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A Really Good Day is a deceptive book. It promises to be about microdosing and how it helped Ayelet find inner peace, less pain, and marital bliss… or at least contentment. It does discuss her success with microdosing, which is grand and helpful, but that’s not what the book is or the book is about. The book is a drug destigmatization pamphlet, and as such, it’s really good.

Ayelet presents herself as a middle-class middle-aged mom and wife who wants relief from her own mind, pain and relationship problems. She appeals to soccer moms, anxious parents, the depressed and exasperated parents. She appeals to the vast number of people in her same socio-economic space that has turned to every prescription drug to quell their demons and day to day stress. She exposes herself by expressing her neurosis to the public; she wonders if she’s a bad mom, a bad wife, a bad writer, and every anxiety. In other words, her target audience is not the average microdoser or psychonaut, it is her peers, mothers, who have for so long villified drugs and been told that any encounter with drugs is likely to destroy everything they hold dear. It’s those mothers that have been the ones targeted by and driving non anti-drug messages as they ‘think of the children’. Ayalet’s message to those moms is that drugs are not something to fear, but instead, can bring a whole lot of good. This book is about harm reduction.

Ayalet worked as a federal public defender and is a consultant for the Drug Policy Alliance. As someone who has been on the front lines of the drug war, she is an authority on the price paid by the ongoing war on drugs. It is from this authority she brings her knowledge. She recounts the history of ecstasy, LSD, the effects of meth, drug abuse, the criminal system, and so on. In effect, she gives us the cliffs notes of the past one hundred years in drug use. This is great for the casual reader that doesn’t delve deep into drug literature and hasn’t read Acid Test, Acid Dreams, My Problem Child, Tikhal and many of the other classics of the genre. There are a few new nuggets of wisdom here that aren’t available in the other books, but by and large she glosses over much, and fumbles some, of the history of psychedelics and other drugs. How accurate and in depth her stories are is beside the point though, the stories are there to show that a lot of thought by a lot of major people has gone into why drugs are not the villains we have been told they are, but instead must be understood deeply in their own right. She teaches us that each drug is different and that we have to educate ourselves on what they do, and figure out our own limits. Ayalet makes her own case clear: she’s hesitant to break the law, won’t go for a full trip, has taken ecstasy, smokes low thc medical marijuana for pain, and prefers to stay as sober as possible.

The conceit here is that she is just trying to educate us about her microdosing experience. She lets us know that microdosing often made her more productive, less anxious, sometimes more irritable, often less pained, etc. The problem is that the treatise on microdosing ends there. Like most medicines that work, they are not that interesting; it removes some type of suffering and makes you feel closer to well. It’s kind of like the Tolstoy quote “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Happiness and wellness tend to be boring to read about unless you’re currently suffering and the path is complicated. Given our modern medicine paradigm, if a drug ‘simply works’ we don’t have much to say about it. We don’t have books on Tylenol, Advil or Pepto Bismol unless they are causing suffering in some other way. In this way, we can sing the praises of microdosing but it’s not very complex. It’s mood boosting, energizing, though it can make you irritable and sleepless. It can help creativity, and being more open, as acid is wont to do, but it’s not world changing in itself, unlike how the larger doses can be. My own experiences with microdosing have been hit-and-miss; a 15ug LSD microdose taken with a cannabis edible it’s a serious and wonderful mood (and sex) booster, but by itself it can drive my irritability through the roof even at a lower dose size.

Much of the book is about her own life: her fights with her husband, her child’s tattoos, her couple’s therapy, her writing career, and how the microdose relates to all of these topics. Personally, I found the character she portrays herself to be as insufferable: a permanently overreacting and neurotic parent that is willing to fly across country to save her own child from the evils of the big city and her own ennui because of an instagram photo. She is constantly putting herself down and letting us know that she feels she is a curse to everyone around her. This was a very taxing personality for me to read about, but having known many people like this in the past, I understand why she presents herself this way: she’s relatable.

If you’re into deep psychedelic and drug literature, skip the book, it won’t really offer anything new. If you’re not, read the book, it may give you insight into what the rest of us have been thinking and saying about drugs for quite some time. She is passionate about the decriminalization and drug reform but it’s not a passionate book. It’s a book to ease you into the idea that drugs have something to offer.