DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor's Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences

by Rick Strassman M. D.

  “There is no feeling of ‘It’s all fine.’ There was no white light during my session. I still have a lot to work on. Part of my joy at the end was a feeling of accomplishment.”

  Andrea could have continued fighting against painful and frightening feelings, making a bad situation worse. We knew she might have difficulty letting go after she told us about her mother’s comparing her sleep-related symptoms to demonic attacks. Nevertheless, with her husband’s and our support, she continued on through her fear and found the sadness and confusion that lay behind it. Facing her anxiety and fears, giving up resistance, she emerged with a clearer sense of who she was, what she desired, and plans for carrying out her goals.

  Some of the most immediately hair-raising DMT sessions involved real life-and-death issues related to blood pressure that rose or fell to dangerous levels. Lucas’s blood pressure dropped to almost shocklike levels, while Kevin’s rose to frighteningly high ones.

  At fifty-six, Lucas was one of our older volunteers. A writer and entrepreneur, he lived in a remote village in northern New Mexico, where his greenhouse contained all manner of exotic mind-altering plants. He was articulate, intelligent, and fearless.

  Luca’s outpatient clinic screening electrocardiogram (ECG) tracing was not 100 percent normal. His heart rate was rather slow, in the high 50s, and he had what is known as a “sinus arrhythmia.” This means that when breathing in and out, his heart rate slowed down and sped up more than was the case with most people. I called the cardiologist who interpreted his ECG, and he told me that if Lucas had no signs or symptoms of heart disease, there was little to worry about. It was a “normal variant.”

  Lucas’s low dose gave us some idea that he might have a big session the next day. Like Rex, who passed out upon entrance to the futuristic beehive (see chapter 14), Lucas also reported a swaying, rocking, slightly dizzy feeling:

  It feels like the bed is gently rocking. Like a hammock swaying back and forth.

  Part of Lucas’s non-blind high-dose session the next day, in which he approached a space station landing bay where he was accompanied by numerous humanoid automatons, is described in chapter 12. Let’s now review the more frightening aspects of that morning.

  Immediately after finishing the injection, Lucas became pale and sighed restlessly. He bent his legs at his knees up and down several times, then looked at Cindy.

  Jesus Christ! I had no idea what it would do to me!

  He retched once. I looked around. There was no “emesis basin” into which he could vomit. Cindy pointed at a gown that was crumpled into a pile behind me. That was all we had, and I offered it to him. He put the gown into his hands and looked at it uncomprehendingly.

  Hunnh??

  “Try that,” I offered.

  He retched once into the gown but did not throw anything up.

  Jesus Christ!

  While retching into the gown, he began sliding off the bed headfirst toward Cindy’s feet. I got up, walked over to Cindy’s side of the bed, and helped pull him back onto it. He was holding the gown up against his face.

  At 5 minutes his blood pressure dropped from 108/71 to 81/55, and his pulse from 92 to 45. He was pale; in fact, he was turning green. Holding his head and trembling, Lucas was going into shock.

  Two minutes later his pulse was 47 and his blood pressure was 87/49.

  We tried to adjust the bed—to raise his feet and lower his head—to increase blood flow to his brain. In the confusion, it was impossible to operate the controls. Should I call the cardiac emergency team? Get ready some drugs to raise his blood pressure? DMT causes such robust rises in blood pressure that I worried that if his circulation did recover on its own, and we gave him a big dose of adrenaline to treat his shock, we might overshoot and cause a stroke from too high a blood pressure.

  I said, “You’re doing fine. Take some deep breaths, focus on your breathing.”

  He looked baffled and ill.

  His vital signs recovered on their own over the next 2 minutes. At 12 minutes, his blood pressure was 102/78, and his pulse was 73.

  At 15 minutes he began describing his approach to the space station. More relevant to his terror, he described what he saw upon opening his eyes:

  I looked at Cindy and she had incredible clown makeup on. It was not funny. It was malevolent. I was afraid to look at her face. I don’t really know you, Cindy, but you seem real nice. It was the drug. I had just a flash of you, Rick—like a stainless-steel face, with intimations of protuberances and knobs. Cindy was bad enough. I couldn’t look at you directly. It would have ruined your bedside manner forever.

  He started to relax and moved on to excitedly describe his outer space voyage. It was difficult for me to pay attention, thinking about how close to disaster we all had been. His truck broke down on the way home.

  His wife picked him up, and she spent the drive back to their house describing horrific memories of childhood incest that were emerging in her therapy. Two messages awaited them upon their arrival: a friend had shot his head off in a suicide, another friend was dying rapidly of cancer.

  When we spoke the next day, he wondered, “What’s real? What’s not? It felt like a boulder was dropped into the pond, not a pebble, and the wake was being felt everywhere. The man who killed himself did so at just about the time I took the DMT. It makes me believe in synchronicity of some sort or another.”

  I had little choice but to tell him, “I’ve been thinking it would be safest to hold off on any more studies. While I think you’re a great person to have in the research, I would hate to damage you physically.”

  Lucas weakly protested, but he understood. Nevertheless, the day’s events had seriously rattled him. He asked me to come by to visit him. Later that week I drove to his house and spent the day with him, the first and only house call for the DMT studies. We went over his session, what had happened, and how he felt about it. By the end of the afternoon he had somewhat regained his bearings. He felt pretty well within a few days and resumed his normal routine. He attended nearly every one of the post-study socials over the next several years and came to look back appreciatively at his DMT experience.

  Kevin was thirty-nine years old and married to Sara, whose story we read in chapter 14. He was a rather serious individual, and in his career as a mathematician found a certain predictability that suited him. He had taken psychedelics nearly two hundred times and found them “useful for emotional and spiritual growth.”

  Kevin was a big and burly man, one of those people whose body seems to provide a certain protective role in fending off the outside world. He had a dry wit and a sparkle in his eye, but there seemed to be a certain fearfulness that he spent lots of energy keeping at bay. One of the ways he expended that energy was in being hyperlogical and extremely talkative.

  Kevin also barely squeezed through the cardiac screening gates to our study. His blood pressure was just below our cut-off point, and his ECG showed some “nonspecific” abnormalities, meaning they did not indicate any particular type of heart disease. Showing tremendous determination to get into the tolerance study, he began exercising regularly, dropped almost fifteen pounds, and stopped drinking coffee. He paid for an independent cardiologist examination and an exercise treadmill test, both of which gave him a clean bill of health.

  His low-dose session was thankfully uneventful, but I worried about his attitude.

  At 2 minutes after his low dose, he said,

  So when does it start, or is that all there is?

  Oh, I feel some physical effects. My heart’s speeding up, and the blood pressure cuff feels odd.

  He seemed too cavalier. I wanted to shake him up, get him ready for a big trip tomorrow. I felt this even more so when he said Sara and he were going to have a big meat-and-cheese pizza and beer with some friends that night!

  I warned, “I would go into it tomorrow as if you were going to die. Be prepared for that. Approach it with fear but faith. That’s the way that I get prepared for people’s session
s when I come into the room.

  “I suggest a lighter meal, too. You really want to be nice to yourself tonight and tomorrow.”

  That next morning he looked nervous lying in his bed. Sara sat near the foot of the bed, ready to offer assistance.

  He said, “I’m worried about my blood pressure.”

  “So are we, but it should be all right. We’ve had some pretty high blood pressures and they resolved quickly.”

  His breathing sped up after the infusion was done, but he remained still. His top blood pressure number, the systolic, shot up to 208 at the 2- minute recording. An alarm I didn’t know existed on the blood pressure machine began ringing piercingly. Laura couldn’t locate the switch, so she turned off the entire machine. I passed her a note: “Turn it back on at 4 minutes.”

  Let’s turn to the notes that Kevin sent us a few days later for his account of what happened:

  I feel a tingling in my body. A strange lifting sensation. I see colors coming at me in the darkness. Then I see a light, a matrix of cells that looks like skin under a microscope, with white light behind them. All of a sudden off to the upper right I see a figure. She looks like an African War Goddess. She is black, carries a spear, a shield, and appears to have a mask on. I have surprised her. She takes a defensive and aggressive posture. She says, “YOU DARE TO COME HERE?!” I mentally reply, “I guess so.”

  The scene before me erupts in a way that I can only relate to what it looks like in the TV show Star Trek when the spaceship shifts into a faster-than-the-speed-of-light acceleration. I feel a tremendous rush in my chest. My heart is hammering. I feel waves coursing through my body. I think, “This is it. Rick and Laura have killed me.” Then my subconscious or someone said to me, “You’re dying, don’t die.” Far away I hear what sounds like an alarm. I think something’s gone very wrong. I think of Sara and my little son. I fight. I’m not going to die. I feel as if I’ve dived off a 10-meter platform, hit the water, and am at the bottom of the pool. I swim for the surface.

  The effects are wearing off. I am hypersensitive to people in the room. I can hear their breathing and their movements. I feel their tension.

  My notes indicate that at about 3 minutes Kevin said,

  I’m still here.

  “Good.”

  His 5-minute systolic reading was only two points lower, 206, and the alarm went off again. Sara looked worried. Laura turned to me questioningly. What to do? The situation began hovering near chaos.

  Is that an alarm?

  “It’s okay, your blood pressure’s dropping a little.”

  That was incredible!

  My bedside notes indicate that as Kevin began speaking, he rubbed the back of his head.

  His blood pressure continued slowly dropping.

  He said,

  I have a little headache at the base of my neck.

  His headache mostly likely resulted from the arteries leading to his brain stretching, but thankfully not tearing, under the assault from his high blood pressure.

  Kevin then added,

  It would be interesting to see if the black woman warrior were there again during the next sessions. Maybe she wouldn’t be taken by surprise next time.

  I thought, “Next sessions?”

  Kevin’s blood pressure was normal by 30 minutes. He was tired, but felt good. I knew I had escaped a collision with something very dangerous.

  I spoke with Kevin later in the day from my office. He sounded upbeat and pressed to continue in the research.

  “I have had many psychedelic experiences in my life,” he said, “but nothing could compare with or prepare me for what happened today. I feel I have come back a changed person. I realized that there are many more realms than the one we exist in. Even though it was terrifying, I am looking forward to participating more. I want to let go next time and see where I go and what I experience. I want to know more about the spaces that I went to.”

  Laura and I conferred about bringing him in for four 0.3 mg/kg doses for the tolerance study. While this was slightly less than the 0.4 mg/kg high dose, we kept asking ourselves, “What if he suffers a stroke?” The answer was, of course, “We can’t take that risk.”

  Kevin was disappointed, but we tried to make the most out of what he had undergone.

  I said, “You have lots to mull over. You experienced a high dose of DMT, something few people ever do. I probably shouldn’t have bent the rules in the first place with your abnormal cardiogram.”

  On the drive home through the mountains at the end of that day, I wondered how the road signs I passed on the highway would have looked if Kevin were dead. Exhausted, I ate dinner listlessly and went directly to bed.

  Effective screening and preparation was key to keeping serious adverse effects as infrequent as we did. While the rate of negative effects may have been even lower with better screening, it’s difficult to see how we could have improved upon our methods. Looking back on it now, one thing I should have done was to trust more deeply my intuition about certain volunteers’ psychological suitability or cardiovascular health.

  Perhaps our doses of DMT were too high. This was a razor’s edge. Too small a dose would have fallen short of the psychedelic threshold, but too high a dose, as we saw in Philip’s case (as described in the prologue), was dangerous. In retrospect, 0.3 mg/kg may have been better as our top dose. No one experienced this as “sub-psychedelic.” We chose 0.4 mg/kg based upon clinical judgement and our research aims. Nevertheless, this high dose of DMT may have compromised the safety and well-being of the minority of volunteers who lost their way, struggled to find it, and were traumatized in their journey.

  When all is said and done, the fact remains that the spirit molecule does not always lead us to love and light. It can open our eyes to terrifying realities, too, and mark us with those experiences for as long as do any beatific ones. DMT is a potentially dangerous drug. For that reason, we must think long and hard about using it in ourselves and on one another.

  Part V

  Taking Pause

  18

  If So, So What?

  Our volunteers unquestionably had some of the most intense, unusual, and unexpected experiences of their lives during the DMT research. The spirit molecule dragged, pushed, pulled, and thrust research subjects into themselves, out of their bodies, and through various planes of reality. We’ve read about all manner of sessions, many of which seemed to help people better understand their relationship with themselves and the outside world. We’ve also read about the toll some experiences took on our recruits.

  Was it worth it? Were those who participated in our research any better off for their involvement? Did they undergo any positive changes in their lives? Did anything really good stick to their ribs? In other words, “If so, so what?”

  The answer to these questions, I will tell you now, is “It depends.” It depends upon what we call “benefit.” Are subtle changes in attitude, perspective, and creativity adequate reasons to take the risks about which we’ve read? Or do we require more visible grounds for believing something truly beneficial happened? What would that proof look like? If not much really resulted, why not? Did the fault lie in the drug, the set, or the setting?

  Before beginning the study, I expected people would have profound psychedelic encounters. However, we all know how fleeting most of these insights, understandings, and realizations can be. My hope was that with a safer, more consistent and reliable clinical environment, our volunteers would be able to get even deeper and further into the psychedelic experience than ever before. Perhaps under these circumstances there might be more long-lasting effects.

  What would be testimony to a fuller commitment to putting into effect the ideas, perceptions, and feelings to which the spirit molecule provided access? A change in career. Entering psychotherapy. Beginning a regular meditation practice, within or outside of an organized spiritual discipline. Concerted efforts to modify lifestyle, such as increasing exercise, improving diet, or discontinuing poten
tially harmful drugs or alcohol. Donating time or money to charitable or community organizations. In other words, did more enlightened behavior result from their enlightened experiences?

  As volunteers came in for their last session in any particular experiment, I asked how they felt about their participation. “What did you get out of your involvement in the study?” was how I began such conversations.

  This was a relatively short-term assessment of any benefit, as experiments generally lasted three to six months. In this context, most did think they had grown in some ways, especially in response to their high-dose encounters with the spirit molecule. These were informal, casual impressions obtained in Room 531, where managing sessions and gathering data competed for our attention.

  We also gathered some longer-term follow-up data from the first group of volunteers. Laura contacted as many of the original dose-response research subjects as she could and arranged for more formal personal or telephone interviews with them. By the time I left New Mexico, we had completed only eleven formal follow-up interviews. Longer-term followup for the nearly fifty additional volunteers is obviously of great importance, and I hope to have the opportunity to complete this in the future.

  We read about Sean’s mystical experience during the tolerance study. On a day during the cyproheptadine study when he received placebo, we had time to talk about things other than his immediate response to DMT.

  He thought for a minute after I asked him about the overall effects of his research participation, then said, “It seems like you create your own world in a way. It’s amazing what the mind can do.”

  “Are you referring to your big experience during the tolerance project?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I call it a mystical experience. I took my mother to church the other day. It was a ceremony having to do with Easter: Paul on the road to Damascus. He was blind for three days after he encountered Christ. I think that’s what happened to me. But I don’t know how it’s really affected my life. I guess part of it was asking for permission each of the three times. Maybe a lot of that has been involved in my life changing. I can do more with my life now. I give myself permission to get involved in new experiences and then do so.”