How I Learned to Love Mushrooms (and MDMA, Ayahusca and LSD)
Editor’s note: Rob Long is not a medical professional or licensed provider of psychedelics. He may, in fact, be high while writing this column. Nothing herein constitutes pharmaceutical advice or guidance, and should not be used to inform diagnoses or treatment.
“The only way I can finish a writing assignment on time,” a screenwriter friend told me recently, “is if I steal some Adderall from my kid.”
We were talking about the trouble we have getting things done, feeling inspired, being able to focus. I told her I had used Adderall in the past, but didn’t like the jittery feeling it gave me. It didn’t do much for my creativity either.
I suggested she look into microdosing psychedelics instead. She rolled her eyes.
I know, I know. Microdosing is one of those irritating and trendy topics that your irritating and trendy friends keep talking about. It’s popular in the entertainment business, where I make my living (or try to) and extremely prevalent in the tech industry—those two things should be enough to turn you off permanently. Elon Musk, with his notorious use of Ketamine (which he has said he is prescribed to help treat depression) is a one-man Just Say No campaign.
But, for a moment, I asked her to hear me out. Microdosing involves taking small, sub-perceptible amounts of a psychedelic drug like LSD or psilocybin (the psychedelic agent in ‘magic mushrooms’) every four days. Not enough to get all Lucy-in-the-Sky, but enough to lighten the mood and open up new creative pathways. I’ve been doing it for five years, and it’s been hugely helpful to me during the writing process. In my business, you only get paid when you turn in the script, and five micrograms of LSD twice a week for three weeks gets me to that payday.
“Oh God,” she said. “Next you’re going to tell me you’re doing ayahuasca in the jungle and going to all-night acid parties in some appalling Brooklyn warehouse.”
(Ayahuasca, for those of you who may have other things going on in your life, is a powerful psychedelic medicine that originated in Amazonian river communities and has been used by shamans and others to heal physical and psychological ailments for centuries. The New York Times, for instance, has recognized it as a trend, which means it’s already been taken up by a lot of insufferable know-it-alls and now I’m one of them and, again, I’m sorry about that.)
I didn’t answer her, which in a way was an answer.
“Jesus,” she said. “When did you become a dirty hippie?”
Which was a fair question. I’m a man in my late fifties—exactly how late is none of your business—and for most of my life I’ve been a buttoned-up establishment Republican. I’m still pretty buttoned up (though I haven’t been a Republican since 12:01 p.m. on January 20th, 2017) but now, every few months, I like to blast my brain with psychedelic medicine and see what comes up. Sometimes I do it in groups of fellow groovy strangers and sometimes I do it solo, with a thoughtful and trained guide to listen to me, ask and answer questions and just generally be there with me for the five or six hours a really thorough (and fun) psychedelic trip can last. I’ve taken mushrooms, LSD, MDMA, Ketamine, and some more complicated combinations of all of them.
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“Please don’t tell my husband about this,” my friend said. “He’s been reading about it and thinks it’ll help him get through his forties.”
“It might,” is what I didn’t say. I’ve been doing psychedelics long enough to know that you’re not supposed to recommend them to anyone. You’re supposed to speak from personal experience and let your listeners decide for themselves.
What I said instead was this: “When you reach a certain age, there’s a movie—and it can be a pretty long movie—you run for yourself that seems to show only the times you were embarrassing and wrong and mean for no reason, or bad at your job, or ashamed of yourself. And it’s always playing somewhere in your subconscious, like when you have too many tabs open on your browser and everything is slow and jumpy and close to crashing.”
I told her that once, on an episode of one of those reality-TV police shows, I saw some detectives interrogating a suspect, someone they had caught red-handed, on video, literally doing the crime. But the criminal kept denying it. “That isn't me,” he kept saying. “That isn't me.” Even though it was! His face, his clothes—it was unmistakably him. But he kept saying, with total conviction, “That's not me.”
And I got it. Because I've done and said (and, sadly, written) a lot of things that weren't exactly me, either. “That's not me” is what we say when something isn’t to our taste; “that’s not me” we shrug when we look at an outfit we know we couldn’t pull off—and it’s also what we say when we’re trying to get out of facing the truth about ourselves.
Eventually you run out of string and the pilot light flickers off and you find yourself sitting in the dark on a sweaty mat in a thatched hut in Costa Rica, drinking a pretty awful-tasting tea and waiting for yourself to arrive. And hoping that “that's not me” changes into “oh, there I am.” Which is what happened to me during my first ayahuasca experience, and what happens whenever I take LSD or mushrooms or MDMA and which has made my life (even at this late hour) immeasurably richer and happier and more loving.
I stopped talking. She took it all in.
“I’m serious,” she said. “If you tell my husband about this I’ll kill you. He’s too into Elon as it is.”
True story: Her husband emailed me the next day and demanded the details. I answered his questions with as much detail as I could—and that the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 would allow. And he had plenty of questions: Where did I go in Costa Rica for those ayahuasca ceremonies? How do I get LSD and MDMA safely? What’s the difference in effect, dosage, medium, experience? Will my brain be permanently fried? And this really annoying question: What does Elon take?
People, it’s fair to say, want to know more about all of this stuff. So it occurred to me that it might be useful to write about psychedelics for everyone who is a little bit acid-curious. Next week, I’ll be talking about MDMA, sometimes called “Molly” and sometimes called “Ecstasy” but often called “lifesaving” by people suffering from PTSD.
In the meantime, feel free to send your questions to the email address below — use whatever pseudonym you like, of course. I’ll do my best to be as comprehensive with my replies in this column as I can be, all the while trying to keep myself from getting arrested. Or going full Elon.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and author of three books. His weekly podcast, Martini Shot, is available everywhere. Contact him at rob.long@thedailybeast.com.
Anyone seeking medical advice should contact their doctor or a health professional; anyone seeking support for depression or suicidal thoughts should reach out to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline by dialing or texting 988.
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