Many Australians start their working day with a strong hit of caffeine.
Sam, a 32-year-old film maker, sometimes prefers to take a small amount of LSD instead.
"It's like having a strong cup of coffee that last[s] the whole day without the crash," he says.
Sam's not alone. In Australia and around the world, there's been increased interest in people experimenting with tiny doses of illegal drugs in the hope of improving their productivity, creativity and focus at work.
It's a practice known as microdosing.
It involves taking small amounts of psychedelic substances, such as LSD or psilocybin, on a regular basis, explains Vince Polito, cognitive psychologist and senior research fellow at Macquarie University.
Dr Polito is among the academics leading microdosing research in Australia.
"People vary in how often they do it, but ... people tend to microdose a couple of times a week," Dr Polito tells ABC RN's This Working Life.
"It's a completely different ballpark to the type of experience that you might typically associate with psychedelics. People are taking doses that are almost imperceptible."
He says the average Australian microdosing may be "a bit older than what you would expect".
Dr Polito's research published in 2019 tracked 98 people who practised microdosing.
"The average age was mid-30s. They were fairly well-educated, and about 75 per cent had some form of tertiary education, and roughly 70 per cent were either working or studying," he says.
"The sort of broad picture that we got was of people who were microdosing [as] pretty normal members of society."
Dr Polito says the potential negative impacts of prolonged use are still unknown, as more long-term research needs to be done in this area.
Sam, who also works as a university lecturer, says microdosing allows him to drop into a "deep, flow-like state" with his work.
He says creativity is "a big part of my work" and something he can access "a lot more easily with the LSD".
"So rather than having to sort of stick it out for six hours and getting distracted, I [can] drop in for two hours in really deep work and accomplish more than I could otherwise."
Photographer and retail worker Trina, aged 51, has also felt an improvement in her productivity at work since she began microdosing with psilocybin six months ago.
"My productivity was sort of heightened [while microdosing] ... because I was processing ideas quite quickly and had this impatience to bring them to fruition," she says.
"Something that it might take me [about] three hours to put together and photograph would probably take me half the time."
But she's hesitant to mention it to anyone in her workplace.
"I just have a sense with the kind of … people that I work with that they wouldn't really understand what it was, and they probably would just think that I'm taking drugs," she says.
Trina also chooses to microdose on the days when she doesn't have too much interaction with other colleagues and has more time to herself.
"I think that on the days that I dose and I'm not [having more time to myself], I can actually get quite scattered. Especially if I've got people coming up to me all the time, because there is a level of hypersensitivity," she says.
'Came out of nowhere'
There's still not a great deal of scientific research on how effective microdosing is at improving output in the workplace.
So why the surge in interest in psychedelics?
"The idea of microdosing came out of nowhere", Dr Polito says.
"It's not something that's been around for a very long time at all really."
In the 1970s, when psychedelics were gaining attention in the west, they "were very interesting to scientists and psychologists and psychiatrists, and there were very many studies at the start", Dr Polito says.
But that all stopped when psychedelics became prohibited drugs in the USA in 1973.
"In the last couple of decades, though, people have started to explore the potential of these substances as treatments, mainly for psychiatric conditions," he says.
He says the first mention of microdosing was in James Fadiman's 2011 book The Psychelic Explorer's Guide. Fadiman was involved in some of the early research on psychedelics.
"It just had one small section where he talked about some reports of people he knew who were taking psychedelics in low doses in this way and had found it to be quite beneficial," Dr Polito says.
Then in 2015, there was a widely read Rolling Stone article that reported on people microdosing in Silicon Valley.
Dr Polito says the renewed interest in psychedelics is leading to interesting findings — though he says more research is needed.
"Looking at them as treatments for depression, anxiety, PTSD, those sorts of things ... although the research is in its early days, it's looking really promising.
"There's really clear indications that people report that microdosing helps with things like attention and focus and creativity," he says.
"But the evidence about whether there really is a pharmacological effect that causes those changes is much less clear."
Mixed experiences
Microdosing doesn't work well for everyone.
"A lot of people say that it does make them feel more attentive and focused," Dr Polito says.
"But there is a minority of people that say it absolutely seems to have the opposite effect and they feel more distracted or scatterbrained, and that it doesn't seem like it's something that would in any way help them with working life," he says.
There have been more than 30 microdosing studies around the world recently, he says, but the findings are mixed.
"It's kind of tricky to do microdosing studies because this is an illegal substance, meaning that there [are] a lot of procedures that you need to follow ... to be able to administer these substances to people," he says.
"So, to do a really rigorous study where people take many doses and then you monitor the effects takes quite a lot of expense and resources and effort. So there really haven't been any … controlled studies of the long-term effects of microdosing."
Dr Polito believes, in some respects, we should consider microdosing like any other kind of performance-enhancing substance.
"Maybe it is something that at least some people could get benefit from, but I think there's interesting ethical questions about whether that is something that we should encourage."
"There's certainly some backlash within the psychedelic community around the idea of microdosing, turning psychedelics into something that is like performance enhancing, a tool of capitalism, basically. And I think there's some really important elements to that critique."
These are individuals' experiences only and are not intended as medical advice. You should see a qualified medical practitioner who knows your medical history.
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