Microdosing Research Collaboration

Dear friends,


Help us finalize the world's 1st round of placebo-controlled microdosing studies in Amsterdam!


What is microdosing? 
To microdose is to consume a tiny amount of a psychedelic substance (around 1/10th of a recreational dose) to boost mood and performance. The trend has become incredibly popular amongst professionals in creative industries (esp. Silicon Valley) and among those seeking alternative treatments for depression, anxiety, and ADHD. However, as media headlines increasingly hype the use of microdosing, we lack the scientific evidence to support these anecdotal claims.


Why do we care & what are we doing?
Our mission as the Psychedelic Society of the Netherlands is to advocate for responsible and well-informed use of psychedelics.  Unfortunately, research on these substances is still rare - stigma continues to pervade in academic and funding institutions.  With microdosing becoming ever more popular and anecdotal reports suggesting a high treatment potential for various mental disorders, we wish to introduce open discussion and collaboration between the psychedelic and scientific communities. Thus, we have decided to team up with several clinical and cognitive researchers, microdosing.nl, and magictruffles.com to facilitate a series of microdosing trials. These trials will allow us to gain a basic understanding of microdosing effects. Our long term goal is to organize clinical trials with populations suffering from depression and anxiety. 



Our previous work: 
This is not our first scientific collaboration. Together with researchers from Leiden University, we found a preliminary evidence that microdosing may enhance cognition by boosting creativity: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/08/08/384412


Our new collaborative project will include:
- a placebo control group
- a double-blind design 
- longitudinal data (1 month of dosing)
- measures of cognitive domains.
- measures of mental health and well-being.  
- electroencephalography (EEG) 


We aim to answer 3 questions:
- does microdosing actually improve work performance and mental health?
- does microdosing have any negative consequences on these domains?
- does microdosing influence brain frequencies? 

We aim to answer these questions on both a short and longer term scale (more about project here: https://www.facebook.com/events/2228920477389648/).  Currently we are screening applicants, so if you are interested please don't hesitate to apply!

Because we have already received so many heartwarming emails from enthusiastic people who want to participate, this project is becoming bigger than expected (over 200 participants)! This is great because the more participants we have, the stronger the results become. Thus, we would like to accommodate as many participants as possible, but this also means we have more costs. 


Costs include:
- Rent for workshop and lab spaces = €2500
- Workshop materials and refreshments = €500
- Travel costs of participants/volunteers who can not afford it = €2000

Rewards for donation: (to claim your reward, please send an email to [email redacted])
- for donations of €20 or more: you will receive a personalized 'thank you' letter or a thank you Christmas letter that you can give to a loved one. This will state that you have supported psychedelic research. 
- for donations of €200 or more: your name, or the name of someone you choose, will be stated under acknowledgements on one of the resulting scientific articles. Please send 


Would you like to support this movement?
If you care about psychedelic research and would like to see our projects succeed, please support us via donation, share this post, and/or join us as a participant :) 
Our deadline for fund collection is Februrary 15th!

Donation via 
- http://www.psychedelicsocietynl.org/support/

- IDEAL quick link: https://bunq.me/PsychSocNL?fbclid=IwAR38YDrO-exlG72UzuyyFYEvJpCEGGXAKc9Rd4JpavfuxsiGRjJ6aK3lTdU





Special thanks to our collaborators:
- MagicTruffles.com
- Microdosing.nl
- Tom and Rachel Ritchford 
- University researchers: Luisa Prochazkova's group at Leiden University, more to come
- and most importantly all of you participants, donators, and volunteers!


Let's work together to make these dream project come true! 


You are the best! Thank you :)