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

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DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor's Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences Page 39

by Rick Strassman M. D.


  4. As in most monastic religious traditions, Margaret took a new name after joining the priestly order. Since her and others’ names are Japanese, and because I know no Japanese and would hate to make up a name that accidentally meant something disgraceful or embarrassing, I’ve chosen to use English pseudonyms.

  5. Rick J. Strassman, “DMT and the Dharma,” Tricycle, The Buddhist Review 6 (1996): 81–88.

  Chapter 21

  1. There was little if any contact among the volunteers at the earlier stages of the research. Even when they did meet, either in social settings at my house or in the support group that formed toward the end of the study, volunteers were uniformly shy and uncomfortable discussing their strange being encounters. Neither were Terence McKenna’s lectures and writings especially popular when we first started hearing these unusual reports from our research subjects. I often asked volunteers about being familiar with popular accounts of DMT-mediated encounters with elves or insectoid aliens. Few if any were. Thus, I don’t think these reports were a type of mass hysteria or a self-fulfilling prophecy. Indeed, if this process was operating, I would have expected an “epidemic” of mystical and neardeath experiences instead, because I was expecting and hoping for them.

  2. Before television engineers developed the “picture-in-a-picture” option, I could have extended this analogy by saying these levels of reality are mutually exclusive. That is, we could not watch channel 3 and channel 4 at the same time. However, we now can. The picture-in-a-picture concept actually helps with the TV comparison, though, if we recall how many times volunteers opened their eyes to see different levels of reality mix and blend. Oftentimes, too, volunteers would fully engage in the new world to which DMT provided access while still remembering that their bodies were in Room 531 of the University Hospital. They had their feet in several worlds at once, a truly mythic multitasking effort!

  3. David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality (New York: Penguin, 1997).

  4. David Deutsch, personal communication, January 2000.

  5. Ibid, June 1999.

  6. Nigel Smith and Neil Spooner, “The Search for Dark Matter,” Physics World 13 (2000): 4.

  7. Why entities or alien intelligences desire to interact with us is, of course, a crucial question. Many of Mack’s abduction experiencers describe human-alien hybrid projects intended to repopulate our dying planet. Some of our volunteers also returned with a “breeding” motif, having found themselves in rooms with toys, cribs, and other items from infancy. Additionally, the transfer of information and the “tuning” and “reprogramming” of consciousness follow a similar thread of an advanced race wishing to impart to us some of what they know. This often relates to the pressing environmental degradation overtaking our planet. Here, too, there are similarities with a few of our volunteers’ tales.

  Several of our research subjects also refer to the nonmaterial nature of the beings, particularly their lack of emotions of love and relatedness, as crucial to their interest in us. Somehow, by interacting and learning from us, they are able to relearn things forgotten or lost by them long ago. Such descriptions border on “spirit possession” and take on disturbing overtones. On a less sober note, recall the playfulness of some of the figures our volunteers described, bringing to mind fairies, pixies, and elves from our own folkloric past.

  8. Karl L. R. Jansen, “The Ketamine Model of the Near-Death Experience: A Central Role for the N-Methyl-D-Aspartate Receptor,” Journal of Near-Death Studies 16 (1997): 5–26. (I have searched for and been unable to find any data regarding whether DMT is neuroprotective.)

  Chapter 22

  1. There are examples of religious and scientific models seeming to exist on better terms, such as research occurring within some of the contemporary psychedelic churches, including the Native American peyote- and South American ayahuasca-using organizations. However, these are relationships of convenience and not true hybrids of science and religion. Scientific results will not modify the practices and teachings of the churches, nor will the insights and experiences of the religious encounter change the methods of scientific research.

  2. Terence McKenna introduced hundreds of people to DMT, and during a visit on his botanical preserve in Hawaii several years ago, we talked about this. He estimated that perhaps 5 percent of people to whom he had given DMT showed nearly no effect. Terence’s 5 percent estimate is exactly what we saw in our research: three out of sixty volunteers.

  3. F. X. Vollenweider, personal communication, June 1993; and L. Hermle, personal communication, June 1993.

  4. Ka-Tzetnik 135633, Shivitti: A Vision (Nevada City, CA: Gateways, 1998).

  5. Bernard J. Albaugh and Philip O. Anderson, “Peyote in the Treatment of Alcoholism Among American Indians,” American Journal of Psychiatry 131 (1974): 1247–51; and Charles S. Grob, Dennis J. McKenna, James C. Callaway, Glacus S. Brito, Edison S. Neves, Guilherme Oberlaender, Oswaldo L. Saide, Elizeu Labigalini, Christiane Tacla, Claudio T. Miranda, Rick J. Strassman, and Kyle B. Boone, “Human Psychopharmacology of Hoasca, a Plant Hallucinogen Used in Ritual Context in Brazil,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 184 (1996): 86–94.

  As an example of conflicting models of efficacy, many proponents of ibogaine treatment for addictions suggest a primarily pharmacological basis to its benefits. In fact, members of a National Institute on Drug Abuse ibogaine research panel in which I participated wondered if there were some way to block its psychedelic “side effects” and still maintain its therapeutic ones.

  About the Author

  A native of Los Angeles, Rick Strassman holds degrees from Stanford University and Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University.

  Dr. Strassman took his internship and general psychiatry residency at the University of California, Davis, Medical Center in Sacramento, and received the Sandoz Award for outstanding graduating resident in 1981. He spent ten years as a tenured professor at the University of New Mexico, performing clinical research investigating the function of the pineal hormone melatonin. He also began the first new U.S.-government-approved-and-funded clinical research with psychedelic drugs in over twenty years.

  Dr. Strassman has published thirty peer-reviewed scientific papers and serves as a reviewer for several psychiatric research journals. He has been a consultant to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, National Institute on Drug Abuse, Veterans’ Administration Hospitals, Social Security Administration, and other state and local agencies. He currently practices psychiatry in Taos, New Mexico, and is Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry in the UNM School of Medicine. Dr. Strassman’s Web site is .

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  Copyright © 2001 by Rick J. Strassman, M.D.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Strassman, Rick.

  DMT : the spirit molecule : a doctor’s revolutionary research into the biology of near-death and mystical experiences / Rick Strassman.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN-13: 978-1-59477-973-2

  1. Dimethyltryptamine. 2. Pineal gland—Secretions. I. Title.

  RM666.D564 S77 2000

  615'.7883—dc21

  00-050498

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