For Ayelet Waldman, Microdosing LSD Led to Revelations
Image by Knopf
By Talya Zax January 10, 2017
Think the psychedelic drug LSD belongs in the tie-dyed “turn on, tune in, drop out” days of the past? Ayelet Waldman — novelist, essayist, and wife of Michael Chabon — believes that, at least when it comes to therapeutic drug use, you ought to think again.
In her new book “A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life,” Waldman details a month she spent using minute doses of LSD to escape an emotional state of, as she told the Forward, “absolute desperation.” During that month, she took 10-microgram doses of the drug — one-fifteenth of an ordinary dose — once every three days.
In “A Really Good Day” Waldman takes an earnest look at her own emotional makeup, the often-surprising science on the use of LSD, opioids, and amphetamines, and the systematic racism of the United States’ War on Drugs.
She didn’t set out to write a book when she began microdosing, she told the Forward. Shortly after she began the experiment, though, she realized its literary potential. The project brought her back in touch with her former career as a federal public defender, during which she often defended clients accused of drug-related felonies.
Stay tuned for a Forward feature on “A Really Good Day.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
