Psychedelic drugs have taken a new place in the popular imagination. Ayelet Waldman’s book
A Really Good Day
details her experience with microdosing—taking small daily doses of
LSD—to help her out of an intractable depression. She maintains it
helped. In Silicon Valley, microdosing with psilocybin, the active
compound in ‘magic’ mushrooms, has been hyped as a new fad. And a
controversial documentary this past spring followed a young American man
who traveled to Peru to cure his severe depression with ayahuasca, a
psychedelic substance used in indigenous medicine.