Welcome back to The Drop In, DoubleBlind’s newsletter serving up news, culture, and independent journalism about psychedelics straight to your inbox.

Today's story is about Danielle Nova — the founder of the Microdosing Facilitator Training and Executive Director of the San Francisco Psychedelic Society — and why, as 10 million Americans experiment with microdosing largely on their own, skilled guidance may matter more than most people think. You can find that story immediately below!

If you keep scrolling, you’ll also find stories about painter Mariela de la Paz, a deep dive into whether palo santo is endangered, and an essay about the intimacy shared between psychedelic friends.

Belated Beltane Wishes 🌸,
Mary Carreón
Editor-in-Chief

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Millions of Americans are microdosing psychedelics with little more than a Reddit thread to guide them. The Microdose Facilitator Training is designed to change that.

10 million people in the United States are microdosing psychedelics, according to a 2026 RAND survey. It’s probably safe to assume that the vast majority are going at it without a roadmap, given that there isn’t much in the way of definitive education on microdosing widely accessible to the masses. That means figuring out your dosage, how often to dose, what substances to consume, and whether microdosing is a good choice all fall on the individual to sort out.

That’s why people resort to Reddit threads for advice, take random guesses at dosage, and wonder why they feel nothing or too much or too anxious or too emotional, which ultimately leaves them feeling just weird enough not to stick with it. They are, as Danielle Nova puts it, treating microdosing as a magic pill. 

Nova is the founder of the Microdose Facilitator Training, a three-month live online certification program launching May 17, 2026, and she’s the Executive Director of the San Francisco Psychedelic Society. She believes psychedelics can interrupt stubborn patterns that keep us stuck and disempowered. After 15 years of severe substance abuse and cycling through psychiatric medications and dependency on opioids, Nova was existentially exhausted. She thought she was going to be addicted to substances and on a slew of medications for the duration of her life. But, plant medicine showed her a different path. For her, drinking ayahuasca and microdosing psychedelics were the turning point. 

"It wasn't just one session that transformed the addiction," she told DoubleBlind in an interview last fall. "It was a whole program that I created for myself, but it really interrupted that process of addiction. And I remember, after doing ayahuasca for the first time, she said [to me], 'I'm going to show you a new way.' I have like shivers sharing this. It was the first time that I could really believe that I could live life beyond addiction."

That experience laid the blueprint for what she’s built since. Nova’s spent years watching people approach microdosing with a similar passive expectation one would with an SSRI — take a pill, wait for it to work, rinse, repeat — and miss the point entirely. 

"A lot of times people say that it didn't work," Nova says. "Out of 99% of people who say they don't feel anything, if I ask them what their inner critic or ego was like that day, they almost always say, 'Oh, I didn't even know it was there. The volume turned down.' And to me that's a game changer."

At least part of this issue seems linguistic. The word most associated with microdosing is “subperceptual”, which many people, including the scientific field, have interpreted to mean the “threshold of feeling.” The term was coined by James Fadiman, Ph.D., who is widely known as the “Godfather of Microdosing,” and has since clarified that “subperceptual” was never meant to mean imperceptible.

"The word subperceptual was my mistake 12 years ago," Fadiman told DoubleBlind earlier this year. "What I was trying to say was that it shouldn't produce any of the high-dose effects at all. So we're now saying it's below ‘threshold.’" As in, the threshold of tripping. In other words, you should feel something. You shouldn’t see tracers or God or your co-workers' faces melting — but you should feel something. 

Lumeria’s Microdose Facilitator Training navigates the personal nuances that often go unaccounted for in clinical settings as part of its program. The program runs more than 24 live sessions each lasting two hours, with a faculty of 13 world-leading experts, including Fadiman and Dr. Conor Murray, a neuroscientist at UCLA. It covers neuroplasticity, medication contraindications, and helps people become trauma-informed in order to best meet clients where they are at emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. After all, becoming a genuinely skilled microdosing coach requires learning to work with people one-on-one. According to Nova, each session is experiential: students learn the core material, then watch a live facilitation happen in real time, ask questions directly to the expert leading it, and then practice the techniques on each other. Learning becomes embodied through direct experience rather than through instruction alone.

It's also worth noting that this training is not designed to replace therapy or psychiatric care. Rather, it's to complement it. Most therapists and psychiatrists aren't trained in the nuances of microdosing as a practice. A microdosing facilitator learns how to work specifically with subtle shifts in awareness, behavior, and how to create positive neuroplasticity over time. This is a skill set that can sit alongside clinical work or be integrated into it, depending on the practitioner’s scope and approach. Roughly half of each micro-facilitator training cohort, Nova says, consists of clinicians who want to integrate this expertise into their work.

Dr. Eric Russell, a psychologist who completed the training, found that microdosing transformed his daily routine and reconnected him with creativity. "This training gave me the tools, the structure, and the confidence to really up-level my practice," he says. Since graduating, he's been hired to teach microdosing workshops for big companies in the psychedelic space.

Fadiman, who is a long-time collaborator with Nova, says that the program fills an educational gap that can help people improve their lives with psychedelics. "Microdosing, facilitated with intention and guidance, has proved to be effective and safe. It's a tool for healing, improved health, and higher levels of performance. She is, without question, the most skilled and experienced microdosing facilitator in North America."

With 10 million reported microdosers in the U.S. — which, realistically, is a low number considering how many people likely didn't take the survey — the demand for skilled guidance is already here. For Nova, building the infrastructure to meet it is both a mission and a personal reckoning. "I still use my own suffering and the alchemy of my own suffering into empowerment for others." 

*Disclosure: DoubleBlind receives a commission from enrollments in the Microdosing Facilitator Training as a way to fund its journalism. Editorial decisions were made independently of that relationship.

Something happens when psychedelics meet the natural world: The colors deepen, the wind gets personal, and that old oak tree starts to feel like it has something to say. It's no accident that some of the most profound trips people ever have happen outside, far from four walls and a couch.

But the wilderness has never once cared about your inner journey — and a dislocated finger, a surprise rogue wave, or a wrong turn at dusk can derail even the most transcendent afternoon.

Drawing on firsthand stories from people who've communed with rivers and gotten lost on coastal cliffs, plus hard-won wisdom from therapists, harm reduction experts, and psychedelic guides who've seen it all, this piece is your essential field guide to doing it right — from picking your terrain and packing your bag, to knowing exactly what to do when the experience gets bigger than you expected.

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