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

by Rick Strassman M. D.

  This is the same question that Saul, a volunteer whom we’ve not yet met, encountered on his first high-dose DMT session. Let’s close with his story.

  A thirty-four-year-old married psychologist, Saul was wiry and energetic, with a wry sense of humor and an intense gaze. He had taken psychedelics about forty times and had been practicing meditation for nearly twenty years. (I did my best to recruit research subjects with a background in meditation. They seemed more able to deal with the initial anxiety of the DMT rush and also helped me compare meditation and drug-induced states of mind.) Saul volunteered for the dose-response study because “I’ve heard about DMT and have always wanted to try it. Plus, I like the idea of being able to try it in the hospital under medical supervision.”

  Saul’s low dose was mild, and he returned the following day for his 0.4 mg/kg session.

  Saul liked to write, and while my notes are rather complete, a letter he later sent to me does an even better job of describing his experience that day:

  The empty space in the room began sparkling. Large crystalline prisms appeared, a wild display of lights shooting off into all directions. More complicated and beautiful geometric patterns overlaid my visual field. My body felt cool and light. Was I about to faint? I closed my eyes, sighing, and thought, “My God!”

  I heard absolutely nothing, but my mind was completely full of some sort of sound, like the aftereffects of a large ringing bell. I didn’t know if I was breathing. I trusted things would be fine and let go of that thought before panic could set in.

  The ecstasy was so great that my body could not contain it. Almost out of necessity, I felt my awareness rush out, leaving its physical container behind.

  Out of the raging colossal waterfall of flaming color expanding into my visual field, the roaring silence, and an unspeakable joy, they stepped, or rather, emerged. Welcoming, curious, they almost sang, “Now do you see?” I felt their question pour into and fill every possible corner of my awareness: “Now do you see? Now do you see?” Trilling, sing-song voices, exerting enormous pressure on my mind.

  There was no need to answer. It was as if someone had asked me, on a blazing cloudless midsummer afternoon in the New Mexico desert, “Is it bright? Is it bright?” The question and the answer are identical. Added to my “Yes!” was a deeper “Of course!” And finally, an intensely poignant “At last!”

  I “stared” with my inner eyes, and we appraised each other. As they disappeared back into the torrent of color, now beginning to fade, I could hear some sounds in the room. I knew I was coming down. I felt my breathing, my face, my fingers, and I was dimly aware of an encroaching darkness. Were there flames, smoke, dust, battling troops, enormous suffering? I opened my eyes.

  Endnotes

  Dedication

  1. Jean Toomer and Rudolph P. Byrd, Essentials (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), 27.

  Acknowledgments

  1. National Institutes of Health grants funded the melatonin project (RR00997-10), the DMT and psilocybin studies (R03 DA06524 and R01 DA08096), and general operations of the Clinical Research Center (M01 RR00997).

  Prologue

  1. The most direct way to get DMT into the brain, of course, is to inject it straight into this sensitive organ. I know of no studies in which researchers gave psychedelic drugs to humans in this manner. However, there is a report describing direct administration of LSD into the cerebrospinal fluid using a spinal tap. Since the cerebrospinal fluid bathes the brain, it allows direct access to it. In this case, LSD effects began “almost instantly.” See Paul Hoch, “Studies in Routes of Administration and Counteracting Drugs,” in Lysergic Acid Diethylamide and Mescaline in Experimental Psychiatry, edited by Louis Cholden (New York: Grune & Stratton, 1956), 8–12.

  2. There were people who had used IV DMT in non-research, or recreational, settings. One of the men I interviewed in the process of developing the rating scale took it this way in the 1960s. His opinion was that it was “just slightly faster” than smoking it.

  3. William J. Turner Jr. and Sidney Merlis, “Effect of Some Indolealkylamines on Man,” Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry 81 (1959): 121–29.

  Chapter 1

  1. For reviews of historical data regarding naturally occurring psychedelics’ importance, see Marlene Dobkin de Rios, Hallucinogens: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1984); and Peter Furst, Flesh of the Gods: The Ritual Use of Hallucinogens (New York: Waveland, 1990).

  For more speculative musings regarding these issues, see Ronald Siegel, Intoxication: Life in Pursuit of Artificial Paradise (New York: EP Dutton, 1989); Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods (New York: Bantam, 1993); and Paul Devereux, The Long Trip: A Prehistory of Psychedelia (New York: Penguin, 1997).

  Wasson’s work is the most exhaustive regarding early spiritual functions of psychedelic natural substances—see R. Gordon Wasson, Carl A. P. Ruck, and Stella Krammrisch, Persephone’s Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988).

  For in-depth discussions of specific plants and their roles in aboriginal societies, see Richard E. Schultes and Albert Hofmann, Plants of the Gods (New York: McGraw Hill, 1979). For the chemistry of those plants, see Richard E. Schultes and Albert Hofmann, The Botany and Chemistry of Hallucinogens, 2nd ed. (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1980); and Jonathan Ott, Pharmacotheon (Kennewick, WA: Natural Products Co., 1993). Albert Hofmann’s tale of discovering LSD never fails to delight—LSD: My Problem Child (New York: McGraw Hill, 1980).

  2. Neurotransmitters allow chemical communication among nerve cells in the brain. A transmitting cell releases a neurotransmitter, which then attaches to specialized receptor sites on the receiving cell. This docking of transmitter to receptor begins a sequence of events ending in the release of the receiving cell’s own neurotransmitter, and the process continues down the line. Other well-known neurotransmitters include norepinephrine (noradrenaline), acetylcholine, and dopamine.

  3. For a sense of the vast amount of information accumulated during those years, see Abram Hoffer and Humphrey Osmond, The Hallucinogens (New York: Academic Press, 1967). Remarkably, almost forty years after its publication, this remains the best available textbook on these drugs.

  4. For an excellent review of the scientific basis for psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, see Walter N. Pahnke, Albert A. Kurland, Sanford Unger, Charles Savage, and Stanislav Grof, “The Experimental Use of Psychedelic (LSD) Psychotherapy,” Journal of the American Medical Association 212 (1970): 1856–63.

  5. Aldous Huxley, Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell (New York: HarperCollins, 1990).

  6. Historians often contrast Leary’s freewheeling take-all-comers approach to the use of psychedelics with Huxley’s view that their use must be limited to a small elite of leaders and artists. The fact remains, however, that without the relatively lawless approach of Leary (see Timothy Leary, Flashbacks [New York: JP Tarcher, 1997]) and Ken Kesey (see Paul Perry, On the Bus [St. Paul, MN: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1997]), it is unlikely many of us would have had the opportunity to encounter these drugs.

  7. Rick J. Strassman, “Adverse Reactions to Psychedelic Drugs. A Review of the Literature,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 172 (1984): 577–95.

  8. Later revelations of CIA involvement in dosing unsuspecting citizens and Army recruits with LSD and other psychedelics added shame and embarrassment to this already painful assortment of feelings. See Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD, the CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond (New York: Grove Press, 1986); and Jay Stevens, Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream (New York: Grove Press, 1998), for thorough reviews of this remarkable chapter in American domestic national security operations.

  9. Stanley Schachter and Jerome E. Singer, “Cognitive, Social, and Physiological Determinants of Emotional State,” Psychological Review 69 (1962): 379–99.

  10. In addition to spawning so many names, psyched
elics have inspired quite a following. I know of no other drugs, except perhaps marijuana, with as many organizations dedicated to educating about them, and promoting their use. There are dozens of psychedelic organizations with thousands of dues-paying members. They publish magazines, newsletters, journals, and Web sites. They organize and sponsor conferences and publish and distribute books. The late Dr. Freedman from UCLA, an early LSD researcher and a driving force behind my study, coined the term cultogen, referring to this zeal with which advocates and enemies of their use rushed in with simple, one-sided descriptions of their effects. Opiate, cocaine, or solvent users don’t organize in such an effective manner. What is so unique about psychedelics that they provoke such evangelical responses?

  11. Drugs from other chemical families also may be psychedelic, but only within a narrow dose range. For example, compounds in the nightshade family of plants, such as jimsonweed, cause hallucinations and altered thinking processes. However, they do so in the context of a confused, delirious state, with dangerous disturbances of cardiac function and temperature control. Oftentimes one remembers little, and serious toxicity, including death, may result from taking “a little too much.” On the other hand, there are no cases of psychedelic drugs being directly fatal.

  Drugs like ketamine (“K” or “special K”) and phencyclidine (PCP or “angel dust”) also produce psychedelic effects. However, they first saw use as general anesthetic agents and cause unconsciousness at higher doses. The “classical” psychedelic drugs such as LSD or mescaline don’t cause general anesthesia.

  In addition, ketamine, PCP, and nightshade-based drugs exert their psychoactive effects through pharmacological mechanisms different from those of LSD, psilocybin, and DMT. For our purposes I will limit my discussion of “psychedelics” to those with similar structures and pharmacological properties. For a review of any and all substances with psychedelic properties, see Peter Stafford, Psychedelics Encyclopedia (Berkeley, CA: Ronin Press, 1992).

  12. Methyl groups, which consist of a carbon and three hydrogens, are themselves the simplest possible addition to an organic molecule.

  13. 5-MeO-DMT is the active ingredient in the secretion from the venom glands of the Sonoran desert toad, Bufo alvarius. The drug is not obtained by licking these toads, as inaccurate media reports would have it. Rather, intrepid users catch a toad and painlessly “milk” the venom onto a glass slide. They release the toad, dry the secretions, and smoke them in a pipe. See Wade Davis and Andrew T. Weil, “Identity of a New World Psychoactive Toad,” Ancient Mesoamerican (1988): 51–59.

  Chapter 2

  1. Alexander Shulgin and Ann Shulgin, TIHKAL (Berkeley, CA: Transform Press, 1997), 247–84.

  2. R. H. F. Manske, “A Synthesis of the Methyl-Tryptamines and Some Derivatives,” Canadian Journal of Research 5 (1931): 592–600.

  3. O. Gonçalves de Lima, “Observaçoes Sôbre o Vihno da Jurema Utilazado Pelos Indios Pancarú de Tacaratú (Pernambuco),” Arquiv. Inst. Pesquisas Agron. 4 (1946): 45–80; and M. S. Fish, N. M. Johnson, and E. C. Horning, “Piptadenia Alkaloids. Indole Bases of P. Peregrina (L.) Benth. and Related Species,” Journal of the American Chemical Society 77 (1955): 5892–95.

  4. Stephen Szára, “The Social Chemistry of Discovery: The DMT Story,” Social Pharmacology 3 (1989): 237–48.

  5. Stephen Szára, “The Comparison of the Psychotic Effects of Tryptamine Derivatives with the Effects of Mescaline and LSD-25 in Self-Experiments,” in Psychotropic Drugs, edited by W. Garattini and V. Ghetti. (New York: Elsevier, 1957), 460–67.

  6. A. Sai-Halasz, G. Brunecker, and S. Szára, “Dimethyltryptamin: Ein Neues Psychoticum,” Psychiat. Neurol., Basel 135 (1958): 285–301.

  7. A. Sai-Halasz, “The Effect of Antiserotonin on the Experimental Psychosis Induced by Dimethyltryptamine,” Experientia 18 (1962): 137–38.

  8. D. E. Rosenberg, Harris Isbell, and E. J. Miner, “Comparison of Placebo, N-Dimethyltryptamine, and 6-Hydroxy-N-Dimethyltryptamine in Man,” Psychopharmacology 4 (1963): 39–42.

  9. Jonathan Kaplan, Lewis R. Mandel, Richard Stillman, Robert W. Walker, W. J. A. Vandenheuvel, J. Christian Gillin, and Richard Jed Wyatt, “Blood and Urine Levels of N,N-Dimethyltryptamine Following Administration of Psychoactive Dosages to Human Subjects,” Psychopharmacology 38 (1974): 239–45.

  10. Timothy Leary, “Programmed Communication During Experiences with DMT,” Psychedelic Review 8 (1966): 83–95.

  11. This uncertainty about DMT effects helped the drug remain relatively obscure until Terence McKenna began praising it publicly and lavishly in the mid-1980s. More than anyone, McKenna has raised awareness of DMT, through lectures, books, interviews, and recordings, to its present unprecedented level.

  12. For an excellent review summarizing the endogenous DMT data, see Steven A. Barker, John A. Monti, and Samuel T. Christian, “N,N-Dimethyltryptamine: An Endogenous Hallucinogen,” International Review of Neurobiology 22 (1981): 83–110.

  13. J. Christian Gillin, Jonathan Kaplan, Richard Stillman, and Richard Jed Wyatt, “The Psychedelic Model of Schizophrenia: The Case of N,N-Dimethyltryptamine,” American Journal of Psychiatry 133 (1976): 203–8.

  14. Despite reservations about the DMT theory of schizophrenia, it is worth noting that in the twenty-five years since scientists abandoned it, there have been no other candidates nearly as well qualified for this role.

  15. In this context, it is a fascinating study in how the winds of public and political opinion shape the research community’s scientific agenda. There now is a flurry of funding for, and publications about, the “ketamine model” of schizophrenia. As discussed previously, ketamine is an anesthetic drug, low doses of which produce psychedelic effects. Similar to the “classical” psychedelic drugs, there is overlap between ketamine effects and schizophrenic symptoms. However, there probably are as many differences and similarities between schizophrenia and ketamine as there are between schizophrenia and typical psychedelics.

  There are at least two reasons for the current, relatively unimpeded progress in the ketamine field. Many more rating scales now exist that statistically can compare druginduced to schizophrenic states. These provide more objective, mathematical support for similarities between schizophrenia and ketamine intoxication. This approach may, however, tend to gloss over the real clinical differences between the two conditions. It was these real-life differences that caused earlier investigators to reject the utility of comparing typical psychedelic drug effects with symptoms of schizophrenia.

  Another, and probably the more important, difference is that ketamine is a “legal” drug. There are few restrictions limiting its use in human research. Nevertheless, the recent surge in popularity of recreational ketamine use is tightening monitoring and controls over it. In addition, concerns about worsening schizophrenic symptoms with ketamine, and the nature of informed consent for these studies, are raising anxiety about psychedelic ketamine research in ways similar to older psychedelic studies.

  16. Making DMT “from scratch” in the laboratory is not complicated. A reasonably skilled chemist can produce it with modest effort in several days. The difficulty in making it is not in the mechanics of doing so, but in obtaining the necessary ingredients, or precursors. Federal drug authorities monitor supplies of these precursors very tightly, and you need a permit to purchase any that might be turned into a known psychedelic drug.

  17. Toshihiro Takahashi, Kazuhiro Takahashi, Tatsuo Ido, Kazuhiko Yanai, Ren Iwata, Kiichi Ishiwata, and Shigeo Nozoe, “11C-Labelling of Indolealkylamine Alkaloids and the Comparative Study of Their Tissue Distributions,” International Journal of Applied Radiation and Isotopes 36 (1985): 965–69; and Kazuhiko Yanai, Tatsuo Ido, Kiichi Ishiwata, Jun Hatazawa, Toshihiro Takahashi, Ren Iwata, and Taiju Matsuzawa, “In Vivo Kinetics and Displacement Study of Carbon-11-Labeled Hallucinogen, N,N-[11C]Dimethyltryptamine,” European Journal of Nuclear Medicine 12 (1986): 141–46.

  18. By some unimaginable feat of “pre-literate chemistry,” South Ame
rican natives learned to combine DMT-containing plants with others possessing anti-MAO compounds, or MAO inhibitors. Accompanied by MAO inhibitors, swallowed DMT can withstand enzyme breakdown long enough to enter the bloodstream and exert its psychological effects before MAO recovers sufficiently to dispose of it. This is the secret by which ayahuasca succeeds in making DMT orally active. The slower absorption from the stomach and intestines means that DMT effects in ayahuasca last 4 to 5 hours, rather than just minutes as with injected DMT.

  Chapter 3

  1. Willis W. Harman, Robert H. McKim, Robert E. Mogar, James Fadiman, and Myron J. Stolaroff, “Psychedelic Agents in Creative Problem-Solving: A Pilot Study,” Psychological Reports 19 (1966): 211–27.

  2. More than twenty years later, in 1995, I met Dorothy Fadiman at a meeting in Manaus, in the Brazilian Amazon. When she returned home to California, she sent me her 1970s video about light, Radiance. The circle finally was complete.

  3. The Crown or Thousand-Petaled Lotus chakra is not the same as the “third eye.” The latter, located in the middle of the forehead just above and between the eyes, anatomically corresponds most closely with the pituitary gland.

  4. The relationship of cerebrospinal fluid to consciousness recently got a boost from brain science research. There are very high levels of particular serotonin receptors on the cells lining the ventricles. It is these lining cells that make cerebrospinal fluid. LSD attaches to these receptors with extraordinary vigor. Perhaps psychedelics really do alter our consciousness in such powerful ways by controlling production of this unique brain liquid. Descartes and his followers would certainly get a hearty laugh out of these “modern” discoveries!

  5. Rene Descartes, “The Inter-Relation of Soul and Body,” in The Way of Philosophy, edited by P. Wheelright (New York: Odyssey, 1954), 357.