Micro-dosing: The Drug Habit Your Boss Is Gonna Love

Maybe the weirdest thing about dropping acid at work, as I did one day just after breakfast, is the faith required.

The small brown vial came to me via a chain of custody that shall not be discussed and with the assurance that the clear liquid therein was, according to some guy who told the guy who gave it to me, a precise dilution of LSD. If the stories I'd heard were true, taking a tiny bit of it, a micro-dose, had the potential to make my workday more productive than ever. At least that's the pitch as delivered from a growing horde now using acid to boost creativity and cognitive function. I squeezed the dropper gently, putting a clear drop into a mug of water on my desk, and drank it all in a single gulp. Then I began to worry that I was about to trip balls.

The idea that illicit drugs may enhance my output at work is but one of the many tricks, counter-intuitive therapies, dietary modifications, and behavioral tweaks that have lately been seized upon by self-styled biohackers, human tinkerers eager to sharpen focus and attention, boost productivity, and improve wellness and longevity.

These young, overwhelmingly male technologists are dabbling in, say, holotropic breathing or cryotherapy; they try fasting for days at a time; and increasingly they pop supplements that target brain chemistry—so-called nootropics, a category that includes everything from the off-label use of prescription drugs like the biohacker favorite modafinil to pills they make themselves by stuffing powdered bulk chemicals bought from Chinese websites into capsule cartridges. At the heart of it all, biohacking is being driven by one of Silicon Valley's prevailing sentiments: that anything can be optimized to run better, so why should the human body be any different?

How exactly LSD fits into such a regimen for self-betterment was a topic of great curiosity one night not long ago in a San Francisco loft. George Burke, one of the Bay Area's most fervent biohackers, had convened a presentation on the topic, entitled “Performance Psychedelics.” Up onstage, the legendary psychedelic psychologist Dr. James Fadiman told the crowded room that the key to unleashing the benefits of the drug was all in the dosage. The doctor explained that taking a smaller amount than usual—something on the order of one-tenth of a typical “party dose”—would stimulate the mind in all kinds of positive ways.

Just how or why is yet unknown. Fadiman admitted that the research is scant. But his own informal study, relying on volunteers dabbling with LSD and other hallucinogens like psilocybin, shows that users feel less anxious, more at ease in social situations, more creative, and less prone to severe migraines. Such usage—which Fadiman recommends only once every three days—also seems to help reduce cravings for things like cigarettes and Adderall, the ADHD pill commonly abused by people hoping to work harder and longer.

Burke, the guy who organized the talk, told me that micro-dosing had made his thinking clearer, allowing him to make “better connections between his thoughts and words.” The difference was manifest in the way he wrote. With a micro-dose of LSD, he felt abnormally productive, quick, and clever in e-mails.

“There's something going on here that doesn't fit medical models,” Molly Maloof, a Bay Area physician who joined Fadiman onstage, told the crowd. “Our best guess is that it creates hyper-metabolism in the cerebral cortex,” as well as more “information flow” throughout the brain. “In other words,” Fadiman added, “we don't have the faintest idea.” Everyone laughed.

At an afterparty, I met Eric Matzner, a young entrepreneur who's determined to get more out of his brain. But Matzner is more than a hobbyist in human perfection. He's also an entrepreneur at the vanguard of a commercial boom in biohacking products. His company, Nootroo, sells a pair of proprietary pills that Matzner created after an extensive study of the existing literature—and no small bit of self-experimentation. (The potions contain, among other things, piracetam, which is thought to slow the onset of dementia.) He started the company, he told me, so that he could help those who might be curious but don't have the time to study up or the know-how to get their hands on experimental compounds from, say, Russia. He himself takes up to 60 different supplements a day. “But I like to tell journalists it's 30,” he said. “It makes me sound less crazy.”

It's worth noting here that I don't find any of these people nuts. I'm sympathetic to their cause. I, too, struggle with focus and would like to find a way to work harder—and, when necessary, longer—at a high level. I'm a voracious consumer of coffee and have been relying on modafinil for years to get me through jet lag, not to mention the benefits it provides after a sleepless night thanks to my 2-year-old. I would take basically anything that made me feel better or sharper, provided the side effects were minimal.

Of course, biohacking's true obsessives are far less casual. They study their bodies compulsively and trade performance secrets in the deep recesses of Reddit and other web hangouts where homage is paid to the high priests of the movement—to people like Dave Asprey, the self-proclaimed inventor of the term “biohacking,” who started his own experimental pursuit for perfection when he was fat and miserable.

Asprey got rich as a young tech mogul in the late 1990s, but he got chronic sinus infections, a terrible skin condition, and an unshakable sense of fatigue. “All the doctors told me I was fine,” he explained. “But I'm a disruptive tech guy, and I was struggling to string sentences together. I realized I was going to have to fire my doctors.”

As a programmer, Asprey was accustomed to hacking his way around trouble, so he decided to solve the problem of his life. He bought his first EEG in 1997 and acquired one of the first commercially available light-therapy machines to, as he says quite seriously, “shine light into my skull and activate the mitochondria.” He studied biology and neurology at his desk every night until he fell asleep. The devotion changed his life, and in the years since, he's become one of biohacking's greatest hype men, spreading the gospel through a massive podcast, a best-selling how-to book, and an annual conference that increases in size every year.

The centerpiece of the ever growing empire of biohacker products he sells is Bulletproof Coffee—his own blend of coffee, butter, and concentrated coconut oil that helps enable fasting and adherence to a low-sugar, low-carb ketogenic diet, which he follows and which multitudes of biohackers swear helps improve health and stimulate cognitive function.

Asprey was also an early and very enthusiastic user of nootropics. He's been using the web to hunt them down for so long that he remembers relying on Alta Vista, because Google hadn't been invented. “I've ordered every smart drug that you could buy,” he told me, explaining that modafinil got him through business school at Penn, whereas a drug prescribed to people with Parkinson's that might improve focus “made me depressed.”

The drug he's stuck with the longest is aniracetam, which seems to influence cognitive function without sedative or stimulant effects. “It increases your memory I/O—your ability to get things in and out of your memory,” Asprey said, explaining brain function in the “input/output” parlance of a technologist. He's also a fan of what he calls “nature's two original smart drugs,” caffeine and nicotine. He'll ingest the latter through the low-dose lozenges smokers use to break their habit, though other biohackers cut up transdermal patches and wear the smaller pieces like Band-Aids.

Is the moment finally right for turning biohacking into big business? Maybe the most talked-about newcomer in the race to monetize the movement—and grab a piece of the roughly $21 billion spent annually on supplements in America—is Nootrobox, a start-up founded by Geoff Woo and Michael Brandt. The two Stanford grads began tinkering with supplements in college but quickly realized just how cumbersome and challenging the lifestyle could be for those who wanted to pursue it. Sure, some portion of the movement's appeal may actually derive from its difficulty: There's a certain type of person who enjoys the thrill of sourcing obscure chemicals from Chinese websites and creating his own pills. But Brandt and Woo are betting that there's an even bigger market for people who want to enjoy the benefits of biohacking without having to plumb the web for obscure tips. “This could be mainstream,” Woo said the two decided. “It should be mainstream.”

That's what they're trying to achieve. Having earned early-stage funding from the powerhouse venture firm Andreessen Horowitz—itself a legitimizing vote of confidence—they're marketing a series of simple products that purport to boost clarity, focus, and energy. But it's their Go Cubes that have generated the most hype, beginning in 2016, when they were a sensation at South by Southwest. They're small gummies that contain L-theanine, an amino acid found in green tea, with a half cup of coffee's worth of caffeine in every cube.

Their products sound rudimentary for now and are a far cry from taking LSD in your cubicle. But that's the point, Woo and Brandt say—all the better to make the notion of cognitive enhancement approachable. “You don't have to seem like a freak biohacker,” Brandt said. Think about SXSW: “If we'd been running around handing out little pills, people would have been like, ‘What the fuck?’ ” Instead, everyone was fiending for Go Cubes—and making the case that chewable coffee is a kind of gateway drug to a future full of exotic brain pills.

“In five years,” Woo told me, “nootropics will just be a part of everyone's diet.”

I would like to tell you that after I nervously downed that mug of acid-laced water, I wrote some of the best and most creative prose of my life. But I'm afraid that's not true. The biggest difference I noticed was a significant increase in lucid dreams, and not only on the days when I micro-dosed. I rarely remember dreams, but in the month when I was experimenting with my own brain chemistry, I woke up nearly every day recalling them. In two cases, I remembered dreams in which I was working my way through problems with stories I was writing.

When I actually got down to work, however, the results weren't as obvious. I required less coffee and felt more alert, but that could have been a placebo effect. When you're experimenting with a psychedelic, it's impossible not to constantly wonder.

In fact, a common problem for new experimenters, according to Fadiman, is that people are used to feeling the effects of drugs, and a micro-dose of LSD can sometimes be less perceptible than a cup of coffee. As a result, people increase their dosage until they can feel something—and then they're actually tripping. One guy wrote Fadiman to say that 10 micrograms did nothing, so he tried 25. Then, he reported, “I realized at the sales meeting that I never cared about the stupid product we were selling, so I went home.”

The trouble, of course, is that the point of a smart drug is to improve cognition, but that's a largely immeasurable concept. “When I first went on smart drugs, I was like, ‘Ah, they don't work!’ ” Dave Asprey told me when I asked about his early experimentation. So Asprey stopped taking them, and he noticed he wasn't as sharp as he had been. What he realized was that he needed to change his expectations—that when the drugs are working, the effect isn't massive; rather, it's “so natural that you feel more like yourself.”

When I told Eric Matzner, the Nootroo founder, that so many of these things seem subjective, he disagreed. He replied with a long argument via e-mail that included six different research papers. One study showed measurable increases in memory from the use of piracetam; another showed significant alpha-wave changes caused by a single dose of L-theanine, as registered by an EEG headset. “That said, I do believe there are objective effects that are hard to measure that are beneficial,” he said—how quickly and effectively a person reacts during an emergency, for example, or comes up with ideas during a brainstorming session.

Because coffee is the performance enhancer we all know best, there's an inherent bias toward its effects—what Matzner calls “feeling jacked up.” But the point of these lesser known substances is that they have a different mechanism. “The way a lot of people describe it is that at the end of their day, they realize how much more work they got done and how much longer they were able to stay in the zone,” Matzner explained.

I called Molly Maloof, the physician who spoke with Fadiman at the micro-dosing event, to see what she thought of all of this. Many of her patients, she said, were avid biohackers. These are rich and powerful tech-business barons, and they're all on a quest to work harder, faster, longer. They will seemingly try anything to push performance, even things that we know to be risky. “I think that the Bay Area has a drug problem,” she said, referring mostly to things like Adderall, Ritalin, and Klonopin. “GHB is really big with a lot of tech executives who don't sleep well at night. It's easy to think they aren't sleeping because they're taking uppers all day. And for what? To work more.”

Increasingly these days, Maloof finds herself recommending a wellness regimen that is decidedly non-cutting-edge. There's nothing about it that lurks deep in Reddit or gets traded in hushed whispers throughout Silicon Valley. It's not that cool. And it's something you've probably heard a million times before: Sleep well, get exercise, eat healthy, do some meditation or yoga. “Most people are not doing all the basic stuff, and they're taking pills to try to get there,” she said. “Everyone wants a shortcut.”

Including me. I understand Maloof's point, and I think she's right. But like most people, I sleep too little—and often lack the time for work and the more holistic things that help me feel sharper. I don't know that it's a shortcut I'm after as much as an occasional boost. On rough days, I'll still pop a modafinil. And the LSD? I actually kept up the micro-dosing, using it at least once a week, until my vial ran out. I'm in no rush, but I plan to get some more.

Josh Dean is a writer living in Brooklyn.

This piece originally appeared in the January 2016 issue with the title "Your Boss Is Gonna Love Your New Drug Habit."