Jim Fadiman, the long-serving psychedelic researcher whose name the protocol carries, dismisses MindBio’s conclusions and the study’s design outright. Fadiman contends that because participants received an active caffeine placebo, the reported benefits may reflect not a pure placebo response but the actual psychoactive effects of that substance.
“Double-dummy is a remarkably apt term,” Fadiman, 86, sneers. “What I know is that if you take enough caffeine, you will not be depressed!”
Fadiman points to MindBio’s earlier Phase 2A trial, recently published in the journal Neuropharmacology, which reached very different results. That was a non-blinded, or “open label,” study, meaning participants were aware they were being microdosed with LSD. It reported a 59.5 percent reduction in MADRS scores, with effects persisting for up to six months, and noted improvements in stress, rumination, anxiety, and overall quality of life. Fadiman says those findings better match his own microdosing research. “Their prior study did wonderfully with LSD,” Fadiman says. “I have collected literally hundreds of real world reports over the years that validate those findings.”
MindBio’s Hanka defends the work. “We are bewildered at the significant difference between the open label Phase 2A trial results and the Phase 2B trial results,” he says. “But that is the nature of good science—a properly controlled trial will get a proper result. Our Phase 2B trial was of the highest standard, a triple-blind, double-dummy, active placebo controlled trial. I haven’t seen another psychedelic trial that has gone to these lengths to control and blind a trial.”
Still, some devoted microdosing proponents remain unconcerned. In 2017, writer Ayelet Waldman (best known for the Mommy-Track Mysteries novels about stay-at-home-mom-turned-sleuth Juliet Applebaum) published A Really Good Day, a diary-style account of self-experimentation with microdosing to treat a persistent mood disorder. She tells WIRED she isn’t particularly troubled by the possibility that her mood improvements were placebo-driven. “In my book I took very seriously the possibility that what I was experiencing was the mother of all placebo effects,” Waldman says. “I wrote about this a number of times in various chapters and decided in the end it didn’t matter. What mattered was that I felt better.”
