JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Psychedelics have entered the mainstream in a big way, but how exactly are Americans using these substances in their daily lives? NPR's Will Stone reports there's new research out this week that is offering some clues.
WILL STONE, BYLINE: There's a lot we don't know about the public's psychoactive preferences. But two new reports suggests that magic mushrooms containing the compound psilocybin are now the most popular choice. Let's start with the report from the nonpartisan RAND Corporation. That estimates about 3% of the public - approximately 8 million adults - use psilocybin last year.
BEAU KILMER: The fact that it was so much larger than LSD or MDMA - that was a bit of a surprise.
STONE: Beau Kilmer with RAND says they surveyed about 4,000 adults.
KILMER: One interesting takeaway is that for everyone who said they had used psilocybin in the past year, roughly half of them said that the last time that they had used, they had microdosed.
STONE: There's no single definition of microdosing. But Kilmer says it tends to be in the range of one-tenth to one-twentieth of a full dose. The top reasons people gave for trying it - fun and social enjoyment, mental health and personal development. These results from RAND dovetail with another study published today in Jama Health Forum by epidemiologist Eric Leas and his team at the University of California San Diego.
ERIC LEAS: Microdosing has become a cultural phenomenon. One of the issues we've had is we have all these surveys that ask about substance use, but they don't ask about dosing.
STONE: Which is why Leas used Google search history to gauge public interest. He found microdosing-related searches grew by more than 1,000% between 2015 and 2023 and that, in recent years, interest in psilocybin outpaced LSD. Of course, search history cannot prove people are seeking out the drug. However, Leas says his lab has shown it can be a pretty reliable gauge of drug use, for example, with cannabis products.
LEAS: It's not perfect. It's a proxy measure, but it gives you a general sense in the absence of other measures what trends might be going on.
STONE: Drilling down further, Leas showed the uptick in internet queries on microdosing correlated with policy changes on psychedelics and cannabis.
LEAS: So where the more and more liberal the state got to substance use, the more microdosing interest you saw.
STONE: No surprise Oregon and Colorado top the list. Both have been on the leading edge of these changes. Deborah Hasin, an epidemiologist at Columbia University, welcomed the new research.
DEBORAH HASIN: We need better epidemiology, and that is for sure so that we really do know the extent of people's use, what circumstances they're using, how they got the drug and what they know about what they're even taking.
STONE: There's not yet much evidence about the risks and benefits of microdosing, especially in the case of psilocybin. Kilmer at RAND says the market for cannabis is very different than psychedelics, but he does see parallels to where cannabis was a decade ago.
KILMER: Now is the time for the federal government - do they want to potentially get involved and shape what these state markets look like? Or do they want to stand on the sidelines and watch kind of this creation of a patchwork?
STONE: Because whether it's a full trip or just a microdose, the public's fascination with psychedelics shows no signs of fading. Will Stone, NPR News.
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