The consequence of this flood of DMT upon our dying brain-based mind is a pulling back of the veils normally hiding what Tibetan Buddhists call the bardo, or intermediary states between this life and the next. DMT opens our inner senses to these betwixt states with their myriad visions, thoughts, sounds, and feelings. As the body becomes totally inert, consciousness has completely left the body and now exists as a field among many fields of manifest things.
The spirit molecule has outlived its usefulness as a scout for these realms. It has led us to the other shore, and we are on our own. During the next forty-nine days, we use our will, or intent, to process our unique life’s signature, the accumulated experiences, memories, habits, tendencies, and feelings of the life that has ended. This conscious contending with our personal histories, where complete, results in a joining of those fields with ambient ones. It is as if a bell has been rung; the sound, loud at first, joins background noise, then gradually fades away.
What is left over settles onto the next physical life-form that seems most appropriate for subsequent processing of unresolved issues. There is a resonance, a sympathetic vibration, of similar fields: C-minor gravitates to C-minor, animal traits to animals, plant qualities to plants, human issues to humans.
In the case of human beings, these unmetabolized tendencies, this unfinished business, can enter the fetus only when it is “ready.” This readiness may require forty-nine days, too, and may take the form of a pineal gland able to synthesize DMT. The pineal could act as an antenna or lightning rod for the soul. And sexual differentiation into male or female, occurring at exactly the same moment, provides the biological framework through which the life-force now may assert itself.
The movement of this energy, the residual life-force of the past into the present, through the pineal and into the fetus, might be the first and most primordial DMT flash. This is the dawning of consciousness, of mind, of awareness as a distinct biological and sexual entity. The blinding light of pineal DMT, secreted within the developing brain, marks the passage through this threshold.
Until this forty-nine-day watershed, the fetus may be only a physical, rather than a physical-spiritual, being. Therefore, is forty-nine days when we truly can consider a fetus to be an individual sentient, and therefore spiritual, entity?
This chapter suggests that naturally occurring altered states of consciousness result from high levels of pineal DMT production. However, what might happen if someone does not have a pineal gland, due to pineal cancer or a stroke destroying it? Would he or she have the same access to conscious experiences from endogenous DMT as someone with an intact pineal?
The enzymes and precursors in the pineal gland are not unique to it, but the high concentrations of these compounds, and the gland’s remarkably convenient location, make it an ideal source of the spirit molecule. Lung, liver, blood, eye, and brain all possess the appropriate raw materials for DMT production. In fact, for some years researchers jokingly referred to schizophrenia as a lung disease because of the high concentrations of DMT-forming enzymes within the lung! These other organs may produce DMT when the same sets of circumstances exist as those that would stimulate the pineal to do so.
As radical as these theories were, I believed they could be tested using the traditional scientific method: designing experiments, analyzing data, and redefining the theories based upon results of this step-by-step research. So, the next step in this hypothesis-building process was to determine if DMT given to people reproduced the features of those experiences. If outside-administered DMT elicited effects similar to those presumably resulting from inner-produced DMT, such as near-death and mystical states, my hypotheses would be much stronger. Therefore, I needed to find some way to perform a human research study with DMT.
However, I was studying melatonin, and this pineal hormone’s effects scarcely resembled those of DMT. Further studies into melatonin’s physiology seemed futile.
A paper I wrote in San Diego on adverse reactions to psychedelics, published while I was performing the melatonin project, drew the attention of Rick Doblin, a tireless fund- and consciousness-raiser for psychedelic drug research. He invited me to a conference in 1985, where I met the major figures of the psychedelic research and therapy field. Representatives from a wide variety of disciplines joined together for wideranging, far-reaching discussions about what to make of, and do with, the psychedelic experience. These new colleagues provided support, inspiration, valuable experience, and crucial information. They made it much easier to begin conceptualizing how a psychedelic research project actually might look.
In 1987 my University of New Mexico mentor, Glenn Peake, died suddenly on a snowy Christmas day while returning from his morning run. Saddened and grieving, I saw my research trajectory waver. There had been a split between the research I believed was “respectable” and what I personally felt most inclined to study. There was my melatonin research, and then there was my interest in psychedelics. Glenn’s premature death hastened the closing of that gap. During his memorial service, I remembered some of his most direct advice: “Do what you really want in research. Who cares what other people think?”
I decided to stop my melatonin research and attempt a DMT project. I talked these ideas over with the chairmen, directors, and heads of the university divisions supporting my melatonin experiments. They all believed a change in fields involved a real but reasonable risk. However, all were supportive of a psychedelic research project, “if that’s what you really want to do.”
The years of preparation were over. It was now or never. It was 1988.
Part II
Conception and Birth
5
89-001
There were two separate but overlapping fields upon which I would work out my attempt to perform a human DMT study. One was the clinical research realm; the other was regulatory. In this chapter I will focus on the science of the study: the actual research proposal. The next chapter will describe the labyrinth of boards and agencies through which the protocol passed.
The Human Research Ethics Committee at the University of New Mexico reviews any project intending to study humans. This committee stamps all such proposals with a number. The first two digits correspond to the year, and the next three digits reflect the order in which the protocol arrives. I submitted the DMT proposal in late 1988. It was the committee’s first study up for review at their January meeting. Thus, it became 89-001.
The first sentence, which I’d spent hours writing and rewriting the month before, trying to find the perfect opening line, read:
“This project will begin a reexamination of the human psychobiology of the tryptamine hallucinogen of abuse, N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT), which is also an endogenous hallucinogen.”
It was nearly two years later, on November 15, 1990, before the U.S. Food and Drug Administration wrote to me, stating:
“We have completed our review . . . and have concluded that it is reasonably safe to proceed with your proposed study.”
I already had some experience with the difficulties involved in giving an abusable, mind-altering drug to humans. This was from submitting a protocol to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) several years before deciding to attempt a DMT study. The drug in this case was MDMA, popularly known as Ecstasy, a stimulant drug with mild psychedelic properties.
In the early 1980s, a loose-knit network of therapists was giving this drug to their patients as an aid to psychotherapy. It was not illegal, and these psychiatrists and psychologists found that its effects were more reliable and easier to use than those of LSD. To their dismay, this “wonder drug,” like LSD decades before, soon became widely abused across college campuses. In addition, scientific papers began reporting that MDMA caused brain damage in laboratory animals. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) placed MDMA into the most restrictive legal category for drugs, Schedule I, in 1985.
Nearly all the therapists using MDMA tried to make the DEA reverse its opinion. I went a different
route and requested permission to give MDMA within its new legal status.
I submitted an application to the FDA in 1986. I proposed to give MDMA to human volunteers and measure its psychological and physical effects. When they sent me their standard “you may proceed if you don’t hear from us in 30 days” letter, I thought to myself, “Great! I’ll be able to start the research within a month!” However, like clockwork, the FDA called after twenty-nine days and said I couldn’t begin yet. Soon a letter came detailing their concerns about the neurotoxic effects of MDMA. They didn’t know when there would be enough information to allow me to go ahead. It might be quite a while.
My MDMA application languished in the FDA files and never amounted to much. However, I did learn that the FDA was a large and rather conservative organization. They had to be. This was made clear to me during an informal conversation with Dr. L., the director of the FDA division responsible for reviewing my MDMA proposal.
Dr. L. and I were attending a scientific meeting in 1987. We happened to be standing near each other during a coffee break. Introducing myself, I asked him if he would consider allowing me to study MDMA in the terminally ill, since he had concerns about long-term brain damage in normal volunteers. In what now seems a somewhat cavalier and callous manner, I told him that these issues wouldn’t be as much of a problem in those with a six-month life expectancy. In addition, I added gamely, it would be an opening into some psychotherapy work with the terminally ill.
Dr. L. replied matter-of-factly, “Even the terminally ill have rights, and you don’t want to waste their death. And besides, sometimes the diagnosis of terminal is wrong.” He wrote me later to reaffirm his opposition to any MDMA studies involving dying patients.
Years later, halfway through the DMT study, the FDA sent me a letter asking if I’d like to cancel the request for an MDMA permit. It seemed like a good idea, so I agreed.
As my melatonin project began revealing the unmistakably timid psychological effects of this pineal hormone, I decided to visit a close friend and colleague, one whose opinions I valued regarding these matters. Sitting up in the loft of his northern California home in August 1988, we spent a day sorting through a wide range of approaches with which to frame a human psychedelic research project. By sunset, we arrived at two relatively simple but solid conclusions.
First, DMT clearly was the drug to study. It was incredibly interesting, and we all had some circulating in our bodies. Second, any psychedelic research project must not conflict with, and in fact must be consistent with, the current concerns about drug abuse. The U.S. government was spending billions of dollars contending with the problems associated with out-of-control substance use. Surely some of that money could fund a human DMT study. Rather than fighting against the government by trying to remove legal restrictions, it made more sense to appeal directly to the scientific thinking that ultimately drives research. We all wanted to know what drugs like DMT did, and how they did it.
My psychedelic colleagues weren’t especially optimistic about a DMT project’s chances for success. The MDMA affair had demoralized many. “You know what?” one predicted. “The only paper you’ll ever write is how you couldn’t do it. Look at how your MDMA protocol fared.” However, I had been working alone in my MDMA project. For the DMT study I had the support and advice of Daniel X. Freedman, M.D.
I met Danny Freedman in 1987 at one of the many scientific meetings I was beginning to attend. Such conferences, and the networking occurring at them, is part of the ritual of establishing a successful research career. A diminutive, gnomelike man, Dr. Freedman was arguably the most powerful individual in American psychiatry at the time. He began his career in the psychiatry department at Yale University studying LSD in laboratory animals. He later moved on to become chairman of the psychiatry department at the University of Chicago. By the time I met him, he had moved again and was professor and vice-chairman of psychiatry at the University of California in Los Angeles.
He had been president of the American Psychiatric Association as well as of every major biological psychiatry organization. Rather than take a government health position, he chose to wield his power as the editor of psychiatry’s most influential academic journal, the Archives of General Psychiatry. He routinely made and dashed careers by accepting or rejecting any one of the thousands of papers aspiring researchers endlessly submitted to him.
Freedman trained dozens of topflight researchers in academics and industry. He made late-night calls to anyone he liked to discuss the latest research ideas or political developments. He possessed unlimited energy and seemed to require almost no sleep. He chain-smoked cigarettes and drank endless quantities of frighteningly strong coffee. Seductive and charming, he could also lash out unpredictably if you aroused his ire.
His 1968 paper “On the Use and Abuse of LSD” was a seminal article in my thinking.1 I admired his no-nonsense but openminded approach to clinical psychedelic research. While he had worked with schizophrenic patients under the influence of LSD in the 1950s, he nearly exclusively performed animal studies. His early animal pharmacology papers on LSD established the groundwork for future laboratories’ approaches to assessing the role of serotonin in psychedelic drugs’ effects. He also testified in front of the 1966 U.S. Senate committee, chaired by Senator Robert Kennedy, that sealed the fate of psychedelic drugs’ placement into their restricted legal category.
Freedman had serious doubts about the possibility of performing good human psychedelic research. He believed volunteers had too many expectations of drug effects. He also was worried about the risk of “unreliable personnel,” a euphemistic reference to drug-taking by members of a research team. This latter concern unerringly predicted some of the problems our own group would encounter in New Mexico.
In our meetings and correspondence, Freedman predicated any help he would provide me upon the premise that my DMT research would focus solely on pharmacology. He thought psychotherapy research would result in irrational enthusiasm, questionable results, and scientific controversy. It was safer and more practical first to confirm and extend the wealth of data coming from animal laboratories. While his logic was unassailable, our adherence to this biomedical model did set the stage for certain problems that developed later on in our research.
With Dr. Freedman’s guidance, I wrote up a DMT study, the “dose-response” project. It was simple, levelheaded, and achievable, containing four specific goals:
Recruit “well-functioning, experienced hallucinogen users” for volunteers;
Develop a method to measure DMT in blood;
Create a new rating scale by which we could assess DMT’s psychological effects; and
Characterize psychological and physical responses to several doses of DMT.
After briefly summarizing the history of psychedelics within academic psychiatry, I pointed out that while animal studies continued, human experiments lagged far behind. Psychedelics continued to be popular drugs of abuse, and understanding what they did, and how they did it, would address real public health concerns.
I also reviewed previously published animal and human data on DMT and listed the qualities that made it an ideal candidate with which to resume human psychedelic drug research. I noted that one of the best reasons for choosing DMT was that very few people had heard of it. When the media discovered my research, it would draw much less attention than would an LSD project.
Next I exhumed the endogenous psychotomimetic argument, arguing that scientists had yet to find any better candidate for a naturally occurring schizotoxin. Researchers were developing new antipsychotic drugs that blocked the same serotonin receptors that psychedelics activated. Thus, the more we knew about DMT, the more we might learn about psychotic disorders. If we could block the effects of DMT in normal individuals, perhaps we would have a new weapon in our armamentarium against schizophrenia.
I also proposed that DMT’s short duration of effects would make it easier to use than longer-acting drugs, especially in the pot
entially negative setting of a hospital environment.
Finally, DMT had a track record of safe use in previously published human research, especially that of Dr. Szára.
This introduction led to the theoretical underpinnings for studying DMT: the biomedical model. Psychopharmacologists had firmly established that psychedelics, including DMT, activated many of the same brain receptors as did serotonin. Laboratory animal research, continuing for decades after human studies ended, revealed the specific types of serotonin receptors involved. I was to build upon this animal data and determine if it also applied to humans.
The most important biological variables were to be neuroendocrine in nature. Neuroendocrinology is the study of how drugs influence hormones by first stimulating certain brain sites. For example, activation of specific serotonin receptors in the brain causes a rise in blood levels of particular pituitary hormones, such as growth hormone, prolactin, and beta-endorphin. The hormones that change in response to drugs reflect which brain receptors those drugs affect.
Serotonin receptors also regulate heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature, and pupil diameter. I would measure these, too, in an attempt to thoroughly catalog other signs of serotonin receptor activation by DMT. These were objective, numerical data.
I would recruit only experienced psychedelic users for the study. Experienced volunteers would be better able to report drug effects than those with no idea what to expect. In addition, seasoned research subjects were less likely to panic under the influence of the extremely powerful effects of DMT, which potentially would be more disorienting in the stark clinical research center environment. Finally, there were unpleasant, but real, liability issues. I had to protect myself from any lawsuits that might result if people claimed they began using psychedelics because of their participation in the study. If they had used psychedelics in the past, it would be more difficult for them to claim the study had introduced them to these drugs.
DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor's Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences Page 10