Ayelet Waldman, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and activist, talks about her new non-fiction book A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life, in which she describes a month long experiment treating her unstable moods with minuscule doses of LSD. Finding psychotropic med prescriptions of little help, Waldman became intrigued by the work of Dr. James Fadiman, a psychologist and researcher who has chronicled the positive effects of microdosing LSD. Waldman is also a lawyer, an accomplished former federal public defender and former teacher at Boalt Hall, U. C. Berkeley's law school. Her legal career includes working to rescue women from prison and advocating for drug-policy reform.
TRANSCRIPT
Speaker 1:Method to the madness is next. You're listening to method to the madness, a weekly public affairs show on k a l expertly celebrating bay area innovators. I'm your host, Lisa Kiefer, and today I'll be talking with novelist and essayist. I yell at Wildman. We'll be talking about her new book, a really good day. How microdosing made a mega difference in my mood, my marriage, and my life. Chris, your pleasure to be here. It's great. After I first [00:00:30] got lost on campus, which I will probably do till the end of time, it's on your used to teach on camera.
Speaker 2:I taught here at the boat law school for seven semesters yet I want to talk about your new book. I really liked it and so glad the superficial level of it. It's a diary of you microdosing for 30 days, but yes, it's so much more than that. It's about how the war on drugs has failed drug reform policy. It's about psychedelic research. It's about your family. Yes. It's about mood disorders and how they affect family. So you're a legal professional. Yes. And you are a a federal public defender. A criminal defense [00:01:00] lawyer. Tell us the journey of how you got to a schedule one illegal drug for your mood disorder. So it was really a matter of desperation. So I have a mood disorder, but I have a mood disorder that was for many, many years, very well controlled. You know, I'm not one of those people who doesn't take our medicines.
Speaker 2:I took my medicine and I took it regularly. My mood disorder was diagnosed as premenstrual dysphoric disorder and the easiest way to understand that is just pms on steroids. It took a while to get the diagnosis. I had a lot of misdiagnoses [00:01:30] first, but eventually I got the diagnosis. I was treated by a psychiatrist who had an expertise in women's mood and hormones and she put me on a very easy to follow very specific medication regimen. I took a week of antidepressants right before my period and for many years that worked great. It was life altering. I mean it was amazing there. I was one month, didn't know what to do, cycling uncontrollably the next month, popping a pill and feeling much better. But then of course I got older [00:02:00] and when you hit your forties when you're a woman, you enter into this protracted period of peri-menopause, which isn't menopause when you stop getting your period, but it's kind of like the build up to that and there's so little literature on it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I thought you'd just like some, one day you're stopped getting your period. I didn't know that. For years I would get two periods a month, three periods a month, no periods, skip a bunch, get one, skip four again, another one, you know, it was just completely unpredictable and crazy. So your mood is fluctuating madly because your hormones are fluctuating madly [00:02:30] and my specific medication regimen required me to know exactly when I was going to get my period and I didn't know anymore and that catalyze this kind of mood disaster. I became a very, very depressed, but my kind of depression is an activated depression, so it's not like I crawled into bed and went to sleep. I was still very productive, but I was very quick to anger, very irritable. I was very difficult to live with and I would get into these spirals where I would be horrible to the people in my family and then I would feel shame and depressed [00:03:00] and I ultimately became suicidal before I began the microdosing experiment, I had left the place of ideation and was more into a kind of more planning phase.
Speaker 2:At one point I was standing in front of my medicine cabinet, kind of evaluating its contents to see what was the most dangerous drug in it. Spoiler alert, Tylenol. I have a lot of stuff in my medicine cabinet, but that is a dangerous drug and that's when I decided to try this crazy thing. That's illegal schedule one. I decided to try micro-dosing with LSD. Tell us how you did that. You, you met [00:03:30] James Fadiman. I reached out to James Fadiman. I use an old time researcher on psychoactive drugs. The 60 60 the sixties he, yes, he was a Stanford t and a couple of other people had a study specifically designed to evaluate the effects of LSD on creative problem solving. Fadiman and his colleagues invited these 28 engineers, architects, people in those sort of beginnings of the computer industry because this was like 1966 right? Right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, right. LSD was illegal. Right? They said to these people, bring a problem. You're not, [00:04:00] we're not, we're not inviting you here to seek God. We're asking you to bring, you know, a math problem and engineering problem, a design problem, something that you've had really a hard time figuring out. Bring your intractable problem to this experience and we'll see what happens. And so these people came in and they got dosed with LSD and the researchers watch them. And what was remarkable is that many of them not only solve their problems, but went on to have these profound insights into their work. Very few of them had kind of spiritual awakenings. [00:04:30] The study was, he said to bring in to problems that you have been unable to solve for one reason or another. Exactly directed it to problem solve. It was all about sort of set and setting.
Speaker 2:It was like intention, right. You know that stupid thing they say before you do your yoga. Having the intention to solve your problem actually resulted in some number of these individuals solving their problems, going on to file patents and and create in some cases, companies based on these. Then of course that research was shut down and if adamant describes it, he says that he had just dosed [00:05:00] a subject group. The LSD was about to hit and they get this letter informing them that their specific permit was going to be rescinded. And so he looks at the letter and he looks at his colleague and he says, I think we got this letter tomorrow. But you know, it was really, it's a shame that that research was shut down because I think what we're seeing now with this resurgence of interest in LSD and particularly micro-dosing, which are to define it for your audience, a microdose is a small dose, a dose that's too small to elicit [00:05:30] any perceptual effects.
Speaker 2:But so sub psychedelic thing. Yeah, new tripping. But it's large enough to have metabolic effects. So in a sense we're looking for something that can act in a way that you almost don't notice. If I had slipped it into your coffee right now, you would not know that you were micro-dosing except at the end of the day after our interview, after the rest of your work, you might go home and think, Huh, that was a really good day. Okay, so, so, so I know [inaudible] yes, she's written a book by Psychedelic and spiritual journeys. I said, but that's [00:06:00] not the kind of book that I'm likely to read because I'm not a particularly psych psychedelics or spiritual personal. Great is you're not. So I'm very practical. I was raised by atheist parents whose atheism was as dogmatic as a Hasidic Jews, Judaism. I mean we were, my parents raised me to have disgust for religion and for spirituality of all kinds, which I struggle with, you know, I'm trying to overcome.
Speaker 2:We all try to overcome the biases of our parents. So I'm, I'm looking on the Internet. I'm in this place of profound depression, Anhedonia. [00:06:30] And I see this talk that Jim is giving and he talks about microdosing and he says that at the end of the day, people report that they had a really good day. And I felt like I'd been hit in the head with a mallet, like a real echos all. I wanted a really one really forget really good. I just wanted a good day. I wanted a day where I didn't feel this kind of sense of despair and inability to take pleasure in my family and my husband did my [00:07:00] marriage and my surroundings and so I reached out to him and he is the most loving, generous man. I mean, look, I'm a person with daddy issues. I get that. I have a very typical, my father's much older than my mother, and you talk about this in the book.
Speaker 2:I was 40 when I was born, so he was older, which in the 60s that was really old, but he was a very uninvolved father and he also had his own mood disorder, so he was, it's hard to live with a parent with a mood disorder as my children can likely attest. Dr Fadiman's generosity, his warmth is his willingness to [00:07:30] talk on the phone with me for hours about my issues, about my problems, about, you know, what I tried was really, it was an, it was a novel experience for that's what you wanted. Yeah. In a, in a way or my dad and I have known one another's mood disorders forever and we've literally never spoken about it once. So one day I'm a visiting my parents and my father comes out of this room, this kind of junk room and he hands me this stack of micro cassette tapes and he says, here, do something with these tapes of my [00:08:00] psychotherapy sessions from the 80s so I have this pile of tapes of my dad's therapy and for years I just couldn't even look at them.
Speaker 2:I was just like, Ugh, you know, you want to tell me how you're feeling, just talk to me. But then eventually I actually did a whole story for this American life about these tapes cause I did eventually listen to them hoping for great profound insight and got nothing. But what you did get, it's so hilarious in the history of communism, all my dad will ever talk to you about is like the history of Zionism, the history of communism, [00:08:30] Stalin's five year plan, like seriously anything you want to know about Stalin's agrarian policy. And so I put in the tape, you know what I really wanted to hear as I love my daughter, I was expecting to hear insights into his problematic relationship with his children, his terrible marriage, all that stuff. But what I ended up getting was, let me tell you a little about Stalin's five year plan.
Speaker 2:I mean, he, his therapist just sat and talked about that for hours at a time. You know, you talk about how you don't get so worked up about these very issues. You just mentioned that your father, you're more circumspect [00:09:00] during that 30 days. I certainly was during those 30 days, I had a capacity for equanimity that I had not had before. I had a resurgence in my ability to enjoy beauty, my family to feel loved, to feel connected to the world. Um, I was less irritable. I didn't less judgment, less judgmental. I didn't lash out. It was really like cognitive behavioral therapy in a pill. You know, I had been in cognitive behavioral therapy, I had been in all these treatment modalities and they just hadn't worked [00:09:30] because I couldn't make myself do them. And with the LSD I was more receptive and I was more able to do that work that was necessary to maintain my mood.
Speaker 2:I also incidentally, and you know this hearkens back to Jim's work in the 60s I was more productive, way more productive. This was not hypomania. This was like sit down, get to work, focus, make interesting connections, which is again not a surprise. We know that large doses of LSD, sort of more typical [00:10:00] doses cause different parts of your brain that don't normally communicate to communicate in new ways and they want to talk about that. The default mode network. Yes. So the default mode network, I mean in the most simplistic way, this is that part that like Rut that you are in your head that tells you to react in certain ways and it's kind of that directive mode. That was the voice in my head that told me I was worthless and I was useless. I was unlovable and it was a very old, very familiar set of reactions [00:10:30] and patterns, patterns and thoughts and beliefs.
Speaker 2:And you know the brain develops patterns. It's what the brain likes to do. An LSD in a large dose takes your default mode network offline. It allows new patterns to form an old patterns to be kind of exploded. I'm too afraid to do an LSD trip. I was still too afraid, but in micro doses, based on my experiment and based on all of my reading and based on the research I've done on the neurochemistry of LSD and on the anecdotal evidence of many, many, many people who have now been micro-dosing [00:11:00] is that a similar function seems to occur with regular micro-dosing. It doesn't take the default mode network offline, but it allows you to develop new thought patterns and new ways of reacting. It takes you out of those traditional unproductive reflexes. And that's the neuroplasticity that you know, neuroplasticity means, you know, the way that your brain grows and changes.
Speaker 2:You want a neuroplastic brain. A neuroplastic brain is a good brain. Babies' brains, very neuroplastic old ladies [00:11:30] brands, old dudes, brands less neuroplastic. You want your brain to change and grow and to constantly be, be able to think in new ways. And so you can teach an old dog new tricks with microdosing as an old dog. Look, I always resist anything that comes off as a panacea. You know, anytime you go to like a new age therapist who says, I'm going to work on your job muscles and that's going to solve your ankle pain, your back pain, your issues with your father and your flatulence problem. I see. I always [00:12:00] feel like that's the sign of a charlatan if like one thing can solve all your problems. So I, I'm very careful about making claims about microdosing, but I do think that the way that LSD and other psychedelics work on the brain holds great promise for mental illnesses that are particularly related to patterns of thinking, which, you know, a mood disorder, depression.
Speaker 2:There are studies going on now, and I'm curious where they're gonna go with Jeff sessions as I knew both, uh, UCLA, NYU [00:12:30] and Johns, John Hopkins there, I think clinical stage two, two and into three. So they did a very smart thing in those research facilities. They said, we're going to study depression and anxiety in people with fatal illnesses confronting the end of their lives. And it's still Simon, not LSL Simon, not LSD. First of all, most people don't even know what psilocybin is. It's actually the psychedelic compound in magic mushrooms. But LSD, you know, LSD. Ooh, everyone's scared of LSD. It has terrible connotations. Timothy Leary, Ken Casey, you know, summer of love, blah, [00:13:00] blah, blah. Siliciden what's that? Nobody really knows that I, I can't spell it. I mean, yes, I'm dyslexic, but seriously, I wrote a whole book about this and I cannot spell silicide, but to saved my life, it was easier to get permission to study psilocybin and is a lot easier to get permission to give a psychedelic drug or any schedule one drug to someone who's dying anyway, so the studies were designed not because there's something unique about the depression at the end of life, but rather because that was the way that permission could be granted from the FDA and DEA.
Speaker 2:The results have been remarkable, really remarkable. [00:13:30] I know they're unprecedented. Michael calling radar. The New Yorker about a couple of articles can is coming out with a book. I said to Michael Dell, I wonder if it's okay that like, I'm, my book's coming out before yours. He's like, oh no, no baby. You go ahead and let's see what happens. First. Mine was constructed as this experiment and then it goes off into the research, into the law. I mean, I, I talk, I spent a lot of time talking about the law and the war on drugs and I want to talk about that. Let's talk about the, the, the racism. I mean, there's never been a war on drugs that hasn't been race based in this country. It's all, I think [00:14:00] the best way to think of the war on drugs as it is a warm people of color.
Speaker 2:The very first drug law in the United States was targeted at Chinese opium dens. At that point in time. There were a lot of people using opium, but the typical opium user was a white southern woman who tippled from her laudanum bottle all day long. That's opium mixed with alcohol. People gave opium to their babies to make them sleep. You know, there are all of these medicines, patent medicines that were opium based, but the law targeted Chinese immigrants in opium dens and it was really about [00:14:30] them. It wasn't about the opium per se. If you're of, you know, a wave of immigration, it's, it's characterized as, you know, fear that they'll rape white women, but it really is just, it's financial panic as xenophobia. Marijuana got tied closely to Mexican Americans. And you can see all this rhetoric at the time in the Hearst newspapers about how marijuana crazed were raping white women.
Speaker 2:Alcohol is closely correlated with sexual violence in our culture but not marijuana. So again, cocaine [00:15:00] gets tied to African American communities, not because they used cocaine more, absolutely not, but it's a way to target and link and criminalize you're, there were these myths that cocaine use made African-Americans, although of course at the time they said Negroes immune to lower caliber bullets. So somehow, you know, snorting some cocaine would make a person immune to a bullet. And so that's why police departments, at least the theory is to police departments use higher caliber guns. That became the standard. So again, and [00:15:30] again, you see the war on drug tied to criminalizing communities, communities of color. And the latest iteration of this, which began in the 60s and which I thought was ending or at least drawing to a pope full close, was this rabid began with Nixon, went through Reagan, amped up with Clinton.
Speaker 2:Let's be very clear targeting of communities of color with draconian prison sentences for drug crimes. So in a world where white people [00:16:00] use drugs more than people of color, you had far more people of color being arrested and incarcerated. You know, in America you go to jail for longer for marijuana in some cases, then you go to jail for murder in Europe, I mean our drug laws are out of control and we saw this massive increase in incarceration rates as a result of people of color, but also women suddenly, you know, women have had very rarely been incarcerated. The numbers were very low because women don't commit violent crimes. There's one genetic marker that you can pretty much use to evaluate [00:16:30] the likelihood of somebody committed and violent crime. And it is the y chromosome. The population of women in prison increased dramatically because of all these drug laws in these mandatory minimum sentences.
Speaker 2:And I thought we had started to understand that, you know, across party boundaries, I've, I've had conversations with Senator Orrin Hatch about the injustices of the mandatory minimum sentences and the over incarceration rate. But with the election of Donald Trump in this, most schizophrenia of elections were, on the one hand, there are a bunch [00:17:00] of states that decriminalized marijuana for recreational use. Marijuana is a schedule one drug. At the same time, we elected Donald Trump who put a as attorney general, the most retrograde, racist, malevolent, incompetent, cruel and vicious white supremacist. He says he's going to go after marijuana. Yeah, that's what he's going to do. If I were in the legal cannabis business, I would be terrified to ask you about that. We don't really know yet what you're going [00:17:30] to die or what about those clinical trials that we were just tying back? Will they be shut down?
Speaker 2:I don't know. I don't know if they're flying under the radar enough. If they have DEA, you know the results that you know the subjects are white. By and large, people are much more inclined to be sympathetic when the subjects are white. I don't know. But here's, I do know the United States has imposed its drug policy on the world through a very aggressive campaign that involved pox, Americana treaties and a kind of putative moral [00:18:00] leadership. So we've dictated to south and Central America. We've dictated to Europe. So when England for example, began a very small but very, very effective heroin distribution program that cut overdose rates, cut crime, and also incidentally got people off heroin. But the United States put so much pressure on the British government that they shut that program down. All the people that participate in that program, most of them went on to die.
Speaker 2:So we've managed to impose our draconian prohibitionist view of drugs on the world. But the only benefit that I can see [00:18:30] to having a Cheeto, dusted mad man is our president, is that we have no moral authority. We have no claim to moral authority. Portugal, which decriminalized drugs is not going to pay any attention to a Donald Trump said the American war on drugs has destroyed Latin America. In rich, the cartels, Columbia for a long time was a country that was simply controlled by more in cartels and people lived in this kind of state of incarceration and terror [00:19:00] and this was all caused by the United States war on drugs and now countries have started to reject it. And I think that that is the one benefit of having this America first platform is that the rest of the world can go on and do good cause we haven't used our moral authority very well.
Speaker 2:We spend so much money on this war on drugs like up to a trillion now or something. This lunatic for what drugs are cheaper and easier to get, which tells you that they're coming into the country more often. You're not winning a war if drugs are easier to get. You know, LSD is a non-addictive [00:19:30] drug in the entire history of LSD usage. There are two cases, human fatalities that have been attributed to LSD and those are actually suspect. So basically there's no fatal dose of Ellis, no addiction, no addiction. But you know what's more dangerous right now is that we have a situation where we have an opioid crisis in this country. Many of the states that voted so vigorously in favor of Donald Trump are littered with bodies of people dying from opioid addiction, and that is a direct result of the failed war on drugs.
Speaker 2:If [00:20:00] you want to treat people and save people's lives, you have to have a harm reduction approach to drug addiction. Not at not a prohibitionist approach. You have to get in there and provide services and help and safe injection sites and safe drugs. This is typically what happens. Someone gets a prescription for O for Oxycontin, for say back pain for which it is not useful. They take it, they take it, they take it, they get addicted. Then their doctor says, well you can have any of oxycontin anymore cause you're an addict. And then they don't have any oxycontin. [00:20:30] So they go out on the street and maybe first they try to buy some pills and they get some and, but eventually pills are hard to find. They're harder to buy. They're more expensive, you know, it's cheap heroin deep, you know, it's fast, heroin's fast, then their heroin addict, and then they're criminalized.
Speaker 2:Then they're criminalized. Then they're in the underground market. Then there's no FDA checking the quality of their drugs, and now heroin is quite often cut with much stronger fentanyl, hundreds of times stronger, and people are overdosing because they take an amount of drugs that they, [00:21:00] they think is a heroin, but it actually turns out to be fentanyl. It is a white epidemic in many ways. There are many, many white victims. Certainly the vast majority, maybe Jeff sessions will be willing to listen to some reason. Although again, this is a man who said that no good person has ever smoked pot. This is a man who made a quote unquote joke about the KKK, which he said he was until they, he found out I had smoked. He went there. He was fine with them until he found out they smoked pot. I wanted to ask you about how you approach drugs in your family, but you used the term harm reduction.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yeah. [00:21:30] So we have, that may be the most radical thing in my book, not the taking of the LSD. I have four kids who range in age from 13 to 22 so these are our rules. We don't lie to our children about drugs ever. And they know we never lie to them. We don't allow others to lie to them. So when they are given misinformation in school programs, school programs on dare, which for many, many years taught all of this ridiculous and misinformation, it's now been improved. But you know, it basically said to kids, you know, marijuana will kill you. And then a kid will hear that message and [00:22:00] then think of their cousin who's a freshman at Yale and an ace student and a wake and bake smoker. And then they reject the whole message of dare. But anyway, they're better now. But like we educate our kids, we inundate them with information and then we have some very specific rules when it comes to pop.
Speaker 2:For example, we talk a lot about the effects of marijuana on the adolescent brain. I think there's compelling evidence that the, that that that is not great that it, it does cause damage to developing brains in particular. But we are realistic. They live in Berkeley. There's no way they're going to wait till [00:22:30] their frontal lobe is fully formed before they smoke pot. So after much negotiation, we reached the agreement that nobody could smoke pot. So there were 15 only on the weekends. And if your grades drop at all, you are not only grounded but I will drug test you and you get your drug tests from Amazon, right? Yes. I can test my kids urine. I buy your intestines. I tested my LSD from a kit that I bought on Amazon. Basically I have a supply cabinet in my house that's full of MTMA testing kits.
Speaker 2:Cause MTMA is the drug that I'm most concerned [00:23:00] with right now. It, it causes your body to overheat and if you have heart issues or high blood pressure, it's, you shouldn't be taking it. Basically the stupidest place to do it is like in the desert while dancing. Yes. Or at a rate where there's some thousands of people and you don't want your body temperature to be raised. And it also does this peculiar thing. It makes me more susceptible to water toxicity. What people are selling is MTMA isn't, most of the time kids will buy drugs and they'll think they're buying Molly. And it turns out that they're buying something much more toxic. So my daughter's a student at Wesleyan University and [00:23:30] half, 11 kids, I think ended up in the Er having taken something they thought was m DMA that turned out to be a synthetic called Ab Fubu, NACA Spice or k two.
Speaker 2:And it was very toxic. And one of them had to be intubated and defibrillated before he, um, and he, he survived thankfully. So I keep testing kids in my cabinet and I say to my kids, those are there, if you ever are inclined to take a pill and put it in your body, first you have to test it to make sure that what you're taking is what you think you're taking because it is not safe to [00:24:00] just, and this has been a success in your household. Yes, and and in fact there have been instances where pills were people, not my own children, but others have taken a testing kit and then reported to me that it was not in fact what they thought it was threw it away. I count that as a life save. If your kid ever overdoses on heroin year, will you want your kid to be around my kid?
Speaker 2:Because if your kids around a kid who has him had this kind of harm reduction education, what they're probably going to do is throw them in the bath tub with some cold water, maybe dump them in the parking lot of [00:24:30] an er and they're going to overdose and die. My kids, they know exactly what to do. They make two phone calls, they call nine one one and they say, comment with Narcan. Now we have a heroin overdose and that can cure an overdose instantaneously and they call mommy and mommy comes and deals with the legal consequences. Your last book, love and treasure was about the Holocaust. There is a character in your memoir about your microdosing Laszlo, who I think you met when you were working on love and treasure. Yes, that's such a beautiful [00:25:00] story. So allowing lowered design, his real name is a holocaust survivor, a Hungarian holocaust survivor who became very wealthy in America.
Speaker 2:Very problematic relationships, difficult relationships. I'm very depressed and he went on a an Iowaska journey until I met Lazo. I, I never understood the appeal of Iowasca, but Laszlo had this incredible experience. He went to Latin America, I don't know where he's okay, but he had a guide and they had a guide and it was all very safe. So [00:25:30] his father died in the Holocaust. He and his mother survived and he had always felt this sense of, of shame and guilt for having survived. And in a way was angry the way his child was angry at his father for not having said because saying goodbye to him and had felt, even though he knew his way, he wasn't abandoned, that his father was murdered by the Arrow cross in the Hungarian fascists. He still felt the sense of, you know, a child's feeling of abandonment.
Speaker 2:And he spoke to his father and he had this incredible spiritual experience that resolve that [00:26:00] pain for him. To this day I became obsessed with this idea of like, did you really speak to your father or is it saw in your head? I mean, and when I was talking to researchers about this, they would always say to me, why is that the question you're asking? I mean, isn't the interesting question that this experience resolved his pain and yet you're obsessed with whether it was real or not, and what do you even mean by real? And that's when you know, it's like, look at the results instead. I have high hopes. I think micro-dosing is kind of, it's like training wheels, right? [00:26:30] I mean microdosing for those of us who are not interested in tripping, we're talking about using a medication, the way people use antianxiety medications, but it's a medication that's actually much safer.
Speaker 2:Say yes and less addictive my, but it's not an option. And that's the sad thing, right? And my message for this book is we need decriminalization. And we need research. And first the research, let's do the microdose study at the University of South Carolina. Mike met Hoffer's doing research on MTMA and PTSD with patients who have treatment resistant PTSD [00:27:00] and he has had astonishing results, which makes sense, right? MTMA is a drug that works on memory. It disconnects traumatic memories from the trauma so that you can explore the memory without the the traumatic feelings associated with it. And instead from a place of love and support, empathy, empathy, the MTMA research has the tentative preliminary support of the VA because they know that soldiers are committing suicide at astronomical rates and they have to do something. So my hope [00:27:30] is that the Pentagon and the VA will look at this research and say, we can't afford not to continue this.
Speaker 2:You know, my husband and I have used MTMA at the suggestion of Sasha and an Shogun to Sasha was, it was a chemist, a local Berkeley chemist who was famous for bio as saying different drugs or synthesizing drugs and then taking them on him to himself to sort of assess their facts. And though he wasn't the first person to synthesize MTMA that honor goes to Merck. He was one of the first people to try it on himself. [00:28:00] But, um, my husband and I have used MGMA as a marital therapy tool, which is what we would, and it was initially used as, as a therapeutic tool and it's very profound and very effective and it allows us to sort of discuss the problems of our, in our relationship in a supportive and loving way. So I've been doing a lot events around the country and at every event there are a bunch of people come up and tell me they're microdosing and they say it loud and they say it proud and they're not ashamed and they're micro-dosing with LSD or psilocybin.
Speaker 2:And that's great. And then there are a bunch of people who come up to me and they asked to speak to me privately [00:28:30] and they confess with great shame and embarrassment that they have a mental illness. And the idea that in our society, you don't need to be ashamed about using illegal drugs, but you need to be ashamed about being mentally ill. That's heartbreaking. And that's something we need to change. So that's one of the things that I as a person with a mental illness feel like it is my job to be public because this is not something to be ashamed of and I won't allow others to experience that shame. [00:29:00] Okay. Running out of time and I wanted to ask you, what is next on your plate? The Vallejo novel to my publisher, I'm working on a TV show that it's based on a true story but it's an it's narrative.
Speaker 2:It's not documentary and it's basically about why we don't believe women who have been raped even when they do everything right and I'm working on another TV show about the first women combat soldiers in a legal combat soldiers in United States military history team, lioness in the Iraq war and because I feel like now for the next [00:29:30] four to eight to forever years, the work that I do has to have meaning and it has to have greater purpose and I'm trying to figure out what that means for me right now. If somebody has a about your book, they can go to our website, which is ILR, waldmann.com and there's lots of resources there. There's lots of articles about the research, and I have lots of resources for people with mental health issues, and I have lots of articles about the drug war, all sorts of things. Twitter, Facebook, email, and I'm easy to reach. [00:30:00] That was, I yell at Waldmann, novelist, SAS, former federal public defender and criminal defense lawyer. We'd been talking about her new book, a really good day. How microdosing made a mega difference in my mood, my marriage, and my life. You've been listening to method to the madness. We'll be back next Friday.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
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