DMT_The Spirit Molecule Read online

  To the volunteers, and all their relations

  We do not possess imagination enough to sense what we are missing.

  Jean Toomer1

  Advance Praise for

  DMT: The Spirit Molecule

  “Strassman’s important research contributes to a growing awareness that we inhabit a multidimensional universe that is far more complex and interesting than the one our scientific theories have shown us. It is of the utmost importance that we face the implications of this discovery, for it has so much to tell us about who we are and why we are here.”

  John Mack, author of Abduction and Passport to the Cosmos

  “The most extensive scientific study of the mental and perceptual effects of a psychedelic drug since the 1960s. Strassman provides fascinating insight into the world of psychiatric research as he seeks to understand these most mysterious substances and their profound effects on human consciousness.”

  Ralph Metzner, Ph.D., author of Ayahuasca: Consciousness and the Spirits of Nature

  “This book is essential reading for anyone with an interest in the mind, philosophy, the nature of reality, and spirituality. The world’s foremost expert on DMT has created a masterpiece of the genre, as he brilliantly leads the reader through a series of startling revelations about the nature of the universe, revealed behind the doorway once DMT turns the key.”

  Karl Jansen, M.D., Ph.D., author of K. Ketamine: Dreams and Realities

  “DMT: The Spirit Molecule points the way beyond the present impasse of the reigning “drug abuse” paradigm. We owe a debt of gratitude to Strassman for persevering in the face of bureaucratic obstacles to conduct important research into the human pharmacology of DMT and elucidate it for the general public, in both scientific and humanistic terms.”

  Jonathan Ott, author of The Age of Entheogens and Hallucinogenic Plants of North America

  Acknowledgments

  Countless colleagues, committees, and agencies helped with all stages of this research. Several deserve special mention. The late Daniel X. Freedman, M.D., from UCLA’s Department of Psychiatry, advocated for these projects at all levels and was instrumental in my obtaining crucial early funding. Staff at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration were extraordinarily flexible and responsive to the unusual circumstances of this research. Clifford Qualls, Ph.D., the University of New Mexico biostatistician, spent endless hours, days, and weeks crunching numbers at the Research Center, at his home, and at mine. David Nichols, Ph.D., from Purdue University, made the DMT, without which the research never would have occurred.

  At every turn, the University of New Mexico School of Medicine provided academic, physical, and administrative support for my work. Walter Winslow, M.D., chairman of the Department of Psychiatry, gave me great latitude as one of his only clinical research scientists at the time. Samuel Keith, M.D., continued with outstanding administrative and academic assistance and counsel after Dr. Winslow retired. Alan Frank, M.D., chair of the university’s Human Research Ethics Committee, handled my requests with consistency and evenhandedness.

  To the UNM General Clinical Research Center I express my appreciation for their decade of assistance in all my studies: melatonin, DMT, and psilocybin. Jonathan Lisansky, M.D., a UNM Psychiatry and Research Center colleague, originally introduced me to the late Glenn Peake, M.D., Scientific Director of the GCRC. Together they enticed me to Albuquerque in 1984. Philip Eaton, M.D., effortlessly took over the reins of the GCRC after Dr. Peake’s sudden death, and barely blinked an eye when I told him I had decided to study psychedelic drugs. David Schade, M.D., Joy McLeod, and Alberta Bland helped with me with skillful laboratory support throughout the years. Lori Sloane of the Computing Center kept all the machines running at top efficiency with what seemed to be amazing ease, and taught me to use programs that otherwise would have taken me years to understand.

  Many thanks to the inpatient and outpatient nursing staff, kitchen personnel, and administrative staff, especially Kathy Legoza and Irene Williams. Laura Berg, M.S.N, and Cindy Geist, R.N., provided heroic, cheerful, and disciplined nursing support for all the studies. Katy Brazis, R.N., also contributed her skills to the early psychiatric interviews.

  A generous research grant from the Scottish Rite Foundation for Schizophrenia Research helped establish the earliest phases of the DMT project’s scientific merit. Later, more substantial funding for the DMT and psilocybin research came from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a division of the U.S. National Institutes of Health.1

  For the writing of this book, John Barlow and the Rexx Foundation, as well as Andrew Stone, provided crucial financial kindling, while support from the Barnhart Foundation later set the project blazing forth. Rick Doblin at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies graciously and generously administered the Stone and Barnhart support. Ned Naumes of the Barnhart Foundation and Sylvia Thiessen and Carla Higdon at MAPS seamlessly coordinated the movement in and out of grant monies.

  Friends, colleagues, students, teachers, and mentors over the years have contributed ideas and support to this project: Ralph Abraham, Debra Asis, Alan Badiner, Kay Blacker, Jill and Lewis Carlino, Ram Dass, David Deutsch, Norman Don, Betty Eisner, Dorothy and James Fadiman, Robert Forte, Shefa Gold, Alex Grey, Charles Grob, Stan Grof, John Halpern, Diane Haug, Mark Galanter, Mark Geyer, Chris Gillin, George Greer, Abram Hoffer, Carol and Rodney Houghton, Daniel Hoyer, Oscar Janiger, David Janowsky, Karl Jansen, Sheperd Jenks, Robert Jesse, Robert Kellner, Herbert Kleber, Tad Lepman, Nancy Lethcoe, Paul Lord, David Lorimer, Luis Eduardo Luna, John Mack, Dennis and Terence McKenna, Herbert Meltzer, David Metcalf, Ralph Metzner, Nancy Morrison, Ethan Nadelmann, Ken Nathanson, Steven Nickeson, Oz, Bernd Michael Pohlman, Karl Pribram, Jill Purce, Rupert Sheldrake, Alexander and Ann Shulgin, Daniel Siebert, Wayne Silby, Zachary Solomon, Myron Stolaroff, Juraj and Sonja Styk, Steven Szára, Charles Tart, Requa Tolbert, Tarthang Tulku, Joe Tupin, Eberhard Uhlenhuth, Andrew Weil, Samuel Widmer, and Leo Zeff. My former wife, Marion Cragg, was there for me and the research through all its twists and turns, providing valuable advice and counsel.

  Several people additionally read all or part of the manuscript and commented liberally and helpfully on the work-in-progress: Robert Barnhart, Rick Doblin, Rosetta Maranos, Tony Milosz, Norm Smookler, Andrew Stone, Robert Weisz, and Bernard Xolotl.

  Many thanks to Daniel Perrine for rendering the best possible images of the book’s molecular structures. And to Alex Grey, deep appreciation for the cover art, and for leading me to Inner Traditions, where Jon Graham liked what he saw in my proposal. Rowan Jacobsen has been everything an editor can be, and then some. Nancy Ringer’s peerless copyediting made many improvements to the text.

  I am grateful to my former Zen Buddhist community’s late abbot, and to the monastic and extended lay communities for their teaching, guidance, and a powerful model of mystical pragmatism.

  My deepest thanks go to my family, for without my parents, Alvin and Charlotte Strassman; my brother, Marc Strassman; and my sister, Hanna Dettman, none of this would have been possible.

  Finally, I salute, bow, and stand in awe of the volunteers. Their courage to hitch themselves to the spirit molecule’s wings, their faith in the research team watching over their bodies and minds while they ventured forth, and their grace under the most austere and unforgiving environment imaginable for taking psychedelic drugs will serve as an inspiration for generations of fellow seekers.

  Contents

  Cover Image

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Prologue: First Sessions

  Part I
: The Building Blocks

  1 Psychedelic Drugs: Science and Society

  2 What DMT Is

  3 The Pineal: Meet the Spirit Gland

  4 The Psychedelic Pineal

  Part II: Conception and Birth

  5 89-001

  6 Labyrinth

  Part III: Set, Setting, and DMT

  7 Being a Volunteer

  8 Getting DMT

  9 Under the Influence

  Part IV: The Sessions

  10 Introduction to the Case Reports

  11 Feeling and Thinking

  12 Unseen Worlds

  13 Contact Through the Veil: 1

  14 Contact Through the Veil: 2

  15 Death and Dying

  16 Mystical States

  17 Pain and Fear

  Part V: Taking Pause

  18 If So, So What?

  19 Winding Down

  20 Stepping on Holy Toes

  Part VI: What Could and Might Be

  21 DMT: The Spirit Molecule

  22 The Futures of Psychedelic Research

  Epilogue

  Endnotes

  About the Author

  About Inner Traditions • Bear & Company

  Copyright & Permissions

  Introduction

  In 1990 I began the first new research in the United States in over twenty years on the effects of psychedelic, or hallucinogenic, drugs on humans. These studies investigated the effects of N,N-dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, an extremely short-acting and powerful psychedelic. During the project’s five years, I administered approximately four hundred doses of DMT to sixty human volunteers. This research took place at the University of New Mexico’s School of Medicine in Albuquerque, where I was tenured Associate Professor of Psychiatry.

  I was drawn to DMT because of its presence in all of our bodies. I believed the source of this DMT was the mysterious pineal gland, a tiny organ situated in the center of our brains. Modern medicine knows little about this little gland’s role, but it has a rich “metaphysical” history. Descartes, for example, believed the pineal was the “seat of the soul,” and both Western and Eastern mystical traditions place our highest spiritual center within its confines. I therefore wondered if excessive pineal DMT production was involved in naturally occurring “psychedelic” states. These might include birth, death and near-death, psychosis, and mystical experiences. Only later, when the study was well underway, did I also begin considering DMT’s role in the “alien abduction” experience.

  The DMT project was founded on cutting-edge brain science, especially that which dealt with the psychopharmacology of serotonin. However, my own background, which included a decades-long relationship with a Zen Buddhist training monastery, powerfully affected how we prepared people for, and supervised, their drug sessions.

  DMT: The Spirit Molecule reviews what we know about psychedelic drugs in general, and DMT in particular. It then traces the DMT research project from its earliest intimations through a maze of committees and review boards to its actual performance.

  Although all of us believed in the potentially beneficial properties of psychedelic drugs, the studies were not intended to be therapeutic, and so our research subjects were healthy volunteers. The project generated a wealth of biological and psychological data, much of which I have already published in the scientific literature. On the other hand, I have written nearly nothing about volunteers’ stories. I hope the many excerpts I have included here, taken from over one thousand pages of my notes, will provide a sense of the remarkable emotional, psychological, and spiritual effects of this chemical.

  Problems inside and outside of the research environment led to the end of these studies in 1995. Despite the difficulties we encountered, I am optimistic about the possible benefits of the controlled use of psychedelic drugs. Based upon what we learned in the New Mexico research, I offer a wide-ranging vision for DMT’s role in our lives and conclude by proposing a research agenda and optimal setting for future work with DMT and related drugs.

  The late Willis Harman possessed one of the most discerning minds to apply itself to the field of psychedelic research. Earlier in his career, he and his colleagues administered LSD to scientists in an attempt to bolster their problem-solving skills. They found that LSD demonstrated a powerfully beneficial effect on creativity. This landmark research remains the first and only scientific project to use psychedelics to enhance the creative process. When I met Willis thirty years later, in 1994, he was president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, an organization founded by the sixth man to walk on the moon, Edgar Mitchell. Mitchell’s mystical experience, stimulated by viewing Earth on his return home, inspired him to study phenomena outside the range of traditional science that nevertheless might yield to a broader application of the scientific method.

  During a long walk together along the central California coastal range one day, Willis said firmly, “At the very least, we must enlarge the discussion about psychedelics.” It is in response to his request that I include in this book highly speculative ideas and my own personal motivations for performing this research.

  This approach will satisfy no one in every respect. There is intense friction between what we know intellectually, or even intuitively, and what we experience with the aid of DMT. As one of our volunteers exclaimed after his first high-dose session, “Wow! I never expected that!” Or as Dogen, a thirteenth-century Japanese Buddhist teacher, said, “We must always be disturbed by the truth.”

  Enthusiasts of the psychedelic drug culture may dislike my conclusion: that DMT has no beneficial effects in and of itself; that rather, the context in which people take it is at least as important. Proponents of drug control may condemn what they read as encouragement to take psychedelic drugs and a glorification of the DMT experience. Practitioners and spokespersons of traditional religions may reject the suggestion that spiritual states can be accessed, and mystical information gained, through drugs. Those who have undergone “alien abduction,” and their advocates, may interpret my suggestion that DMT is intimately involved in these events as a challenge to the “reality” of their experiences. Opponents and supporters of abortion rights may find fault with my proposal that a pineal DMT release at forty-nine days after conception marks the entrance of the spirit into the fetus. Brain researchers may object to the suggestion that DMT affects the brain’s ability to receive information, rather than only generating those perceptions. They also may dismiss the proposal that DMT can allow our brains to perceive dark matter or parallel universes, realms of existence inhabited by conscious entities.

  However, if I did not describe all the ideas behind the DMT studies, and the entire range of our volunteers’ experiences, I would not be telling the entire tale. And without the radical proposals I offer in an attempt to understand volunteers’ sessions, DMT: The Spirit Molecule might have, at best, little effect on the scope of discussion about psychedelics; at worst, the book would reduce the field. Nor would I be honest if I did not share my own speculations and theories, which are based on decades of study and listening to hundreds of DMT sessions. This is why I did it. This is what happened. This is what I think about it.

  It is so important for us to understand consciousness. It is just as important to place psychedelic drugs in general, and DMT in particular, into a personal and cultural matrix in which we do the most good, and the least harm. In such a wide-open area of inquiry, it is best that we reject no ideas until we actually disprove them. It is in the interest of enlarging the discussion about psychedelic drugs that I’ve written DMT: The Spirit Molecule.

  Prologue: First Sessions

  One morning in December 1990, I gave both Philip and Nils an injection of a large dose of intravenous DMT. These two men were the first people in the study to receive DMT, and they were helping me determine the best dose and manner of injecting it. They were our “human guinea pigs.”

  Two weeks earlier, I had given the very first dose of DMT to Philip. As I will describe, the intramuscula
r injection, into his shoulder, didn’t give completely satisfactory results. We then switched to the intravenous route, and Nils received the drug that way for the first time a week later. Nils’s reaction indicated that the dose we gave him was too low. So today Philip and Nils were going to receive substantially higher doses of intravenous DMT.

  It was hard to believe we really were giving DMT to human volunteers. A two-year process of obtaining permission and funding, which I felt would never end, was finally over. Attaining the goal never seemed as likely as the continual struggle to do so.

  Philip and Nils both had previous experience with DMT, and I was glad they did. About a year before starting our study, they had attended a ceremony in which a Peruvian folk healer gave all participants ayahuasca, the legendary DMT-containing tea. The two men were enthusiastic about this orally active form of DMT and were eager to smoke pure DMT the next day, when a member of the workshop made it available. They wanted to feel its effects in a much more immediate and intense manner than the tea form allowed.

  Philip’s and Nils’s experiences smoking DMT were typical: a startlingly rapid onset of effects, a kaleidoscopic display of visual hallucinations, and a separation of consciousness from the physical body. And, most curiously, there was a feeling of “the other” somewhere within the hallucinatory world to which this remarkable psychedelic allowed them entrance.

  Their prior experience with DMT was a very important aspect of bringing them in as the first volunteers. Philip and Nils were familiar with the effects of DMT. Even more crucial, they were familiar with the effects of smoking the drug, which would help them gauge the adequacy of the two different administration methods I was considering, intramuscular (IM) or intravenous (IV), in reproducing the full effects of the smoking route. Since recreational users of DMT usually smoke it, I wanted to approximate as closely as possible the effects as they occur when taken in this manner.