DMT

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N, N-dimehtyltryptamine, or DMT, is the so-called “spirit” molecule as identified by the leading researcher on the subject Dr Rick Strassman. This molecule seems to provide our consciousness access to an altered state filled with bizarre visions, thoughts and feelings. It seems, in short, to open up access to realms way beyond our imagination.

As powerful as DMT is (with the result that it is illegal and very heavily controlled even for research purposes) what is as surprising as the visions it provokes is that it is found naturally occurring throughout the plant and animal kingdoms. It is a part of the normal makeup of a regular human, as well as being found in flowers, barks, roots, mushrooms and so on. It is, literally, almost everywhere you look.

That said, DMT is most abundant in Latin America, among the plants that are used – and have been used for thousands of years - by the shamans in the area. Arguably the most famous method of ingestion of DMT is through ayahuasca, a traditional (and vile) beverage believed to help predict the future and allow contact with dead ancestors.

R. Manske, a Canadian scientist, discovered how to make DMT in the first half of the twentieth century. At the time he was unaware of its existence as a naturally occurring substance found in the human body. However, there was very little interest in it or any other psychedelic drugs. This changed in the early 1950s when LSD and serotonin were discovered. A new breed of scientist was very interested in psychedelics and using them to investigate human consciousness. Chemists began searching for the active ingredients of barks, leaves and seeds. Science developed and it was discovered that DMT was a constituent of plants that produced psychedelic effects, though it was then unknown if DMT itself was psychoactive.

The next development was an unexpected, but crucial step. Hungarian researcher Stephen Szara wanted to experiment with LSD. Living as he did behind the iron curtain he was blocked from receiving any of the drug from the West. Unperturbed he synthesized some DMT in his lab in 1955. Immediately he began to experiment only to find that his chemical was ineffective. He surmised that there must be a mechanism in the gut that breaks down DMT as quickly as it is swallowed…and he was correct. Part of the story that is so amazing is how shamans in South America were able to understand this and formulate a response thousands of years ago to allow DMT to be taken orally in one form or another (the ayahuasca brew being the most popular). Szara began experimenting on himself with an injected psychedelic and after on members of a study group.

Szara had this to say about his experience “….The hallucinations consisted of moving, brilliantly colored oriental motifs, and later I saw wonderful scenes altering very rapidly….My emotional state was elevated sometimes up to euphoria. My consciousness was completely filled by hallucinations, and my attention was firmly bound to them…”

One of his test subjects, a male physician, reported that “The whole world is brilliant….The whole room is filled with spirits….I feel exactly as if I were flying….I have the feeling that this is above everything, above the earth.”

A female physician noted “How simple everything is….In front of me are two quiet, sunlit Gods….I think they are welcoming me into this new world….I am finally at home….Dangerous game; it would be so easy not to return. I am faintly aware that I am a doctor, but this is not important; family ties, studies, plans, and memories are very remote from me. Only this world is important; I am free and utterly alone.”

Szara eventually made his way from Hungary to the United States, via Berlin, where he began working at the National Institute of Health before moving onto the National Institute on Drug Abuse before his retirement.

The subculture that had developed to experiment with psychedelic drugs starting using DMT. But not all the trips were pleasant. William Burroughs, author of The Naked Lunch was an early user and one of his friends was reduced to becoming like a “writhing, wriggling reptile.” LSD remained the hallucinogenic of choice; the trip from DMT was commonly regarded as being intense (one way or the other) and short lived.

The primacy of LSD was challenged when researchers discovered DMT in the brains of mice and rats. The scientists then established how the bodies of these animals made the psychedelic. The next question was obvious: Did DMT exist in the human body? In 1965 a German research team published in Nature magazine that it had isolated DMT from human blood. In 1972 Julius Axelrod reported finding it in human brain tissue. Other researchers found it in other fluids, such as urine. Next the pathways by which the human body made the psychedelic were identified.

Thus, and of huge significance, DMT was recognized as the first endogenous human psychedelic. That is, it was the first psychedelic compound found to be produced in the human body.

A startling question now follows, and one to which I will return in the future, but I offer it here for your own meditations.

Why had Nature / the Universe / God / evolution seen fit to create a body capable of producing a powerful psychedelic compound?

There is no clear answer to this but I am inclined to agree with Dr Rick Strassman, the foremost authority on DMT research, that the psychedelic is a “spirit molecule” intended to allow us to establish visionary contact with a realm beyond the normal and beyond the confines of time and space.

Psychiatry on the other hand explains the existence of this hallucinogen as being, perhaps, the cause of mental illness. Scientists hoped to find a way to block the effects thereby preventing mental illness.

All this research started to come to an end though in 1970 when DMT, along with other psychedelics, were placed in a highly restricted legal category. By the end of the 1970s all research was stopped until Dr Rick Strassman began a new investigation.

In effect DMT affects receptor sites for serotonin throughout the body, but of most interest are those receptors in the brain which are involved in mood, perception and thought. Of even more interest is that the brain seems to desire the psychedelic. Usually the brain works hard to keep out other drugs and chemicals by erecting a blood-brain barrier. In this way the brain can be highly selective as to what it uses for energy: glucose only. So here is the curious thing: the brain is very, very careful in selecting what it absorbs, only taking in what is vital to allow it to function in an optimal manner. So why, as Japanese scientists discovered in the second half of the twentieth century, does the brain allow a psychedelic into its realm? As far as we know, no other psychedelic is permitted to cross the blood-brain barrier. Furthermore, DMT is used almost immediately by the brain. It is as if the psychedelic is necessary for normal brain functioning.

And when the brain receives more than enough the subject begins to experience various hallucinations.

One of the ways to overload the brain with DMT is to take it in via IV. But the drug is endogenous; it is created within the body naturally. And from time to time the body is capable, all by itself, of creating an excess amount of the psychedelic leading to various visions and emotions. Indeed, it seems that the body can in fact be trained (through meditation and asceticism) to produce an above average amount, thereby allowing a subject to induce the hallucinatory trip.

Ayahuasca being prepared.

Users of DMT maintain that its use allows them to accept the coexistence of opposites (such as life and death), grants them the knowledge that consciousness continues after physical death, and leaves them with the certitude that all things are connected (with the glue being love). The psychedelic also allows users to “visit” other realms that appear more real than our current reality and which may be populated by elves or aliens. These other realms however may not always be peaceful and could be, to use Christian concepts, described as hell. A trip then is not without its dangers.

The medium between DMT and consciousness seems to be the pineal gland, which I will discuss in more detail in a future article.

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Psychedelic Drugs A Brief History

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Psychedelic Drugs: A Brief History

It is assumed that the use of plants and mushrooms, and possibly animals too, to create psychedelic effects pre-dates written history; the practice of imbibing various hallucinogenic substances may even reach further back into history than the homo sapiens species. The earliest solid archaeological evidence of human culture is also more concretely pointing to the theory that psychedelics were in use as the homo sapiens species evolved. Furthermore, this evidence is not local and can be found in both Africa and Northern Europe. Theorists go so far as to suggest that it was early experiences of altered states of consciousness that led to the formation of religion. Shamans in particular were heavy users of psychedelics to explore consciousness and gain help and insight from beneficent spirits. As Christianity spread users and the plants and mushrooms were vilified. Fortunately the shamanic tradition has managed to survive in Latin America and a growing tourist trade sprung up towards the close of the twentieth century where curious individuals could experience "trips" using drugs that were illegal in their own countries.

Science predominantly bases its knowledge of psychedelics from the investigation of chemicals found in the Western hemisphere; specifically DMT, psilocybin, mescaline and different LSD-like compounds. The first significant breakthrough came with the discovery of mescaline in peyote, a New World cactus. Mescaline was isolated from peyote in the 1890s by German chemists. It was immediately known among those open to exploring its effects as a way of entering an "artificial paradise". However, not a whole lot had been done by the end of the 1930s. Freudian psychoanalysis was in its ascendency and though Freud himself was open to experimentation with cocaine and tobacco, many of his followers were not. Outside of the realm of psychology there otherwise seemed to be no medical application for psychedelics.

This changed when LSD appeared. Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD) was first experimented with in 1938 by the Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman. Initially he was hoping to find a drug that would aid in stopping uterine bleeding after childbirth. He returned to LSD five years later and accidentally discovered its psychedelic properties. LSD was almost infinitely more powerful than mescaline without the unpleasantness that went with the latter substance. The first papers appeared in the 1940s and scientists recognized its "psychosis mimicking" properties.

Following the Second World War, thanks in part to the psychedelic properties of LSD, enormous gains were made in the field of psychiatry. During those years the field of "biological psychiatry" was founded. This area of research explores the relationship between the human mind and its brain chemistry. In 1948 researchers found that serotonin was responsible for contracting the muscles lining veins and arteries and this was important for understanding how to control the bleeding process. In the mid-1950s scientists found serotonin in the brains of laboratory animals. Surgery or drugs that modified serotonin-containing areas of an animal brain profoundly altered sexual and aggressive behavior as well as sleep and wakefulness. Thus serotonin was identified as the first neurotransmitter.

Scientists were also finding out that LSD and serotonin molecules looked very much alike. Both were in competition for many of the same brain sites. LSD could block the effects of serotonin at times, while it would mimic serotonin in other cases. Thus LSD became recognized as the most powerful tool for learning about the brain-mind relationship. For the next two decades research progressed in the area of psychedelics with full government support and backing. Rapid breakthroughs followed using "psychedelic psychotherapy". Terminally ill patients were next exposed to LSD with the result that their depression lifted and they were more ready to accept their fate.

What also emerged was the insight that altered states of consciousness induced by LSD closely matched the experiences of those engaged in Eastern meditation. Scientists however were uneasy with the apparent meshing of science and religion. People such as the English novelist and philosopher Aldous Huxley became interested for this reason and thus, through his writings, a massive sub-culture emerged intent on experimenting with psychedelic drugs. With greater (and unsupervised) usage came reports of a darker side to the various drugs. Purity was compromised and cocktails of various drugs and alcohol overwhelmed people who were not in a fit state to be taking anything in the first place. The public began to suspect that the scientists had lost control of the situation. In 1970 the United States Congress passed a law making LSD and other psychedelic drugs illegal. Research grants began to disappear immediately and interest died off. A few academic papers followed and then nothing. Since then psychedelic drugs have been driven underground and users risk long periods of incarceration if caught.

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