About a decade ago, many media outlets – including WIRED – focused on a strange trend at the intersection of mental health, drug science and biohacking in Silicon Valley: microdosing, the practice of taking petite amounts of a psychedelic drug not seeking full-fledged hallucinatory pleasures but milder, more stable effects. The archetypal microdoser, usually using psilocybin mushrooms or LSD, was looking less for melting walls and kaleidoscopic visuals with open eyes than for mood and energy boosts, like a gentle spring breeze blowing through the mind.
Anecdotal reports portray microdosing as a sort of psychedelic Swiss Army knife, providing everything increased concentration Down increased libido and (perhaps most promisingly) reduced reported depression level. For many it was a miracle. Others remained cautious. Could a 5 percent dose of acid really work All This? A large-scale up-to-date study from an Australian biopharmaceutical company suggests that the benefits of microdosing may actually be drastically exaggerated – at least when it comes to alleviating the symptoms of clinical depression.
A Phase 2B study of 89 adult patients conducted by Melbourne-based MindBio Therapeutics, examining the effects of LSD microdosing in the treatment of major depressive disorder, found that the psychedelic was in fact better results by placebo. Over eight weeks, symptoms were assessed using the tool The Montgomery-Åsberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS), a widely recognized tool for the clinical assessment of depression.
The study has not been published yet. However, MindBio CEO Justin Hanka recently released his company’s best results LinkedInwanting to show that his company is “at the forefront of microdosing research.” He called it “the most vigorous placebo-controlled study ever conducted in microdosing.” They found that patients given a petite amount of LSD (ranging from 4 to 20 μg, or micrograms, well below the threshold for a staggering hallucinogenic dose) showed noticeable improvements in well-being but worse MADRS scores compared to patients given a placebo pill with caffeine. (Because patients participating in psychedelic trials typically expect some kind of mind-altering effect, studies are often blinded using so-called “active placebos” such as caffeine or methylphenidate, which have their own observable psychoactive properties.)
Essentially, this means that a medium-strength cup of coffee may prove more beneficial in treating major depressive disorder than a petite dose of acid. Perhaps good news for regular caffeine users, but less so for researchers (and biopharmaceutical startups) counting on the effectiveness of microdosing psychedelics.
“This is probably the nail in the coffin for the use of microdosing in the treatment of clinical depression,” says Hanka. “It probably improves the well-being of people with depression, but not enough to be clinically or statistically significant.”
However dire, these results are consistent with the suspicions of more skeptical researchers who have long believed that the benefits of microdosing are less due to the diminutive psychedelic catalyst and more attributable to the so-called “placebo effect.”
In 2020, Jay A. Olson, then a PhD student at the Department of Psychiatry at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, conducted an experiment. He gave 33 participants a placebo, telling them it was actually a dose of a drug similar to psilocybin. They were told that there is no placebo group. Other researchers who were present on this piece acted out the effects of the drug in a room lit with funky lighting and other visual stimulants in an attempt to create “optimized expectations” of the psychedelic experience.
Resultant papertitled “Tripping On Nothing,” found that most participants reported feeling the effects of the drug – even though no real drug existed. “The main conclusion we draw is that the placebo effect may be stronger than expected in psychedelics research,” Olson, now a PhD student at the University of Toronto, tells WIRED. “The placebo effects were stronger than those you would get from microdosing.”