Curious Primate’s Guide to DMT

DMT is a truly fascinating substance, and not just because it can blow your face clean off: it was also discovered in reverse.
That’s right, first DMT was chemically synthesized in 1931.  It wasn’t until 1950 that it was discovered to already exist in nature.  That’s funny enough, but things get downright creepy in 1972, when humans discovered DMT already exists within our brains.  Clearly, this is worthy of a closer look.  Plus, did I mention it can blow your face clean off?

Strassman elaborates:

Pineal DMT makes available those particular non-embodied contents of consciousness. All the factors previously described combine for one final burst of DMT production: catecholamine release; decreased breakdown and increased production of DMT; reduced anti-DMT; and decomposing pineal tissue. Therefore, it may be that the pineal is the most active organ in the body at the time of death....

A word of caution before we look deeper, and before the reader is tempted to romanticize this drug.  As puts it on his superbly written site Rigorous Intuition:

Strassman ended his clinical studies of the drug in part because he gave serious weight to the warning of a “highly intuitive” friend who told him she saw “evil spirits hovering around you. They want to come through this plane, using you and the drugs.”

If that sounds superstitious or absurd, that merely means you don’t have friends who are capable of seeing like that.  Some of us do, and we find your scoffing adorable.  (I would refer the curious reader to the Barbara Brennan School of Healing.)

What his friend pointed out is very true—DMT is fairly sinister stuff, once you get to know it.  The drug is more accurately considered a death molecule than a spirit molecule.  It’s hilarious that DMT is illegal, because it has to be the single least addictive drug in the known Universe. In fact, it can blow your face clean off.

DMT is not a substance that humans want “more” of, ever.  This is because the body is far more intelligent than what we consider “the mind”.  Certainly, humans do return to the drug --- I know I sure have, nyuk nyuk --- but it takes awhile. 

Basic Pointers from the 5th Dimension

When you’re considering taking any drug ever --- do some research. If you’re online reading this, you have no excuse for dying in some grubby emergency room.  Start with the Erowid vaults, which is more information than anyone but a chemist would probably need.  The good people at DeOxy Dot Org also have an outstanding collection of DMT resources.

Also consider this passage from Jeremy Narby’s dope little book The Cosmic Serpent:

...for several weeks, I went over the scientific literature on hallucinogens and their supposed effects on the human brain.

Here is a fact I learned during my reading: We do not know how our visual system works. As you read these words, you do not really see the ink, the paper, your hands, and the surroundings, but an internal and three-dimensional image that reproduces them almost exactly and that is constructed by your brain. The photons reflected by this page strike the retinas of your eyes, which transform them into electrochemical information; the optic nerves relay this information to the visual cortex at the back of the head, where a cascade-like network of nerve cells separates the input into categories (form, color, movement, depth, etc.). How the brain goes about reuniting these sets of categorized information into a coherent image is still a mystery. This also means that the neurological basis of consciousness is unknown.

Strangely, and with few exceptions, these basic facts are not mentioned in the thousands of scientific studies on hallucinations; in books with titles such as “Origin and Mechanisms of Hallucinations”, experts provide partial and mainly hypothetical answers, which they formulate in complicated terms, giving the impression that they have attained the objective truth, or are about to do so.

In the second half of the 1960s, hallucinogens became illegal in the Western world. Shortly thereafter, scientific studies of these substances, which had been so prolific during the previous two decades, were stopped across the board. Ironically it was around this time that several researchers pointed out that, according to science’s strict criteria, LSD most often does not induce true hallucinations, where the images are confused with reality. People under the influence of LSD nearly always know that the visual distortions or the cascades of dots and colors that they perceive are not real, but are due to the action of a psychedelic agent.

In 1979, it was discovered that the human brain seems to secrete dimethyltryptamine—which is also one of the active ingredients of ayahuasca. This substance produces true hallucinations, in which the visions replace normal reality convincingly, such as fluorescent snakes to whom one excuses oneself as one steps over them. Unfortunately, scientific research on dimethyltryptamine is rare. To this day, the clinical studies of its effects on “normal” human beings can be counted on the fingers of one hand.”

So, as one of my very favorite humans puts it, “you are swimming in the deep end of the pool.”

And, finally, the goods

Like we’re just gonna quote some dope book at you and not let you see for yourself?  C’mon now:

DMT: The Spirit Molecule, by Dr. Rick Strassman.

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