer.

I sent a text. And then I decided that I was part of a DEA sting, and I was going to go to jail. And mostly, I was just cursing Piper Kerman for having written Orange is the New Black, so I wouldn't have a logical sequel. Right, because your background is in public defense. Yeah, and there's nobody as paranoid as a public defender because we've seen the might of the government arrayed against our poor clients and we know what that can be like.

And I'd had clients who were just thought they were doing something minor who ended up being like, you know, tricked into triggering a mandatory minimum. So I write about that a lot in the book too. In the back of your head, does your husband know from day one that this is the trial has begun? Oh yeah, he can hear lot in the book too. In the back of your head, does your husband know from day one that the trial has begun? Oh, yeah.

He could hear it in my voice immediately. He was gone. And he was out of town. He was on a – I don't remember where he was. I think it was a book tour. And he could hear it the first time he called. And I remember he was just so relieved because he was terrified. He had to travel.

He had to be working. But he was leaving me alone in this really fragile state with all the kids. Did he know what a dark place you were? Yeah. Yeah. And so you can imagine how terrified he was that I would do something and I would do something bad to myself. And then the kids were there by themselves and they were having to deal with it.

And there's a real – it's funny. He wrote this amazing book called Mood Glow. I can't – I have a cold so it sounds like boob glow, but it's not boob glow. It's mood glow. And it's a fake memoir. It's written from the point of view of Mike Chabon, but it's about his grandfather. And the character is my grandfather, my grandfather, my grandmother. But the book's really about what it's like to have a wife who's mentally ill. And because it says my grandfather, my grandmother, nobody really has noticed that what he's talking about is us. And she's much more seriously affected than I am. But I have yet to have an interviewer say to me, oh, my God, your husband just wrote a book about how devastating and difficult it is to be married to someone and to love someone so much who's so mentally ill. That's what that book's about. They're interesting to read in tandem, I think. Yeah.

Did you fully understand his experience of you until you read that? No, no. Both how hard it was and how devoted. Like when I started doing press for this book, I would say to people, we were going to get divorced. Our marriage was in crisis. We were going to end. I was going to break us up. I was going to do something. Michael says that the fact that I believe that is just a symptom of my depression. I felt deeply unlovable. So I assumed that he couldn't love me and that he was going to leave me. But that's just a symptom of my depression. He wasn't going anywhere. And I believe that. I believe that he really wasn't. I give you a million reasons like deep in his psyche why he would never go anywhere. But I think the honest truth is that he just loves me. Yeah. When you read that book, what was the biggest thing that surprised you about his

experience? Well, there are things that broke my heart. There's a couple of lines that were very hard to read that I just, I started to cry because, you know, it gave me insight into how hard it must be to be the person pouring water into a broken pitcher. Cause you just pour it, you pour it, you pour your love and you pour your support and it's just never enough to fill the pitcher. I don't think that surprised me because I feel like I knew that. And in times when I've wanted to kill myself, I have wanted to kill myself because I want to spare him the pain of losing me. But what I guess surprised me the most was the magic that the grandmother character brought to the grandfather and the kind of exhilaration of her broken mind, not just despite its brokenness, but almost because of it, that there is an excitement there.

And it's the other side of the coin, right? When you have a mood disorder, there are positive things. You can sparkle. You can be really insightful and fun. And the place of radical empathy, that's part of the same range of symptoms as the crazy times. So I guess I really, I can believe it in a fictional character more readily than I can believe it in my life. And when I saw it in a fictional character, it was so much easier for me to accept it as true. Oh, that's interesting. Because I would imagine he probably said a lot of what was in there sort of directly to you, but it wasn't different. Yeah, but it doesn't matter.

It was different. Like the truth is fiction is much more honest than memoir. That's so interesting. As you move through the 30 days, so you're writing that whole time also? Yeah. Oh, what am I writing? What's this doing to your work? So I wasn't in this for performance enhancement. I don't really care about that. That's not my, like, you know, in Silicon Valley, there's a lot of microdosing better, stronger, faster, and that is not my interest. I just wanted to not kill myself. But wow, like, there is no, it is not an accident that this is the book I produced while I was microdosing. What happened was I was working on this novel and I put it aside and I said, just

let yourself write whatever you want. So I started just keeping a journal of the experience, but then I was also doing a lot of research at the time and I just kind of let myself write whatever I felt like at the moment. So this is a book that's at once memoir. It's about family history, mental illness. It's about my marriage. It's a personal story, but it's also about things that I know a lot about.

You know, I was a law professor. I wrote about constitutional criminal procedure and criminal justice. So it's about the historical underpinnings of the war on drugs. Spoiler alert, it's all about race. It's about mass incarceration. It's about the neurochemistry of psychedelics. What happens in your brain? It's about the neurochemistry of mental illness.

Like, why do SSRIs work for some, not for others? It's about, you know, possible systems of decriminalization and what that might look like in the world. So it's public policy. It's social policy. It's history. It's personal. It's emotional.

And it's also funny, which it feels weird to be like tooting my own horn. But I like usually by this time when you're plugging a book, you kind of hate it. But this book I love because it is kind of the book that acid built because what LSD does is it allows different parts of your brain to communicate in novel ways. And this is a book that has all different parts that integrate in really, I think, interesting ways. And I don't think that I could have written this book if I wasn't microdosing. I wouldn't have let myself. I would have said, you can't write about history right after you talk about your dad's bipolar disorder. That doesn't make any sense, but it turns out it does. Yeah. I mean, that was one of the really fun things.

I felt like I was going along for the ride as you were just going wherever your fierce curiosity was taking you. And it was interesting. And it was interesting. Because that could be bad. Yeah, it could be completely scattershot. Totally. There's nothing worse than hearing about someone's drug experience, right? It was interesting because you did bring in, I mean, there's so much about the history, the legality, the politics of psychedelics and, you know,

on a larger scale, like you were talking about, just what happens with law and drugs in the US. I mean, I interviewed Michelle Alexander. I actually taught the seminar at UC Berkeley called The Legal and Social Implications of the War on Drugs. And Michelle used to come in and guest lecture on a day called The New Jim Crow before she wrote the book. That was when she was doing the research for that book. There's a lot of that that I've been interested in for a long time that I had an opportunity to delve into. I interview Carl Hart, who's the preeminent expert on methamphetamine. I write about what does methamphetamine do in the brain? You want to know something that I didn't know about methamphetamine? It's chemically basically identical to Adderall. So the years that I

spent giving my kids Adderall, I might as well have been giving them meth for good and for ill, right? There's no doubt it helped them. They have ADHD, two of my four, and they could not have sat through school without the help of a stimulant drug. But like at the same time that I was giving them Adderall, I was saying to them, meth is the worst drug. It'll make your teeth fall. Like I was giving them this crazy mixed message because I didn't understand that those two drugs were the same. And the difference is, of course, set and setting. In what way are those drugs consumed? Who consumes them and for what. Yeah. Getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum.

Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is?

You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. So you mentioned the phrase set and setting, which I know is something which is considered mission critical in the world of psychedelics. So tell me more about what this is.

I think it's actually mission critical in the world in general. So set and setting. Set is you. What do you bring to an experience? Are you bipolar? Do you have a cold? Do you have a mood disorder? Do you have your period? That's you, the set. The setting is what setting you're taking it in. Are you sitting in a studio in someone's beautiful apartment on the Upper West Side? Are you on the playa at Burning Man? Are there people around you who are supportive and loving? Are you dropping acid and then go hanging out with your parents? For most people, maybe not the best idea. Maybe there's some people for whom it would be a great idea.

So when people talk about like, in psychedelics specifically, it's like they're talking about what kind of trip you're going to have, what kind of experience you're going to have. And set and setting has everything to do with it. So if the setting is supportive and warm and nurturing, it's much more likely that you'll have a positive experience. If you go in to the experience looking for spiritual enlightenment, your set is that's what you're that's your, you know, intention. It's much more likely that you'll experience a spiritual insight. If your intention is to say as studies were done by Jim Fadiman in the 60s on creativity and problem solving and Alice under the influence of LSD, if you bring in a math problem and you're an engineer and you've been working on that problem for a long time, you're much more likely to have insight into the solution to that problem, but not insight into the meaning of life because you're focused on that problem. So my mantra as a parent of teenagers is you have to think about the sentence setting all the time if you're going to engage in drug activity. So don't smoke pot at school because

you're going to have a paranoid freak out. Also, because you'll get grounded and mommy will test your urine because our rule is never smoke pot during the week. If you're going to have a psychedelic experience. I mean, this really came to the fore for us with MDMA because Michael and I have used MDMA only therapeutically. I'm not really interested in recreational drug use. I never have been. I don't drink. I like used medical cannabis. I smoked pot a little bit in high school and college, but I'm not inclined to recreational drug use.

But I am really interested, obviously, in therapeutic drug use. So Michael and I used MDMA at the suggestion of Sasha Shulgin, who's a Berkeley chemist who came to lecture to my class at Cal a number of times with his wife, Anne, as a marital aid, like not as a tool to a therapeutic tool for marital issues. So every few years, we'll, if things are sticky, if they're things we want to talk about, but like talking about them triggers anger or fear, we'll do MDMA. And what MDMA manages to do for us is allow us to sort of explore difficult issues, but without the negative emotions from a place of love. So like if we're having an issue, we can kind of talk about it and really

address it knowing that you feel love for the other person and having access to that feeling and not being sort of not having all those negative feelings getting in the way of that. The first time we tried it, we were old people. We were grownups. We had four kids already. And I became obsessed with this idea that my kids were going to waste their first MDMA experience. Because MDMA, it does change your brain chemistry. And we know that because the more you use it, the less effective it is until eventually it has no effects at all. So that effect can be ameliorated by, say, having long spaces between usages.

But people who go into raves every weekend, eventually they're just not going to be able – they can take as much – stack as many pills as they want. They're not going to feel anything. And it's definitely true that the first time you use MDMA is the most intense. So I was obsessed with this idea that my kids would waste their first time on some dumb party. And I kept saying to them, first of all, here are all the dangers of MDMA. It raises your core body temperature. There's some people who have, if you have high blood pressure, it can trigger a stroke. There's some dangers associated with the drug. It's not as drug as safe as LSD, for example.

But it is relative. It's not as dangerous as Tylenol. You can't overdose as easily on MDMA as you can on Tylenol. I know I sound like a Tylenol conspiracy theorist, but that is a dangerous. Acetaminophen is a dangerous drug. So I kept saying to the kids, don't waste it. Don't waste it. It's more important who you use MDMA with for the first

time than who you have sex with for the first time. Because sex, it sucks the first time. It only gets better. But MDMA, it only gets worse. And my kids would just be like, you know who we're not going to talk to about this? You. But I still keep trying. I'm just working on the younger too. So let's talk about this bigger experiment in the context of your kids too, because there's different paths to go here. But one is, when do they get let in on the grand experiment? And then what's the reaction? And two is, some people are going to listen to this from the outside looking in.

And be horrified. And be horrified. And not get it. And think, wait, so she wants to go trip while she's a mom of four kids. Well, first of all, no tripping, right? Remember, sub-perceptual. Right. So I think that's sort of like, this is not about tripping.

This is like, you don't feel that. If I had told you right now that I had slipped a microdose into your cup, you would not feel anything different than you feel right now. There's no psychedelic element to microdosing at all. You can do everything you could do in regular life. And in fact, I did it better. I was a better driver because I wasn't distracted. I was a better mother because I was more present. I worked better. So that's the first thing to know. But the way that I am different than a lot of parents is that I do have a very thoughtful,

perhaps radical approach to drug policy with my children. I care only about one thing. I want everybody to stay alive. That's what I care only about one thing. I want everybody to stay alive. That's what I care about. My job is to keep you safe, and that's what I care about. I care less about whether you smoke marijuana than that you do it in a way that reduces the harm. I care less about whether you do a drug than that you do it in a way that minimizes the harm. So for example, we're in the middle of an opioid crisis. There are a lot of kids who are becoming dependent on opioids. I really want to avoid that for my children. So the way I've decided to avoid that is to make sure my kids are hyper-educated about opioids.

What do they do? What don't they do? What are the dangers? When are people most likely to overdose? What do you do if someone overdoses? Like the truth is, if your kid is going to overdose on heroin, you probably want to be around my kid because my kid knows what to do if your kid overdoses. You know, you heard my MDMA mishegas. But for me, it's all about this harm reduction policy. It's like Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Remember that?

There was this program like you would sign a contract with your kid and it said, if you need a ride, I will get you no questions asked. And the idea is don't get in the car with a drunk person. So my attitude is, if you are going to do drugs, I'm going to educate you on how to do them safely. I prefer that you didn't, but that's not where my stress is. Our approach to marijuana, for example, there's a lot of good research on the way that marijuana affects the developing brain. And it's not great. So I taught that to my kids. I said, okay, so this is the effect of marijuana on the adolescent brain. In a perfect world, you would wait until you were, say, 21, 22, until your frontal lobe had stopped developing, maybe even 24, 25, before you smoked marijuana for the first time. There's been some correlation with use of marijuana in adolescence and decreased IQ. Here's the information. I tell that to my kids.

And then I say, I'm not an idiot. We live in Berkeley. You're going to smoke pot in high school probably. I wish you wouldn't. But if you do, this is what I want you to agree. I will not give you a hard time about smoking pot. If you wait until you're 15, and if you promise that you will do it only on the weekends, and if your grades suffer, you are grounded from the demon weed. And I will test you if I ground you. And this actually came up with one of my kids. He was abiding by the 15 year rule. He was abiding by the weekend rule, but his grades dipped. And I was like, dude, this is it. No weed for you. And he said, what are you going to do,

drug test me? And I said, yeah. And I pulled out of the cupboard a urine test kit. And I said, pee in a jar, my friend. We're going to test you until your grades improve. And then you can go back to the old rules. I only had to test one kid once before they realized that I was being serious. So that's, you know, that's very different than most people I know. Most people I know just say no, no, no, no, no to drugs, even as they roll their own joints and smoke from their vapes and do all the stuff that they've done. But I feel like it's much more important to me that my kids are educated, knowledgeable, and behave in safe ways. Yeah.

So they didn't know about the 30 days until it was over, though. Right. I didn't want to put them in an awkward position. And I was scared of LSD before I do. It's scary. So I just told them, you know, our policy has always been we have to tell you the truth, but we don't have to tell you the whole truth about drugs and other things. You don't have to know every drug I ever took, but I won't lie to you. So I told them I was trying a new medication, which I was, and they were used to that. I tried a lot of new different, different new medications.

And then at the end of the 30 days, I said to them, okay, well, how was it? And they reported these remarkable results. And it was kind of heartbreaking because they all said, this is the one you found the drug, take this drug, mommy. This is the best one for you. And that's when I told them, first the older ones and eventually the younger ones, that it was LSD and microdoses. The older ones were like, you know, they listened to a lot of hip hop. They were like, oh yeah, cool. Chance the Rapper. The youngest one was like, for him, the problem was the book. He was like, oh my God. Now everyone in school is going to know that you took acid. And I said, I'll tell you what, sweetie.

I'll tell you which parents took acid if you promise you'll keep it a secret so that you know you're not alone. Which kind of brings it to one big open question, which is Lewis Carroll sent you a limited dose. And it was profoundly impactful and really positive for you. And now that is over. So two questions really, and then we'll come full circle. One, have you experienced lasting changes since then? Because this is now a chunk of time in the past. And two, what about the future? I have experienced lasting changes, but I'm a very science-based person. I don't think there's a molecular change that it continues after the microdosing is stopped. I attribute the lasting

changes to the insights I had during that month. And the most important insight was that it wasn't happiness I was looking for, but rather space. I was looking for room around my emotions in which to evaluate them before acting. So I needed, you know, I was so reactive and I am so reactive. I experienced something and I feel something very intensely and immediately I act and that's really compressed so that I don't even know so much. I don't even know what my feeling is till after I've already reacted, whether that's yelling at my kids or sending an angry tweet or whatever it is. And what the LSD microdosing experiment taught me was that these are all very distinct things.

You experience something, you have a reaction to it. It may not be the reaction you think. I experience a lot as anger, but that's not actually what I'm feeling. When I start to parse it out, I'm like, what are you really feeling? Are you feeling anger or are you feeling shame? Are you feeling fear? Those masquerade as anger in me a lot. And then I have an impulse to act. Rather than acting on that impulse immediately, almost before I realized I've had the impulse, the LSD experience allowed me to kind of stop and just ask a simple question. Is that going to make things better or worse? This impulse you have, if you act on it, will things get better or worse? Now that change is life altering. Just being able to loosen up that sort of

stimulus reaction response, it has not sustained in the sense that I don't have the same space around it, but at least I know that exists so that I can try to build into my life ways to get that. It's a lot harder than taking a pill, but like I have this tattoo that says, wait, and that actually works sometimes. If I see the tattoo, I'll be like, just wait. I have a little machine I wear that makes me breathe. It buzzes if I haven't taken a deep breath. And for me, if I take a deep breath every 15 minutes, every 10 minutes, I can keep myself more stable and calm. The contrast between the profoundness of the depression and the immediacy of the relief has given me a lasting perspective that depression is transitory. One of the features of my depression has always been that I feel like I've always been

depressed and I always will be depressed. And because those two experiences, depression and relief, were so close together one day to the next, one hour to the next, really, I now, when I am falling into that low mood, well, sometimes I have to ask my husband. I just have to say, remind me this isn't going to last. And he'll say, no, sweetie, it's not going to last. So, like, sometimes I need to do the trick of, you know, getting the help. But in that sense, it's sustained. But there's no doubt in my mind that this is the medication that worked for me. It could have been a placebo effect. Maybe I just

had a really good month because I had a really good placebo effect. But what I really want is research on the subject. I want a double-blind study, and I want it decriminalized so I can take it and experience long-lasting benefits. Yeah. And it looks like there is, when we started the conversation, there is renewed academic interest in it. Still not the easiest thing to sort of get hold of and test, but it seems like, and like you were saying, not necessarily LSD, but psilocybin, which doesn't have the political baggage so that now at least there are some really good labs and really good researchers who are looking into this. And it seems like a lot of the, I mean, it's very preliminary research, at least from what I've seen, but it's some stunning outcomes.

So hopefully that continues. Hopefully that channel of research stays open. You know, it's interesting. At my events, a lot of people come up to me and they say very loud and proud, I'm microdosing. I'm microdosing with LSD. I'm microdosing with psilocybin. I'm microdosing with ayahuasca. Let me tell you all about my microdose experience. And there's a whole other category of people that comes up to me and they come very quietly and they ask if they can speak to me privately and they say, I'm depressed.

I have a mental illness. I'm in pain. And the fact that there is more stigma attached to being mentally ill, to feeling depression than there is to using an illegal drug is heartbreaking. And I feel like we, I mean, we do have a crisis of mental illness in this country. And any treatment that could help needs to be explored and explored with vigor and intensity and thoughtfulness. So let's come full circle. This is called Good Life Project. So offer that term out to you to live a good life. What comes up? I think for me, it really is abandoning the quest for happiness and just allowing myself to seek perspective, to just have a little more room around my emotions,

about my reactions, and to allow space for whatever feeling it is, pleasure, displeasure, anger, sadness, without being overcome by it. I mean, you know, I'm trying so hard not to use the word mindfulness because I have so many problems, but I do feel like in many ways, the secret to living a good life is as trite as it sounds, living a mindful life. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me here. It was a real pleasure. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If the stories and ideas in any way moved you, I would so appreciate if you would take just a few extra seconds for two quick things. One, if it's touched you in some way, if there's some idea or moment in the story or in the

conversation that you really feel like you would share with somebody else, that it would make a difference in somebody else's lives, Take a moment and whatever app you're using, just share this episode with somebody who you think it'll make a difference for. Email it if that's the easiest thing, whatever is easiest for you. And then of course, if you're compelled, subscribe so that you can stay a part of this continuing experience. My greatest hope with this podcast is not just to produce moments and share stories and ideas that impact one person listening, but to let it create a conversation, to let it serve as a catalyst for the elevation of all of us together collectively, because that's how we rise. When stories and ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change happens. And I would love to invite you to participate on that level. Thank you so much as always for your intention, for your attention, for your heart. And I wish you only the best. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. to mastering a strength program. They've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals.

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