I heard about Ayelet Waldman’s book A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life on Tami Simon’s podcast Insights At The Edge. It isn’t a podcast I normally listen to; it’s more aligned with the Chaplain’s interests. But when he saw an episode featuring an interview with Waldman, he sent it my way, knowing my interest in psychedelics and microdosing.

Since I started this journey, I’ve felt like I didn’t want to spend my time defending my interest in and use of psychedelics, not in person or on my blog. But recently, I was expressing frustration with the Chaplain about the way anti-drug groups are still spreading false information about psychedelics, the safety of certain drugs, and grouping drugs like psilocybin in with heroine and opioids.  

The frustration about disinformation started with an article I read in a magazine while I was reading Waldman’s book. It featured parents of a young man who had died of an overdose. The article presented his story as a natural progression from marijuana, to psilocybin, to opioids, to heroine. At the time of his death, he was living in a group home due to a brain injury from a previous overdose. I felt sad for his parents and their son, that he’d gotten involved with highly addictive drugs and that it had ultimately killed him.

Two things crossed my mind as I read the article: First, it’s too bad that we don’t have better mental health support and options for people who struggle to cope with life. What I perceive as the young man’s self-medicating eventually led to his death. Second, I hoped people weren’t buying the connection between weed, psilocybin, and opioids that was drawn in the article. (If you’re curious to know the U.S. government’s perspective on whether marijuana is a gateway drug, check out this article.)

A Really Good Day is an interesting and thought-provoking read because it takes these issues that are often painted in black and white strokes, and fills in the grey of research, facts, and society’s response to drug use in our culture. Waldman describes the difference between drugs typically used illegally for recreational purposes. She mentions more than once that one drug of choice that is legal in the U.S., alcohol, is far more dangerous than LSD, weed, or psilocybin in terms of risk of addiction, death, and other poor outcomes.

Waldman introduces each chapter with a brief list of factors she was evaluating during her one-month microdosing experiment, including mood, quality of sleep, and pain. She goes on to explore different topics related to legality of drugs, safety, her own experience while microdosing with LSD,  along with the history of drug use, experimentation, and study in the U.S.

Many of the names and studies cited were familiar from when I read Michael Pollan’s How To Change Your Mind. In that sense, it was a good review, but Waldman also presents new information. Her book is more of a defense of certain ideas than Pollan’s was, and she comes at it from the perspective of a lawyer who has seen drugs prosecuted in a way that disadvantages people of color in a wildly disproportionate way. While I complained about Pollan’s failure to acknowledge privilege, Waldman is very aware of how privilege plays a role in who gets to experiment with drug use, and who gets in trouble for it.

I deeply identified with so much of what Waldman shares about her personality, her struggles, and her relationship with her husband. Early in the book, I read an excerpt to the Chaplain, and his response was, “Are you sure you didn’t write that?” Like Waldman, I dream of living in a world that isn’t quite so brightly colored by my moods – an existence with a little more temperance and equanimity.

The terrible side effects and safety issues with currently available medications for mental health and sleep issues, as well as pain, compared to the possibilities presented by MDMA, marijuana, LSD, and psilocybin, are astonishing. Yet progress now, in a world where there is so much fear mongering, and the word “drugs” is a catch-all for both the horrible and the helpful, feels frustratingly out of reach.

Through her own research and interviews with people in the field of psychedelics, Waldman presents different models for providing safe, limited access to certain drugs. You don’t have to agree with the ideas presented in the book to get drawn in by them. She mixes these ideas for the future with current knowledge about different types of drugs that are currently illegal in the U.S. She includes how facts she learned about different substances affected her approach to parenting her teens and what she taught them about drug use.

I wasn’t blown away by Waldman’s podcast interview. She didn’t come across well, and she didn’t seem to like how it went, either. But I knew when she described her book that I needed to read it, and I’m glad I did. Her story was compelling, her research well cited. If you have an interest in psychedelics, or even an antipathy and are wondering what all the fuss is about, this is an interesting read by an unlikely psychonaut.