Acute Mood-Elevating Properties of Microdosed Lysergic Acid Diethylamide in Healthy Volunteers: A Home-Administered Randomized Controlled Trial.

Abstract

Microdosing psychedelic drugs is a widespread social phenomenon with diverse benefits claimed for mood and cognition. Randomized controlled trials have failed to support these claims, but the laboratory-based dosing in trials conducted to date may have limited ecological validity. Healthy male volunteers were randomized into lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) (n = 40) and placebo (n = 40) groups and received 14 doses of either 10 μg LSD or an inactive placebo every 3 days for 6 weeks. First doses were given in a supervised laboratory setting, with other doses self-administered in a naturalistic setting. Results of safety data, blinding, daily questionnaires, expectancy, and pre-/postintervention psychometrics and cognitive tasks are presented here. The most notable reported adverse event was treatment-related anxiety, which prompted the withdrawal of 4 participants from the LSD group. Daily questionnaires showed credible evidence (>99% posterior probability) of improved ratings of creativity, connectedness, energy, happiness, irritability, and wellness on dose days compared with nondose days, and these effects remained when controlling for preintervention expectancy. No questionnaire or cognitive task showed a credible change between baseline and 6-week assessment time points. Microdosing LSD appears to be relatively safe in healthy adult men, notwithstanding a risk of anxiety. While microdosing elicited transient increases in scales associated with mood-elevating effects, it was not sufficient to promote enduring changes to overall mood or cognition in healthy adults. Future microdosing trials in clinical populations will require the use of active placebos to control for placebo effects and dose titration to adjust for interindividual variability in drug response.

In the evidence

This study is part of the evidence base for a synthesis in the library. Here is how each one recorded it.

• State of the evidence: LSD and microdosing ↕Mixed

  Microdosing LSD (10 μg every 3 days for 6 weeks) produced transient mood-elevating effects on dose days but no credible change in overall mood or cognition between baseline and 6-week assessment.

  Synthesized October 22, 2026

Comparable studies

Other randomized controlled trials on LSD and microdosing, most cited first.