LSD 'microdosing' is trending in Silicon Valley

go big or go home!

Sort of...

If you're familiar with the literature you'll find meta-analysis with a lot of phrases like "At present, HPPD appears to be a genuine but uncommon disorder". YEah, its in the DSM, but at best it's vanishingly rare. And according to the DSM past hallucinogen in combination with the symptoms alone is not enough to constitute a diagnosis of HPPD. It's also tangled up with a number of other confounding mental illnesses. And, even still it's believed that a user must possess preexisting risk factors in addition to heavy use to trigger HPPD. What I'm driving at is that microdosing is almost certainly unlikely to cause HPPD in healthy adults.

I think microdosing LSD for the purpose of increased work performance is absolutely ridiculous. I have absolutely nothing against performance enhancing drugs in the workplace or other areas so long as the drugs themselves can be taken safely, but I think the use of LSD and psychedelics in general for this purpose is misguided for several reasons.

I think self-reported gains in creativity are meaningless in defending LSD microdosing. Psychedelics are not magic creativity chemicals and their use does not inherently make anyone more creative. How are we defining creative? What does that even mean? Is the code I wrote on LSD really that much better than the code I wrote sober or on a different drug or combination of drugs altogether? What about strategic business decisions, design work, or documentation? How does one accurately measure 'creativity'- is that even a desired trait while working for most people?

I also don't see why it's necessary to use hallucinogens during the work day. Why can't you just drop acid on the weekend or vacation when you actually have the time to enjoy the experience (as heavily as you'd like) in whatever setting you feel most comfortable in? If you really are invested enough in your career to do psychedelics for the sole purpose of workplace creativity, can't you just do your creative thinking then? I think this approach to applying hallucinogens to your work would be as effective as microdosing, if not more so.

My biggest criticism is this though: isn't the whole point of psychedelics the expansion of consciousness and wisdom beyond its current state? The psychedelic community is generally a fairly anti-authoritarian one and I tend to think that it's not just because the state often treats the use of hallucinogens with the same level of violence as far more socially dangerous behavior. Using psychedelics for as shallow of a reason as coming up with ways to better optimize your stupid advertisement platform to sell foot cream to seniors is a tragedy. Besides, there already exist drugs for this purpose (coffee).

And these points ignore the main risks which are obviously being caught and having an adverse health effect.

I think this is a stupid trend highly indicative of just how boring and uncreative the tech industry is. At the end of the day, some of us use drugs to get through the work day. If you want to use psychedelics to do so, that's your business, I don't know how you function, but I doubt you're drastically outperforming the coffee guy or the straight edge guy at the office.

I'm not advocating prohibition of any drugs. I can be against that, and still see the folly in desperate edge-seeking behavior.

How to get LSD? I bet is quite hard to produce it yourself. How I know if the dose is right and the quality of LSD is good.