Waldman’s little helper: Microdoses of LSD
You’re a successful 50-something author and former federal prosecutor with four kids, a quite famous husband (novelist Michael Chabon), and raging mood swings that therapy and the usual pharmaceuticals no longer blunt. What do you do?
What Ayelet Waldman did was break the law and secretly consume minuscule doses of LSD every third day for a month, monitoring and recording the changes in her moods, relationships and productivity.
A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage and My
Life (Knopf, 219 pp., out of four) is the chronicle of Waldman’s short experiment with what most regard as a dangerous mind-bending psychedelic. She, on the other hand, asserts that the tiny doses she consumed amounted mostly to a sip of serenity, or something close to it.
Relentlessly honest and surprisingly funny (in parts), the book is also an energetically researched history of this drug (which until it was criminalized in the 1960s was regarded by many researchers and counselors as a tool to address forms of mental illness).
Waldman’s underlying bias — that LSD was and is safe and effective in therapeutic settings and hasn’t been that risky when used recreationally, either — might challenge mainstream thinking. She produces decent data and arguments. It’s worth noting she taught a course on the War on Drugs at UC-Berkeley School of Law, so she knows where the good stuff about drugs and policy and vested interest is buried.
In modified diary form, Waldman details her use of and reactions to LSD microdoses (two drops, about one-tenth of a typical recreational dose), branching off for sweeping forays into drug history, drug law and some of the most private corners of her life. She was motivated by a lifetime “held hostage by the vagaries of mood,” and writes that at the worst times she’s “beset with selfloathing, and knotted with guilt and shame ... overtaken by a pervasive sense of hopelessness.”
Once she embarked on this experiment, she experienced the probably predictable moments of fretting over whether she would have to be resuscitated by EMTs and how “wretchedly irresponsible” she was, what with her children counting on her.
Although hers was a journey few will take, A Really Good Day reads like an Everywoman’s experience, because Waldman’s fears and reactions are so commonplace. She is so likable in her flaws and her determination that it’s a relief to learn that the microdoses (or possibly her therapy sessions or maybe even a placebo effect, she acknowledges) allowed enough of a head shift that her life has become easier, lighter.
She had the courage, the credentials and the insight to make this journey and tell us about it. They all add up to a fine read.