“When you look to the heavens, hold onto your hat.”
— Yiddish expression
DIMETHYLTRYPTAMINE (DMT) IS ONE trippy drug. It is a powerful endogenous (originating inside the body) hallucinogen. Similar to LSD, it is popular with youthful, investigational bon vivants enjoying rock concerts, uncensored environments and downtown art gallery strolls.
DMT occurs naturally in many plants and animals, including humans. For us to get high from it, this strange substance needs to be injected, sniffed or smoked. However, when the ayahuasca vine, where DMT is found organically, is mixed with a shrub called chacruna into a bitter brown liquid, it can be consumed orally and has been used ritually and medicinally for centuries by tribes in the Amazon. Depending on the physique and temperament of the user and the potency of the potion, a DMT trip starts almost immediately and usually lasts about an hour. The higher the dosage, the more fantastic the hallucinations.
DMT is increasingly popular. Vape pens filled with DMT started selling underground in 2018. One website includes 800 stories of trips over the last few years by psychic adventurers. Trips often include feelings of disorder, floating, detachment from the body (“my body just didn’t feel relevant anymore,” one user told the BBC), elevated moods, encountering and often communicating with “sentient entities,” altered sense of time, euphoria and other mystical experiences. After the trip, there are often long-term psychological changes: more kindness, less self-centeredness and greater acceptance of life’s challenges – including death.
If you’ve read the first few columns of The Meaning of Death (see archives: March 24, March 31, April 7 and April 14, 2024), this may sound familiar to you. Yes, the experience of taking DMT is similar to a near-death experience. A small 2018 study at the National Institute of Health, found “DMT models the near-death experience.” The authors discovered significant overlap between individuals who took DMT and those who had near-death experiences.
Studies show that DMT is not addictive and has “low abuse potential.” It is currently the focus of several scientific studies as a potential treatment for major depression, Parkinson’s disease and strokes. In small amounts, DMT naturally occurs in human brains and in some human and other mammal tissues. In 2019, experiments found that the rat brain is capable of synthesizing and releasing DMT. It is possible, but not yet proven, that human brains may also release DMT.
Like many illegal drugs, DMT’s effects on the brain have not been thoroughly researched. But in 1990, Dr. Rick Strassman, a professor of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico’s School of Medicine, began a five-year project administering some 400 doses of DMT to 60 volunteers. From this work, he hypothesizes that the human brain releases a rush of DMT at death and near-death. (Without volunteers willing to have their skulls opened as they die, Strassman’s theory is hard to confirm.)
I started researching DMT because my good, close, personal friend Mason Lester suggested that near-death experiences might have nothing to do with heaven or hell but might be caused by a sudden, natural infusion of self-produced DMT invading the brain. That is the cardinal question: What is the relationship between DMT and death? It may not be a portal to the afterlife, but it might be an example.
Next week: The meaning of death according to Kurt Vonnegut