UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Drug-craft On the configurations of psychedelic efficacies Mishra, S. Publication date 2020 Document Version Other version License Other Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Mishra, S. (2020). Drug-craft: On the configurations of psychedelic efficacies. General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:06 Oct 2021 Chapter 1 Dosing Creativity Besides alcohol, I don’t really use drugs and have little interest in them, but this microdosing – for work, being creative, for being focused and effective… its increased use by Silicon Valley professionals – it did catch my attention. You research drugs, what do you think about it? I would like to try it someday. (Informal conversation, Amsterdam 2017) This is what Jan said to me, on an afternoon at my research institute in Amsterdam, as we bumped into each other by the department’s coffee machine. Jan’s curiosity about microdosing is exemplary of a widespread narrative about psychedelics that I encountered often during my fieldwork. In this paradoxically,narrative, the byefficacy the impossibility of psychedelic to perceivesubstances their is effects,so extraordinary as “sub-perceptual that even minimal doses” doses– allow – defined, for a effects are said to be readily harvested to increase productivitybeneficial transformation. and enhance creativityThese almost in cognitive unnoticeable work through microdosing practices. As I proceeded to attributed to psychedelics, one of the major challenges itstudy posed the was beneficial about transformationshow to think ethnographically that are being 29 543935-L-bw-Mishra and attend to practices that reach far beyond a well-delineated community of practice. Pinning such a broad narrative down is not an easy task. It travels across different contexts – from psychedelic sciences to the worlds of business and medicine, from countercultures to academia and policy makers – and gets reproduced and transformed each time, with varying emphasis on what matters within a given context. To understand this, it is useful to begin with the popularity of the narrative that stimulated Jan to ask me my opinion by the department coffee machine. The main argument at its core is that small doses of psychedelics can increase creativity. As this argument spreads through the mainstream media, it comes to highlight one particular version of the efficacy of psychedelics. This is the version of microdosing told in the control rooms of Silicon Valley, the contemporary ascendant node that is funneling our networked world. Indeed, most of my informants would share with me articles they had found online or that had popped up in their social network feeds, recounting one or another variant of this story about the benefits of microdosing. Reaching powerful, respected, and authoritative outlets – and often thanks to the authority that Silicon Valley itself represents – this narrative has spread widely. It tells, as the Financial Times reports, of “how Silicon Valley rediscovered LSD - A new generation of San Franciscans believes the drug makes them more creative,” while simultaneously exploring it as a way to boost productivity and overcome mental health problems. It does so by weaving this story into the modern Promethean dream of ongoing heroic innovation. The popular bestseller Stealing Fire alludes to this when it dubs microdosing a “shortcut” to be used “to solve 30 543935-L-bw-Mishra Figure 1.1 How Silicon Valley rediscovered LSD (Kuchler 2017) critical challenges and outperform the competition” (Kotler and Wheal 2017; p. 6). Riding the hype of the “untapped” or “superhuman” potential that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs allegedly enroll, the attention that microdosing is receiving in the public sphere hinges upon its impact on creativity. The core argument around enhanced creativity has an added dimension: the possibilities that microdosing opens up for work and productivity, together with its beneficial effects onmood , are often linked, though less directly, to future potential uses of these drugs in biomedicine. The entanglement of creativity and mood with work and productivity in such narratives features a desire to make efficient use of psychedelics and to optimize human potential, thus capturing psychedelic creativity within the realm of modern Western rationality and its ramifications in post- Fordist capitalism. In other words, psychedelic drug efficacies in such narratives emerge at the intersections of very specific kinds of work (in particular, what is increasingly called cognitive labor), different logics around the use (or avoidance) of psychopharmaceuticals, 31 543935-L-bw-Mishra and experimentation with the possibility of improving one’s situation and surroundings. Despite this strong connection with the forms of capital that dominate the lives of many of the youth I focused on, this narrative is seductive: even with its dystopian twists, the Silicon Valley dream, its economic possibilities, and its peculiar projection as a global creative hub, are setting a trend. It is a heroic narrative that is inspiring the life trajectories of many – far beyond the borders of California. Even for those more critical of such framings and their representation in public discourse, the promise of enhancing attention, mood, and creativity – through the microdosing of psychedelics – is enticing. To all of this, add the fact that, as many of my Dutch-speaking informants told me, “even Dutch news is covering [microdosing] now!” This far-reaching discourse that spans science, popular media, counterculture, law, and professional productivity portrays microdosing as a practice with unique qualities, something that pushes the horizons of what may be considered acceptable non- medical, personal drug use. In this realm, microdosing comes to have a range of practitioners, from novices to extremely regimented, competent, and experienced users of psychedelic drugs. Additionally, those who may be averse to the use of (recreational/illegal/nonmedical) drugs, such as Jan, nevertheless feel compelled or at least interested. Nevertheless, if this potential does carry over from public discourse into personal practices, it does so with many deviations from the script of the articles that Jan and other informants read. This in turn raises the question of how to handle practices that travel along less clearly delimited or rigorously controlled structures, like the microdosing of psychedelics by users and their circulating anecdotes. One way is to build an infrastructure around these practices that 32 543935-L-bw-Mishra provides a more controlled examination of such scripts. Life scientists engaged in studying the health benefits of psychedelics have taken such practices onboard and, might I say, have creatively diversified their attempts to assess the circulating claims surrounding microdosing. This includes designing controlled clinical studies that incorporate innovative ways to test increased creativity and productivity beyond the existing psychological measures. Furthermore, in attending to the growing trend in collective user experimentation, researchers have designed “self-blinding”1 monitor-it-as-you-experiment microdosing studies, which include participants filling in questionnaires and performing tests at home or wherever they are. These studies have also turned their attention to understanding what might, for instance, be the long-term physiological negative impact of such regular intake of psychedelics (Kuypers et al. 2019). Although this approach might give relevant answers to the ways in which psychedelics function pharmacologically, it should not be confused as speaking to that which entirely defines what is relevant and at stake in the case of microdosing. It is my contention that the rapidly growing sphere of microdosing is rife with contrasting values that serve to provide relevance to such practices. These values serve a purpose that goes beyond what may be captured in an experimental proof. This is in line with the way in which historians of science and technology, such as Donna Haraway (in Nicholas Gane’s 2006 published interview with her), have articulated the relevance of knowledge-generating practices and the technologies they incorporate. Haraway defines such endeavors as something which “…re-does its participants. 1 See the remarkable work of the Beckley Foundation on getting https://beckleyfoundation.org/ amicrodosing-lsd/ scientific hold ).on the anecdotal giant that microdosing’s efficacy has become ( 33 543935-L-bw-Mishra It reaches into you and you aren’t the same afterwards. Technologies rearrange the world for purposes, but go beyond