From the Wall Street Journal's WSJ Magazine, February 7:
For a select group of moms in high-powered jobs, psilocybin has become the answer to a packed social and professional calendar with no time for hangovers
Kiana Anvaripour, a marketing executive in Los Angeles, has a rigorous weekday-morning routine. She drinks warm lemon water, dials into a high-intensity interval training class, and then gets her kids ready for school. Before she runs out the door for work, she eats a protein-rich breakfast and takes her supplements: turmeric, vitamin D and omega-3. She tops it all off with a capsule of psilocybin—the psychedelics you might know as magic mushrooms.
“I work hundreds of hours a week, and it helps my performance,” says Anvaripour, 42, who runs her own agency. “It allows me to be my best self.”
Anvaripour says she has been microdosing mushrooms for two years now, four days a week. She started after struggling with postpartum depression and menstrual mood swings. Back in her 20s, she’d had a terrible experience with shrooms, but now many of her friends and peers seemed to be doing them. The vibe felt different to her—not trippy but focused and productive.
“It was like an attitude adjustment, where things that would infuriate me, like missing a call, or whatever was going on in your busy day as a CEO, just wouldn’t,” Anvaripour says. “It’s mental clarity.”
Some Silicon Valley executives have spoken openly about taking psychedelics, as have A-list celebrities like Julia Roberts. Now working moms in elite enclaves are singing mushrooms’ praises. Though the psychedelic drug is classified as an illegal substance by federal law and in most states, restrictions have eased in some parts of the country, making the drugs easier to procure. Women in high-powered jobs say they are taking psilocybin to treat anxiety and depression, optimize work-life balance and ease career pressures.
“It’s a way to get reinvigorated with the repetitive components of your job,” says Jessica Girard, 34, an executive headhunter in Santa Barbara, Calif.
Girard, who runs a recruiting agency, takes a low dose of psilocybin on days when she has to read hundreds of resumes. She finds that “it completely shifts my perspective, adding a level of enthusiasm, creativity and engagement.”
For people like Girard, who takes her mushrooms in gummy form, the drug has become more sophisticated and sleek. It’s now often sold in smooth capsules or as well-packaged candy rather than dried fungus shoved into dime bags.
“It’s like if you were to take a happy Advil,” says Koehl Robinson, a 41-year-old wellness entrepreneur in L.A.’s Venice Beach neighborhood. She says she likes to microdose 30 minutes before she goes out, noting that she struggles with social anxiety in big groups.
“The second a woman is doing it, she talks to her friends about it,” Robinson says, adding that, to her, it feels like “out of every 10 women I talk to, eight are microdosing.”...
....MUCH MORE
"Honey, mommy's tripping right now so let's look at your artwork instead of the 'puter, okay?"
Bringing to mind one of the all-time great newspaper corrections, at the Financial Times:
CorrectionsFortunately for anyone who took the 1000-times-larger amount, President Carter (a bit of a micro-manager) is still alive...
Correction: LSD microdosing
August 11, 2017
• Drug microdosers use 10 microgrammes of LSD every three days, not 10 milligrammes as wrongly stated in an article in the Aug 12/13 FT Magazine.
