Sophie Melissa

A new UK-based study will explore whether microdosing psychedelic drugs such as LSD really brings the psychological benefits that some people claim – or if it's all just a placebo effect.

Microdosing is when people take a very small dose of a psychedelic drug on a regular basis. At these low doses, the drugs don’t have the kind of perceptual effects usually associated with psychedelics, but some users claim other benefits, such as improved focus, creativity and psychological wellbeing. In the past few years, microdosing has become a particular trend in Silicon Valley.


Reports on the effects of microdosing, however, are purely anecdotal. “If you look around in the scientific literature, you realise there are virtually no studies on psychedelics microdosing,” says Balazs Szigeti, a researcher on the new study.

Led by Imperial College London and the Beckley Foundation, the purpose of the study is to help pinpoint what effects (if any) microdosing may have on people's psychological wellbeing or cognitive function. Over a four-week period, participants will take daily microdoses or placebos and report back on their experiences. The experiment will use a novel “self-blinding” procedure that means participants won’t know if they are taking a psychedelic or a placebo on a particular day until after the study period ends.

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It is important to have a placebo control, Szigeti says, as people often underestimate how powerful the placebo effect can be when considering effects such as wellbeing, which are largely subjective and difficult to measure. David Erritzoe, the principal investigator the study, explains that microdosing may be particularly susceptible to the placebo effect owing to the nature of the drugs. Given that LSD is illegal, people who go to the trouble of taking it presumably believe that it will have an effect. “Microdosing has all the potential in the world to have a massive placebo component, because I doubt that anyone would take what is in many places an illicit drug […] if they didn’t really hope and believe that this would help them,” Erritzoe says.

The study will not take place in a lab, but will recruit volunteers online to do the experiment at home. The researchers emphasise that they are targeting people who already microdose or intend to microdose, and insist that they are not encouraging anyone to take illegal drugs who would not be doing so anyway. To qualify, participants must be over 18 and have some prior experience with psychedelics. The researchers do not provide the drugs or help people to procure them.


The main reasons for conducting the study this way are time and money; a clinical trial, where participants are given the drug in a controlled lab environment, would be very expensive and time-consuming. It would also be a logistical challenge: as microdosing is done regularly over a period of time, participants would have to come back to the lab repeatedly to take another dose.

An advantage of the at-home study is that it can accommodate a large number of potential participants, which means more data. A disadvantage, however, is that researchers will have to rely on people following their instructions correctly, reporting back accurately and not breaking the self-blinding mechanism.

Once people have been recruited to the study, the researchers will send them information on the self-blinding protocol, which involves participants hiding their microdoses in opaque gel capsules. They will put the microdose capsules in bags labelled with days of the week, and put a week’s worth in four envelopes labelled with QR codes. They will then repeat the process for four sets of empty capsules, which contain no microdose; these are the placebo doses. Finally, they will mix the eight envelopes up and pick four, discarding the rest. Those four represent the four weeks of the study; each week, participants will take a microdose every morning or a placebo every morning.

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“The way it is set up, you don't even know how many microdosing or placebo weeks you're going to have,” Szigeti says. “We are going to have some participants who only take placebo and some who only take microdose. Most people are going to do a mix of both.”


At the end of the study, people will be able to find out which weeks were microdose weeks and which were placebo by scanning the QR codes.

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The study is applicable to any psychedelics that are paper-blotter-based. Szigeti says he expects most people to use LSD, although they could also use analogs such as 1p-LSD or AL-LAD. Plant-based psychedelics such as magic mushrooms won’t work, as their weight would give away their presence in the capsules and ruin the placebo control. As the study is observational, the researchers will not tell participants how much to take, although a microdose is usually considered to be around 10 to 20 micrograms (a full tab, by comparison, is around 100 micrograms).

Szigeti says they will ask people how much they think they are taking, but that this is in unlikely to be accurate anyway, as “most dealers claim there is more on the blotter than there actually is.” Twice a week, participants will fill in a questionnaire and play some online games designed to test cognitive function.


Szigeti says he is unsure what the results of the study will show. He expects any effects to be relatively small – “it's called microdosing for a reason” – and says he would bet money that many people will think they’ve had a microdose on a placebo day. He previously ran a small pilot study with nine microdosers to test a version of the self-blinding protocol, and in the first week, eight out of nine were convinced they had at least one day of microdosing. In reality, they all only had placebos. “Everybody got tricked, because there was all this excitement,” he says. “Everybody was pumped up, and people's minds tricked them into believing it was a microdose.”

Erritzoe says he’s 50/50 on whether microdosing will prove to have the effects claimed. Researchers at Imperial have previously done research with single, full doses of psychedelics, but microdosing, he says, is a “different paradigm”.

The researchers hope that, if the study reveals some interesting findings, it will help to promote further research into microdosing and increase our understanding of these compounds. “As a scientist working in the field, it just feels not very satisfying that something explosively used by a lot of people is basically so non-evidence-based,” Erritzoe says.