Microdosing study shows placebo effect of taking psychedelics

People who microdose psychedelics are likely to feel more satisfied with life but the transformation comes from the expectation of their effect rather than the actual drugs, the first major study in the field has concluded.

The practice of regularly taking low doses of LSD or psilocybin, also found in magic mushrooms, has spread since it became a trend among Silicon Valley techies a few years ago.

Proponents speak of boosted levels of creativity, empathy and general wellbeing but large-scale scientific studies testing these experiences have been rare, partially due to the illegal status of psychedelics.

A study conducted by the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London and published on Tuesday confirmed that four weeks of microdosing led participants to report higher scores on all surveyed psychological metrics, including life satisfaction, mindfulness and paranoia, which decreased.

However, participants who took a placebo but thought they were taking a psychedelic reported similar results. Meanwhile, those who consumed the drugs but thought they were taking a placebo experienced no significant increase in wellbeing.

“Our study confirms the benefits of microdosing, but the mechanism behind those benefits likely has nothing to do with [the drugs]. It’s about your expectations of the upcoming experience,” said Balazs Szigeti, a research associate at Imperial who led the study.

“Differences in the data were not driven by what capsule people took, but rather by what they thought they took,” he added, explaining that the findings of the study highlighted the power of a placebo, or the effects that beliefs and expectations can have on the human mind.

Data on the popularity of microdosing is sketchy because hallucinogenic drugs remain illegal in most parts of the world. But a proxy for the growing interest can be found in the Reddit forum on microdosing, which in the past four years has ballooned from roughly 20,000 to 150,000 subscribers.

The Imperial study, which was not clinically supervised but was peer reviewed, involved 191 participants, making it the largest placebo-controlled study on psychedelics and the first to test the longer term impact of microdosing as opposed to measuring the effects of a single dose.

It devised a so-called self-blinding process, in which participants filled opaque capsules with drugs or a placebo. The capsules were then placed in envelopes with a QR code and shuffled, meaning researchers could later track what participants had taken, while they themselves could not.

David Erritzoe, a senior clinical lecturer at Imperial and principal investigator on the study, said he hoped the results would encourage clinically supervised trials and further research on the subject.

The process to get approval by Imperial’s ethics committee for the study, which required participants to take illegal drugs without supervision, was complex, the researchers said. But they stressed that participants were all planning to microdose anyway and acquired their own psychedelic substances.

Imperial is one of the world’s leading hubs for research around psychedelic drugs and their impact on the human brain, following a decades-long hiatus after early studies were halted amid a backlash against mind-altering narcotics.

Letter in response to this article:

Why scientists felt LSD was not a ‘narcotic’ drug / From Peter Chuprevich, London N10, UK