How are people using psychedelics out in the world?: 5 Questions for Unlimited Sciences researcher Matthew X. Lowe

Lowe discusses Unlimited Sciences' research and how the organization’s naturalistic studies contribute to our understanding of psychedelic use.

Climbing the ladder of academia is brutally competitive, so when cognitive scientist Matthew X. Lowe landed the exact postdoctoral position at MIT he’d wanted, he thought he should be happy. Instead, he felt depressed, and realized he was experiencing what’s called “the arrival fallacy,” the belief that achieving a specific goal would lead to lifelong happiness. To cope, Lowe tried Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and antidepressants, but it was his first experience with psilocybin that helped him break out of the thought patterns he’d settled into. 

Lowe went on to become the research director of Stanford University’s Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience Laboratory. As he continued his research, he became more interested in incorporating psychedelics into his work, and ultimately left academia to join Unlimited Sciences, a non-profit research organization of which Lowe is now the executive director and chief scientific officer. In an industry dominated by company-sponsored clinical trials, the group studies populations few others do: they’ve published research on naturalistic psilocybin use, meaning how people take the drugs outside formal research settings. They’re also studying ayahuasca use in immigrants and refugees and in the LGBTQ+ community, and they recently launched a Psychedelic Info Line to provide evidence-based information about psychedelics to callers. The Microdose spoke with Lowe about Unlimited’s work and how the organization’s naturalistic studies contribute to our understanding of psychedelics use. 

Why do you think it is important to study underrepresented groups?

The vast majority of psychedelics research studies particular populations: mostly Caucasian men. As a result, particular perspectives are emerging from that work, and that doesn't allow us to get at how people are using psychedelics in the real world across different groups. We're also failing to get Indigenous perspectives in the field; people talk about the “psychedelic renaissance” but, of course, psychedelics have been around for thousands of years, and this “renaissance” stems from ancient stories and data that has been passed down for generations and generations. Those voices just aren't being heard in clinical research, so there is a need for us to seek different sources of information to tap into a more diverse population. 

When Maleek Asfeer first approached us about studying ayahuasca in immigrants and refugees, he said to us that his community of Middle East and North African individuals have never had their voices represented in psychedelic science. In the study they participated in an ayahuasca ceremony and many previously had no idea of the benefits they could potentially get from psychedelic medicine. And that was really the genesis of why we took that approach. We’re now launching a project to investigate health outcomes in a community of individuals who identify as LGBTQ+. Historically, the queer community has not only faced underrepresentation in psychedelic science, but it's also been misrepresented. In the 50s and 60s there were prominent leaders in psychedelics, like Timothy Leary and Stanislav Grof, who specifically proposed that psychedelics could be used in conversion therapy. So not only is there this convoluted history, where psychedelics have been used as a weapon in the queer community, but there's also a gap in research on how psychedelics are currently used in the queer community, despite the fact that data suggests that the queer community, on average, use more psychedelics than the heterosexual community. 

Why do naturalistic research?

Until recently, almost all use of psychedelics was happening in the real world in uncontrolled settings without particular safeguards in place. People use psychedelics in their homes, outdoors, recreationally, with friends in group settings. To actually understand how people are using psychedelics and the effects of psychedelics in the real world, we have to use naturalistic investigation methods: observing individuals in their natural environments and understanding how they're actually using psychedelics. That also gives us a deeper understanding of the different substances involved; there are over 200 different species of psilocybin. Many of them have different potencies and people use different ingestion methods. We're just not able to get that diversity in clinical research. 

Do you think naturalistic research should inform policy?

I think it has massive implications for legislation. We should be making changes that are best designed to take our communities into account, and we can't make those decisions unless we understand how our communities are actually using substances. There’s a pivotal gap in our understanding of psychedelics right now— so much of decriminalization efforts are oriented towards “natural psychedelics” like psilocybin, and yet the vast majority of research is occurring with synthetic derivatives. That means we don't necessarily understand what we’re decriminalizing, and how people are using it. We're simply not going to get that information from strictly clinical research. Right now, we just don't have the diversity and variety of information we need to make informed decisions about regulations of plant-based therapies. There's a need to understand this so we can develop services dedicated to harm mitigation and for lowering potentially adverse risks that individuals may experience. 

Are you all seeing any interesting trends on how people are using psychedelics in the data you’ve collected so far?

We’ve found that, on average, people responding to our study had significant experience with psilocybin as well as other psychedelics. Nearly 70 percent of individuals in the study were using psilocybin at home, and a few used it in a religious or spiritual setting, or a recreational public place like a concert. A lot of people — 43 percent — also reported using psilocybin alone.

People also said they felt they were still experiencing benefits from using psychedelics after use, and they reported very low levels of adverse reactions. That's one thing we've heard in the news and in other research studies: that psilocybin is an incredibly safe drug that is well tolerated, but that it has the potential for adverse reactions. For the most part, our findings, based on a naturalistic sample of individuals in the real world, show that the drug has a very good safety profile with very low rates of acute adverse reactions as well as long term adverse reactions. That was very encouraging to see — that these individuals using psychedelics repeatedly and at home, sometimes even by themselves, are not reporting high levels of adverse effects. For individuals who don't necessarily have access to therapeutic programs or clinical research, that could be good news.

How does a nonprofit research group like yours get funding? 

Funding has been incredibly difficult and we are not well funded. A lot of our projects have been self-funded, or funded through small contributions from donors. We also have had a significant contribution of volunteer hours; incredible individuals have given their time to these projects. And we've been fortunate to collaborate with some really fantastic researchers from Johns Hopkins University, Harvard, MIT, and many other institutions. In order to pay for costs like Institutional Review Board applications, publication fees, and travel associated with disseminating findings, we have received some private funding through donors.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.