DMT: The Spirit Molecule

by Rick Strassman

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.

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.

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.

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.”

“I’ll wipe your shoulder with some alcohol. Take as much time as you need to collect yourself. Then I’ll inject the needle into your arm, draw back to make sure I’m not in a blood vessel, and then push in the plunger on the syringe. It might sting, or it might not. I don’t really know. You ought to feel something in a minute or less. But I’m not sure what that something will be. You’re the first.”

I consulted with my colleague who had made the DMT, David Nichols, Ph.D., at Purdue University in Indiana. He agreed that I needed to switch to the intravenous route. Reflecting upon our mutual anxiety about this change in plans, he added dryly, “I’m glad it’s you and not me.” It was time to consult with Dr. W., the physician at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) who, after helping guide the project through the two-year regulatory process, was now overseeing its performance. When I asked his opinion, he laughed and said, “You are the only research scientist in the world giving DMT. You’re the expert. You decide.”

Nils was a long and lanky fellow, charming and fun to be around. He had taken LSD many times, having “lost track after the 150th dose.” The first time he had smoked DMT, at Philip’s house the year before, he was powerfully moved. He said, It made strong telepathic impressions, causing mental bonds with the people around me. This was confusing and overwhelming. I became very excited as an inner voice spoke to me. This was my intuition directly relating to me. It was the most intense experience of my life. I want to go back. I saw a different space with bright bands of color. I couldn’t raise my hands, I tripped so hard. It is a mental Mecca, an excellent reference point for all other psychedelics. Those around me looked like alien space insects. I realized they were all part of it, too.

This tendency in our volunteers, to persevere even under the possibility of an annihilating psychedelic experience, was marked. It was most apparent during our tolerance study, which took place the next year, in 1991, in which volunteers received four large doses of DMT, each separated by only 30 minutes. Not one volunteer, no matter how worn out, refused that fourth and final high dose of DMT.

Now that was what you would call a transcendent experience. I died and went to heaven.

It was a cosmic blowtorch, a tempest of color, bewildering, like I was thrown overboard into a storm and was spinning out of control, being tossed like a cork.

Hundreds of years of anthropological research have demonstrated that these societies used psychedelics to maintain social solidarity, aid the healing arts, and inspire artistic and spiritual creativity.

Church effectively suppressed information about the use of those materials in both the Old and New Worlds and persecuted bearers and practitioners of that knowledge. It is only in the last fifty years that we have realized that Mexican Indian use of magic mushrooms did not entirely die out in the sixteenth century.

German chemists isolated mescaline from peyote in the 1890s. The more literary among those exploring its effects hailed its ability to open the gates of an “artificial paradise.” However, medical and psychiatric interest in mescaline was surprisingly restrained, and researchers published only a limited number of papers by the end of the 1930s. The unpleasant nausea and vomiting that often occur with mescaline may have had something to do with the lack of interest in it.

In 1938 the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann was working with ergot, a rye fungus, in the natural products division of Sandoz Laboratories, even then a major pharmaceutical company. He hoped to find a drug that might help stop uterine bleeding after childbirth. One of these ergot-based compounds was LSD-25, or lysergic acid diethylamide. It had little effect on the uterus of laboratory animals, and Hofmann shelved it. Five years later, “a curious presentiment” called Hofmann back to examine LSD, and he accidentally discovered its powerful psychedelic properties.

In fact, Hofmann nearly overdosed himself with what he thought was too small a quantity to possibly be mind-altering: a quarter milligram.

Hoffman and his Swiss colleagues were quick to publish their findings in the early 1940s. Because of the highly altered state of mind LSD produced, and the traditional psychiatric context in which researchers explored it, scientists decided to emphasize its “psychosis-mimicking” properties.1

In 1948 researchers discovered that serotonin carried in the bloodstream was responsible for contracting the muscles lining veins and arteries. This was vitally important in understanding how to control the bleeding process. The name for serotonin came from the Latin sero, “blood,” and tonin, “tightening.”

A few years later, in the mid-1950s, investigators discovered serotonin in the brain of laboratory animals. Subsequent experiments demonstrated its precise localization and its effects on electrical and chemical functions of individual nerve cells. Drugs or surgery that modified serotonin-containing areas of an animal’s brain profoundly altered sexual and aggressive behavior as well as sleep, wakefulness, and a diverse array of basic biological functions. The presence and function of serotonin in the brain and in animal behavior clinched its role as the first known neurotransmitter.2

Numerous research publications suggested that the normal mechanisms of talk therapy were much more effective with the addition of a psychedelic drug. Dozens of scientific articles described remarkable success in helping previously untreatable patients suffering from obsessions and compulsions, post-traumatic stress, eating disorders, anxiety, depression, alcoholism, and heroin dependence.

psychedelic psychotherapy in these patients had striking psychological effects. Depression lifted, requirements for pain medication fell dramatically, and patients’ acceptance of their disease and its prognosis improved markedly. In addition, patients and their families seemed able to address deep-seated and emotionally charged issues in ways never before possible.

In addition, it soon became apparent that the experiences described by volunteers under deep psychedelic influences were strikingly similar to those of practitioners of traditional Eastern meditation.

The overlap between consciousness alteration induced by psychedelic drugs and that induced by meditation attracted the attention of writers outside of academics, including the English novelist and religious philosopher Aldous Huxley. Huxley underwent his own remarkably positive mescaline and LSD experiences under the watchful eye of the Canadian psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond, who visited him in Los Angeles in the 1950s. Huxley soon wrote about his drug sessions and the musings they inspired in him. His writings on the nature and value of the psychedelic experience were compelling and eloquent, inspiring many individuals’ attempts to attain, and researchers to elicit, spiritual enlightenment through psychedelic drugs. Despite that fact that his ideas stimulated a massive movement toward popular experimentation with the psychedelics, Huxley was a staunch advocate of the theory that only an elite group of intellectuals and artists should have access to them. He did not believe that the common man or woman was capable of using psychedelics in the safest and most productive ways possible.5

However, terminal illness studies and discussions of similarities between psychedelic drug effects and mystical experiences brought religion and science together in an uneasy mix. The research was moving further away from Sandoz’s original agenda. Complicating things further was LSD’s escape from the laboratory in the 1960s. Reports of emergency room visits, suicides, murders, birth defects, and broken chromosomes filled the media.

The media exaggerated and emphasized psychedelic drugs’ negative physical and psychological effects. Some of these reports resulted from poor research; others were simply fabricated. Subsequent publications cleared psychedelics from serious toxicity, including chromosome damage. However, these follow-up studies generated much less fanfare than did the original damaging reports.

Papers in the psychiatric literature describing “bad trips,” or adverse psychological reactions to psychedelics, also multiplied, but are similarly limited. In order to address these concerns in my own study, I read every paper describing such negative effects and published the results. It was clear that rates of psychiatric complications were extraordinarily low in controlled research settings, for both normal volunteers and psychiatric patients. However, when psychiatrically ill or unstable individuals took impure or unknown psychedelics, combined with alcohol and other drugs, in an uncontrolled setting with inadequate supervision, problems occurred.7

In response to the public’s anxiety about uncontrolled LSD use, and over the objections of nearly every investigator in the field, the United States Congress passed a law in 1970 making LSD and other psychedelics illegal. The government told scientists to return their drugs, paperwork requirements for obtaining and maintaining new supplies of psychedelics for research became a time-consuming and confusing burden, and there was little hope for new projects. Money for studies dried up and researchers abandoned their experiments. With the new drug laws in place, interest in human psychedelic research died off almost as rapidly as it had begun. It was as if the psychedelic drugs became “un-discovered.”

The natural process within psychiatric research is for scientists to refine research questions, methods, and applications. This

The most powerful members of their profession discovered that science, data, and reason were incapable of defending their research against the enactment of repressive laws fueled by opinion, emotion, and the media.

Set is our own makeup, both long term and immediate. It is our past, our present, and our potential future; our preferences, ideas, habits, and feelings. Set also includes our body and brain.

The psychedelic experience also hinges on setting: who or what is or isn’t in our immediate surroundings; the environment we’re in, whether natural or urban, indoor or outdoor; the quality of the air and ambient sound around us; and so on. Setting also partakes of the set of who is with us while we take the drug, whether they be a friend or a stranger, relaxed or tense, a supportive guide or a probing scientist.

Scientists rarely acknowledge the importance of the name they give to psychedelics, even though they know how powerfully expectations modify drug effects. All undergraduate psychology students learn this in their introductory psychology courses when they review landmark studies published in the 1960s. These experiments injected volunteers with adrenaline, the “fight-or-flight” hormone, under different sets of expectations. Adrenaline caused a calm and relaxed state in volunteers told they were receiving a sedative. If told that the experimental drug was stimulating, volunteers felt the more typical anxiety and energy.9

Try this mental exercise: Consider how you might look forward to your day as a “research subject” under the influence of a “psychotomimetic agent.” Then reconsider: How would you feel about your role as a “celebrant” in a “ceremony” involving an “entheogenic sacrament”? How would these different contexts affect your interpretation of the hallucinations and intense mood swings brought on by the drug? Would you be “going crazy” or having an “enlightenment experience”?

Psychedelics show you what’s in and on your mind, those subconscious thoughts and feelings that are are hidden, covered up, forgotten, out of sight, maybe even completely unexpected, but nevertheless imminently present.

Psilocin differs from DMT by only one oxygen. I like to think of psilocybin/psilocin as “orally active DMT.”

LSD, mescaline, and ibogaine are longer-acting. Effects begin 30 to 60 minutes after swallowing them. The effects of LSD and mescaline may last 12 hours, ibogaine up to 24 hours. Psilocybin effects are slightly shorter; they begin within 30 minutes and last 4 to 6 hours.

Maybe that’s another reason why the psychedelics are so frightening and so inspiring: They bend and stretch the basic pillars, the structure and defining characteristics, of our human identity.

Psychedelic alchemist Alexander Shulgin devotes an entire chapter to DMT in TIHKAL: Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved. He aptly entitles this chapter “DMT Is Everywhere” and declares: “DMT is . . . in this flower here, in that tree over there, and in yonder animal. [It] is, most simply, almost everywhere you choose to look.” Indeed, it is getting to the point where one should report where DMT is not found, rather than where it is.1

Beginning in the mid-1800s, explorers of the Amazon, particularly Richard Spruce from England and Alexander von Humboldt from Germany, described the effects of exotic mind-altering snuffs and brews prepared from plants by indigenous tribes.

While psychedelic plants languished in natural history museum archives, Canadian chemist R. Manske, in unrelated research, synthesized a new drug called N,N-dimethyltryptamine, or DMT.

As far as anyone knows, Manske made DMT, noted its structure, and then placed his supply in some isolated corner of his laboratory, where it quietly collected dust. No one yet knew about DMT’s existence in mindaltering plants, its psychedelic properties, or its presence in the human body. There was little interest in psychedelics in scientific circles until decades later, after World War II.

One male physician reported: The whole world is brilliant. . . . The whole room is filled with spirits. It makes me dizzy. . . . Now it is too much! . . . I feel exactly as if I were flying. . . . I have the feeling that this is above everything, above the earth. It is comforting to know I am back on earth again. . . . Everything has a spiritual tinge but is so real. . . . I feel that I have landed. . . .

A female physician stated: How simple everything is. . . . In front of me are two quiet, sunlit Gods. . . . I think they are welcoming me into this new world. There is a deep silence as in the desert. . . . 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.

thus became the first endogenous human psychedelic.12

DMT is the simplest of the tryptamine psychedelics. Compared to other molecules, DMT is rather small. Its weight is 188 “molecular units,” meaning that it is not significantly larger than glucose, the simplest sugar in our bodies, which weighs 180, and only ten times heavier than a water molecule, which weighs 18. By comparison, consider the weight of LSD at 323, or of mescaline at 211.16

Now that we have reviewed the history and science behind DMT, let’s return to the most pressing question, one that no one has adequately answered: “What is DMT doing in our bodies?” More specifically, let’s ask, “Why do we make DMT in our bodies?” My answer is: “Because it is the spirit molecule.”

Using these experimental results, scientists concluded that melatonin was the crucial pineal factor in whose presence reproductive function flagged, and in whose absence reproductive function flourished. Put simply, melatonin possessed powerful anti-reproductive effects.8

The unique enzymes that convert serotonin, melatonin, or tryptamine into psychedelic compounds also are present in extraordinarily high concentrations in the pineal. These enzymes, the methyltransferases, attach a methyl group—that is, one carbon and three hydrogens—onto other molecules, thus methylating them. Simply methylate tryptamine twice, and we have di-methyl-tryptamine, or DMT.

It is uncertain whether beta-carbolines by themselves are psychedelic.

Well as of 1998 Grella et al shown that some are actually hallucinogenic in humans related with DOM effects: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9649961/

Thus, the pineal gland may produce both DMT and chemicals that magnify and prolong its effects.

2019 study found rats brain produces dmt even in absence of the pineal. So it may be a neuro transmitter! Also after an induced cardiac arrest the rats produced higher levels of dmt https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-45812-w.pdf

Under what circumstances might the pineal gland make DMT instead of the minimally psychoactive melatonin?

What about when blood stream adrenaline levels are so high they pass through the filter which prevents it to reach the pineal?