DMT: The Spirit Molecule
This month I decided to look at mind expansion, making this weeks book DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor’s Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences by Dr. Rick Strassman.
DMT is the short version of di-methyl-tryptamine and it is a naturally occurring psychedelic substance that is found in everyone. All people and many animals naturally produce this. It may be all animals but I don’t want to exaggerate because I don’t know that all animals have been tested for it’s presence. It is also found in many plants…like a lot of plants, again I don’t want to say all plants, but of the plants that have been tested, a significant percentage of them naturally produce DMT. DMT is the active psychedelic agent in ayahuasca.
So if it’s so prevalent, why aren’t we all walking around stoned out of our minds all the time? Well, basically, we also all naturally produce MAO’s, monoamine oxidase, which keeps the DMT in check naturally. For most people. Strassman discusses that during the early days of psychedelic research, meaning between approximately 1947 and 1970 when congress passed the Controlled Substances Act, psychedelic research was a bit like the wild west of psychiatric care. And tremendous research was done during this 23 year period and it was discovered that people with schizophrenia may naturally produce higher levels of DMT, combined with naturally produced MAOi’s, or monoamine oxidase inhibitors, which means they ARE walking around stoned all the time. So…if you were thinking that would be cool, think about the hellscape someone who is in a psychotic break is going through. It is not cool, it is heartbreaking.
Ayahuasca is actually produced by the introduction of harmaline or beta carbolines to the DMT brew. Harmaline is found naturally in exactly two plants... so far. Again, not sure how many plants have been tested for it. In South America, it’s found in Banisteriopsis caapi, in Europe and Africa it’s found in Syrian Rue. What’s so special about harmaline as a substance is that it is a natural MAOI, meaning it temporarily suppresses the monoamine oxidases that interfere with experiencing DMT.
Where does DMT come from? This is the fascinating question that Dr. Strassman was trying to determine, and it’s his belief that the primary source of its creation is the pineal gland. So what is the pineal gland? Here’s where things get interesting. The pineal gland is found deep inside the brain and it’s primary function is creation of melatonin…that stuff that helps you sleep at night.
Some interesting things about the pineal gland is that while it’s found in the brain, it is not composed of brain tissue. If actually forms in your mouth during gestation. And on the 49th day, it moves into position in your brain and begins producing melatonin and DMT.
Now….if you want an INTERESTING spiritual connection, according to the Tibetan Book of the Dead…which I have not read, but Dr. Strassman references in this book, is that the 49th day after death is when the soul reincarnates. This is ONE of the reasons Dr. Strassman references DMT as The Spirit Molecule. That synchronicity between 49 days after conception the pineal gland moves into place, and 49 days after death, you reincarnate.
My own thought on reading this is that the pineal gland forms in the mouth so that we may speak the word of the god, and is protected in the brain, right behind the chakra point known as the third eye. Also, if the pineal gland is the seat of the soul, than we should all really rethink the legality of abortion after 49 days. Because if Dr. Strassman is right…then at 49 days that baby has a soul. And if I’m right, that baby now knows the name of god….whoever that may be for you.
Dr. Strassman learned that DMT is produced in massive quantities during major trauma…I mean MAJOR. Like…near death. When you are seeing heaven’s gates, your brain is likely producing DMT. For women, when you give birth, assuming it’s natural birth not caesarian section, your body will release excess DMT. The baby will also release excess DMT during canal birth.
Nearly 20 years after all psychedelics were classified schedule 1, meaning no known benefit and likely to be highly addictive, Dr. Strassman was in a professional position to see if he could get legal clearance to start experimenting with DMT clinically.
And he includes a detailed description of the application process, not just to University of New Mexico School of Medicine, where the study would take place, but to the DEA, who had to authorize use of this Schedule 1 drug, which Strassman had to include detailed description of how this would be tracked and monitored against theft, and the FDA, who had to approve who ever made the DMT’s production to ensure it was safe for human use, and not just lab use. From start to finish the application process was very nearly two years. Like 1 year 11 months. His was the first proposal submitted ot UNM in 01/1989. He began writing his proposal in like July of 1988. Submitted in 01/1989, and received all the green lights from the various agencies involved in 11/1990.
When the process started, he started with just two volunteers to discover what the best doses would be, for high, medium, and low doses. And would they be injected intramuscular or intravenous? Initially, they tried intramuscular. Which had minimal impact. So they went to intravenous, which means pure DMT injected directly into the blood stream. Couldn’t eat it, because the MAO’s in the stomach would suppress the DMT immediately.
So intravenous, with I believe the low dose was .05 mg/kg, and high dose was .4 mg/kg. I think medium was .2 mg/kg.
Now, I know in Dr. Strassman’s book The Psychedelic Handbook he talks about set, setting, and dose. Since this was all for science, science dictated all three. The .4 mg/kg was determined to be the best high dose based on one of the first volunteers reactions to .6 mg/kg dose. So they rolled it back a bit.
Set and setting…one feeds the other. Set is your mental preparedness for this. To get the best results, and as part of his screening process, he wanted people who already had experience with psychedelics, this was partly to minimized the risk of someone gaining a dependency on the drug being administered. If they were already known users, they couldn’t really point at DMT and say that’s why I’m now an addict. So for legal reasons, they wanted experienced users. But for all that, people who participated in the study knew going in that this was taking place at a medical facility. This likely colored some peoples experiences.
Setting…well, it was a hospital room. They tried to make it as pleasant as possible, but they needed the medical equipment so they could monitor vital signs. And this was important, at least one participant was only able to take one dose due to their blood pressure skyrocketing over the medically acceptable levels. But setting feeds set and quite a few participants reported seeing beings who were medically experimenting on them. Would their experience have been different if this had happened in a beautiful park outside?
People reported explosions of color, sound, sometimes the beings they encountered seemed threatening, others were very comforted by them. Not everyone had a pleasant trip, one volunteer began screaming no no no no no after the injection. One reported being sexually assaulted by I think it was alligators. Several reported feeling like they were dying, although, none of them were scared of that, which supports Dr. Strassman’s belief that death releases a high amount of DMT.
The experiment ran from 1991 to 1995 and Dr. Strassman had several factors that led to him winding it down. He had a grad student assistant who got way too involved, experimenting with other psychedelics with the experiment volunteers, and frequently enough that Dr. Strassman had to actually forbid him from doing so. Then the kid showed up at Dr. Strassman’s house wanting to drop acid with him. Which boggles the mind…I’m trying to imagine any of my jobs where I would have just popped by my bosses house to hang out and I just can’t. I’ve been blessed with my supervisors, but there’s a very clear professional line you don’t cross, and dropping acid with your boss is one of them. He also had personal reasons having to do with family that contributed to his shutting down the study.
Dr. Strassman wanted to branch out and repeat the experiment with psilocybin, but the problem there is he couldn’t get the University’s blessing to take psilocybin outside of the hospital and into nature. Why is that a problem? Well, the average length of a DMT trip in this experiment, even at the highest dose of .4mg/kg, was 15 minutes. Generally, within 30 minutes to an hour the participant was good to go home. The average duration of a psilocybin trip is 5 to 6 HOURS. 15 minutes in a hospital room may not be ideal, but for science, most were willing to do it. 6 hours, tripping balls, stuck in a less idealistic setting, was a bit of a harder sell.
Then there was the brick wall he ran into with his spiritual community. Dr. Strassman was a Buddhist at this time, and while initially he had support from the Buddhist community, their leader…main monk… I forget the spiritual title, but that person died. In the rush for political election to supreme position, the Buddhist community came out hard against use of psychedelics to seek enlightenment. Despite the fact that the ultimate winner of this race to the top of the Buddhist spiritual hierarchy had had their own first enlightenment experience under the influence of I think it was LSD. But the Buddhist community came down on Dr. Strassman to end the study as there shouldn’t be any shortcuts to spirituality or enlightenment. Which just reminded me again of Brian Muraresku’s book The Immortality Key.
They maybe half right though. One of the people who participated in the study was an urban shaman, called in the book Carlos although I don’t know that that was his real name as Dr. Strassman, quite rightly, takes patient confidentiality quite seriously and so may have used a pseudonym in his book. Carlos, at the end of his doses, said something like he wouldn’t do it again without the ceremony around it. Set and Setting are everything. This was not a spiritual event, this was scientific, and that was the set Carlos had walking in to it. Ceremony might include everything from chanting to drums, to sitting in nature, but that setting makes all the difference.
Dr. Strassman, in his closing thoughts, provided other studies he would like to see done, but as this book was written in 2001 I don’t know if these have since been done, is testing on how much DMT IS found in mothers at the moment of delivery, and in their newly born babies. How would a slow drip release of DMT impact dreams? If the study had been done outside the confines of a hospital, how would that have impacted participants experiences?
This book was fascinating. And exceptionally well written, it pulled me right along and before I knew it I was done reading it. I think there is so much more we don’t know, and until the government gets out of our way, we won’t know. And I’m actually not referencing those who go out and try just to see. I’m talking about the actual science of it. And some of it, even without government interference, we’ll likely never know. Because who wants to drop acid, then spend some time in an MRI? That sounds horrifying. But what might we learn? Do psychedelics open the consciousness to other dimensions? To the multiverse? Is the pineal gland the seat of the soul? And how would such be measured?
