In 2018, Brandon Goode was in his mid-20s, living in Denmark, and working for a pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk when he first started thinking about psychedelics. Now he's the founder of an called Houston, which allows users to track and reflect on their microdosing sessions.
Thank you Jane. A few quick thoughts: Instead of promoting this app with a veneer of criticality ("does microdosing work?" "what's different about your microdosing app"?), why not ask some bigger, more important questions that get to the company's motivations for doing this in the first place -- What data are they collecting, exactly, and what are they doing with it? Why do users need an app to do something they could easily do without? How does the company stand to benefit from pushing this app? Not that you would necessarily pose all these questions directly to Brandon, but you do the reader a disservice by not addressing the capitalist set and setting of the whole endeavor. These companies are not driven solely by benevolence. There is more going on. I would argue that if it's beyond the scope of this newsletter to even bring that up, then you shouldn't be promoting things like this at all.
("If the story about 'Clearlight Brand 'Microdose' LSD is true, then the origin of the term 'microdose' for very small amounts of LSD precedes all other uses of the term, e.g. in pharmacology [since 1995], in agriculture [since 2005] and by Fadiman [2011]."
---German psychiatrist Torsten Passie, in his 2019 book THE SCIENCE OF MICRODOSING PSYCHEDELICS. The book reproduces a page of the product insert for "Clearlight brand 'Microdose' LSD" that I wrote in the 1980s.)
If I had been arrested and convicted for the more than 400,000 microdoses I produced, I could have been sentenced to life in prison. (BTW, I am very, very much against capitalism. None of the microdoses I produced were sold. All of those that were distributed were given away.)
Thank you Jane. A few quick thoughts: Instead of promoting this app with a veneer of criticality ("does microdosing work?" "what's different about your microdosing app"?), why not ask some bigger, more important questions that get to the company's motivations for doing this in the first place -- What data are they collecting, exactly, and what are they doing with it? Why do users need an app to do something they could easily do without? How does the company stand to benefit from pushing this app? Not that you would necessarily pose all these questions directly to Brandon, but you do the reader a disservice by not addressing the capitalist set and setting of the whole endeavor. These companies are not driven solely by benevolence. There is more going on. I would argue that if it's beyond the scope of this newsletter to even bring that up, then you shouldn't be promoting things like this at all.
I am the inventor of the word "microdose". I think people should read what I have written here:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jdyf333/2075297284/
("If the story about 'Clearlight Brand 'Microdose' LSD is true, then the origin of the term 'microdose' for very small amounts of LSD precedes all other uses of the term, e.g. in pharmacology [since 1995], in agriculture [since 2005] and by Fadiman [2011]."
---German psychiatrist Torsten Passie, in his 2019 book THE SCIENCE OF MICRODOSING PSYCHEDELICS. The book reproduces a page of the product insert for "Clearlight brand 'Microdose' LSD" that I wrote in the 1980s.)
If I had been arrested and convicted for the more than 400,000 microdoses I produced, I could have been sentenced to life in prison. (BTW, I am very, very much against capitalism. None of the microdoses I produced were sold. All of those that were distributed were given away.)