Madeline, a tall, almost willowy, woman in her early thirties, lives in Manhattan. Her report fills in some of her different occupations. She is married and has a four-year-old child.

As the subway rumbles along toward downtown, my observation of the passengers around me is that they put utter poison into their bodies. A woman in a camel-colored suit and white gym shoes uses a plastic knife to spread cream cheese on a giant bagel, washing it all down with gulps of soda. A few others enjoy fast-food breakfasts; enough sandwiches and hash browns are withdrawn from steamy paper sacks to scent the entire car with fryer oil. I wonder for a moment about what these people would think about my peculiar breakfast ritual -- 20 micrograms of LSD chased a bit later by green juice made from juied cucumbers, sunflower sprouts, and pea greens.

I arrive at my temporary office where I'm on a seven-week contract editing film. The documentary I'm working on has a budget of nearly nine hundred thousand dollars and will air on the second best network. My job is to screen nearly fifty hours of historical footage and knit it together into a story arc. I snip the footage down to its most essential bits, add narration notes, and harves sound bites. I feel deeply connected to my work, focused and in the flow. I barely come up for air for the next five hours because I am so sincerely enjoying what I'm doing. I laugh aloud and occasionally cry at poignant moments. I love my work. Although I'm not hungry and don't feel in need of a beak, I known that it is healthy to tak one. Onc outside, the world is too bright, even with my sunglasses on. I have very large blue eyes and naturally large pupils, and anything above 10 micrograms of LSD makes them as big as saucers.

After a six-block walk, I feel hungry, and I sit my lunchbox and thermos on a ledge at my favorite park. I begin Chinese exercises and deep breathing. The movement feels wonderful, and I feel so healthy and connected to my body that I begin to tear up for a second and enjoy a little laugh that can only be described as a release of joy and gratitude. I plan a longer than average workday today and will skip the gym, so this stolen moment of movement and sunshine is essential. My lunch is a thermos of mild green tea and four small salads that I made a day earlier. One is seaweed with sesame seeds, another chickpeas, another quinoa, and the last is fruit with coconut and pecans. Exquisitely nourished, I head back to my office for another four-hour stretch.

Sub-doses of 10 to 20 micrograms allow me to increase my focus, open my heart, and achieve breakthrough results while remaining integrated within my routine. While a full dose equires that I carefully plan my surroundings, onn a sub-dose I am fully able to navigate all manner of logistics and social ineractions. I would venture to say that my wit, response time, and visual and mental acuity seem greater than normal on it. I utilize a sub-dose about six days each month and sometimes more often if I am engrossed in a project requiring extraordinary focus. This has been my practice for more than ten years, and it has facilitated my success working in mainstream and independent media, staff-level positions in government and publishing dozens of pieces journalistic work.

I am not saying that I wouldn't have done any of this without LSD, but I am saying that I wouldn't have done all of this without it. The practice of sub-dosing transforms my work from being work to being creative play.

I'm a naturally persuasive person able to enlist others in my vision but never more so than when I am enhanced by a sub-dose. Therefore, I find it essential to my work as a grant writer and coalition builder to open myself in this way. One of my standard responses to the question "How are you doing? from a colleague is to reply that I am doing "soaringly well." It really sums up what it feels like to perform my work while sub-dosing: it's somewhat like flying.

I had never heard of sub-dosing when I began doinng it. After a couple years of wonderful success with the practice, I met a friend of Terence McKenna's who, upon hearing about my practice, explained that he uses sub-doses too -- something he learned from McKenna. He explained that Albert Hofmann did the same thing, and that Mckenna told him that Hofmann believed that LSD sub-doses would hae gone on to be widely prescribed in much the same way as Ritalin, had it not been so harshly scheduled.

I played with big doses before I played with small ones. I experimented with 250 to 800 microgram doses and learned to surrender to their intensity. My experiences at these doses were profound, amazing, and fun, but ultimately, I couldn't bring too much back with me. I left super-high doses in the late nineties. Then I began to experiment with sub-doses. I don't drink alcohol because I find it a bit harsh and numbing, so I was looking for something to make me feel sparky and up at cocktail parties and networking events. I tried a few cups of coffee but I wasn't quite loose enough and I'd still get tired, so I bean trying small doses instead. I found that on sub-doses, I made more meaningful and lasting connections, and my own evolution seemed to accelerate, as if I were able to accomplish more living within the same span of time.

I wondered how sub-doses could be employed within my career and I began using them for bigger assignments and events. I also expanded my role within my own family during this time and became the one most often consulted. Following conversations with relatives and friends, they would report feeling truly seen. Within only a few months of discovering sub-doses, my skills as a listener and communicator had blossomed. Interestingly, a number of family members appointed me executor to their estates almost immediately after I began using sub-doses.

I find that 10 to 20 micrograms of LSD is both a stimulant and a calming agent at the same time. For me, the only challenge that remains with sub-doses is increased light sensitivity, which I mitigate by wearing sunglasses or dialing down the brightness of my computer screen. This minor inconvenience is certainly worth it to me, because when I'm enhanced, I feel more passionate. i feel more energized. I feel more focused and enlisted. I feel more.

I'm not completely comfortable with how little is known about the long-term effects of LSD and other drugs. I'm a healthy young woman, and I want to do only what is safe and smart for myself and my family, so I wish to know what th long-term effects of LSD use are. Albert Hofmann seemed perfectly sharp at 101 years old, and the friends I know who are twice my age and use LSD frequently are some of the most brilliant people I know. And I want the fear of criminalization removed from this field of research so that people like me will be willing to share their experiences openly and have their data quantified.