Microdoses: an inside journey
Microdoses: an inside journey
In the 1940s, scientists in Europe and the United States began investigating the therapeutic use of psychedelic substances. Something that indigenous peoples, in other ways, had already known about for a long time. After years of taboo and stigma, there is now renewed interest, especially in microdoses of mushrooms. What are they for? How do they work, and How are they used?
In the second episode of the second season of ‘Jardines y Laberintos’, we talk about these issues with Paola Lambertin, Bolivian photographer, psychonaut, and member of the collective WarMi Photo. Paola currently lives in Mexico, and for some years, she has been studying entheogens, sacred plants, and mushrooms.
“To overdose on mushrooms, you need to eat the equivalent of your weight,” says Lambertin. One of her research objectives is “to destigmatize mushrooms that are considered as a drug: they are in the classification of one of the drugs along with heroin.”
In the middle of the pandemic, going through a difficult personal situation, Lambertin came across psilocybe mushrooms and the possibility of treatment through microdoses. “A microdose corresponds to one-tenth of a recreational dose. It is like taking a vitamin. It has no hallucinogenic effects.” However, they do have effects on the neurotransmitters that are activated by psilocybin. In the long term, the therapeutic effect is impressive: as the Bolivian photographer points out, recent studies have recorded the beneficial impact of the so-called “hallucinogenic mushrooms” in treating depression, anxiety, stress, and trauma. For Lambertini it was such an impact that, since then, she has dedicated herself to learning and accompanying treatments with micro and macro doses.
“The first thing they teach you when you are working with entheogens is that nothing is going to cure you, that you are not going to cure anyone, that the substance does not cure anything,” the photographer points out. “The person and the desire to be well will cure them. So, these are simply substances that show them the way.”
She portrayed her experience in work ‘Hacia Adentro,’ part of the Warmi Photo collective project that received one of the ECO – Deconstruir la Mirada grants. “Learning to look at the legacy of violence and pain and deconstructing the emotions and ways of being that sustain them have been paths that entheogens have provided me with,” says Paola. “With them, I learned to look and feel differently.”
