I believe psychedelics can help with understanding the placebo effect
Una Meistere
An interview with Dr. Rick Strassman, an American clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, a renowned researcher of psychedelics, and the author of DMT: The Spirit Molecule (2000).
Thirty years ago, Dr. Rick Strassman, who is a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, initiated – both directly and indirectly – the current renaissance of psychedelics and the resumption of scientific research on the use of psychedelic substances for medical and rehabilitation purposes. At the same time, with the ever-increasing changes in the fundamental understanding of human existence, he provoked us to examine from a different point of view the existing notions of the mind, brain and consciousness as well as the potential role of DMT in the scientific study of the mysteries of the human mind and soul.
Between 1990 and 1995, Strassman conducted the first U.S. Government-approved and funded clinical research on DMT at the University of New Mexico, injecting sixty volunteers (400 doses in total) with DMT, one of the most powerful psychedelics known. His detailed review of these sessions provided a unique insight into the nature of the human mind and the therapeutic potential of psychedelics.
Not only is DMT the only psychedelic substance to be naturally formed in the human body in small concentrations (it has been identified as being a normal constituent of human metabolism), it also exists in every mammal investigated and in hundreds of plants as well. DMT is found in virtually every living organism on earth, which raises a number of questions about its role in the human body and in evolutionary processes in general. DMT is also one of the ingredients in ayahuasca, the psychedelic Amazonian brew often referred to as “sacred medicine”. At high doses, DMT reliably induces an experience that is in a number of aspects comparable to spiritual experience: visions, voices, a seeming separation of consciousness from the body, extreme emotional states, contact with seemingly discarnate intelligences or entities, and also near-death experiences (NDE).
N,N-Dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, was first synthesised by German-Canadian chemist Richard Manske in 1931. The first scientific study of the psychotropic effects of DMT was conducted in the mid-1950s by Hungarian chemist and psychiatrist Stephen Szara, who later emigrated to the United States, where he became the chief of the biomedical branch of the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse.
In 1972, the Nobel laureate Julius Axelrod of the National Institutes of Health discovered DMT in human brain tissue, leading to speculation that the compound plays a role in psychosis. However, further study on this topic, as well as research into psychedelic substances in general, was abandoned because of the growing backlash against these compounds. In 1971, with the passage of the Convention on Psychotropic Substances and as part of the so-called war on drugs, DMT and a number of other psychedelic substances had been declared illegal in the United States, which led to the discontinuation of all ongoing and planned clinical trials. At the same time, however, and despite the ban, these substances continued to play an important role in cultural processes – beyond the official scientific and public arenas.
Strassman’s revolutionary study was described in 2001 in the book DMT: The Spirit Molecule, which gained cult status among those interested in psychedelics and higher states of consciousness. The book also became a source and reference point for further scientific research as well as personal journeys of the mind.
Strassman says his interest in psychedelic substances was motivated by his attempt to understand “the biology of naturally occurring, highly altered states of consciousness; in particular, spiritual or religious experiences. I believed that since administering DMT, an endogenous psychedelic, replicated features of non-drug spiritual experience – meditation, near-death experiences, enlightenment, etc. – one could suggest that endogenous DMT plays a role in the non-drug state.”*
DMT: The Spirit Molecule has been published in at least fourteen languages, with a total of a quarter-million copies sold. It also inspired a documentary film by the same name. In it, Strassman speculates about whether and what kind of role endogenous DMT plays at the moment of physical death and birth as well as during the highest states of meditation and even sexual transcendence. He wonders whether it may provide a unique scientific explanation for the phenomenon of alien-abduction experiences and contemplates the link between DMT and the pineal gland, considered by Hindus to be the site of the sixth chakra and by René Descartes to be the seat of the soul.
Strassman is also the co-author of Inner Paths to Outer Space (2008). In 2014, he published DMT and the Soul of Prophecy: A New Science of Spiritual Revelation in the Hebrew Bible, which explores “the biology of spirituality” and the eventual integrative link between the DMT state and that of the prophetic experience in the Hebrew Bible. It explains how the “prophetic state of consciousness” may share biological and metaphysical mechanisms with the DMT effect. In a way, the book is Strassman’s answer to his own question of “What does it mean that DMT, a simple chemical naturally found in all of our bodies, instantaneously opens us to an interactive spirit world that feels more real than our own world?” Also, what is the most appropriate spiritual model for this experience? Which spiritual model resonates best with the DMT experience? At the same time, the book is Strassman’s attempt to build a bridge between two still quite conflicting camps: theology and science.
“I like to define metaphysics as the ‘science of the invisible’, although this is rather idiosyncratic. A more formal definition is the science of first principles of being and knowledge, or speculative philosophy in the widest sense. When set into religious context, it shares many features with theology,” he writes in the book.
Examining mediaeval commentaries on the Hebrew Bible, Strassman reveals how Jewish metaphysics provides a top-down model for both the prophetic and DMT states, a model he calls theoneurology – “a counterpoint to the present research model of neurotheology, which proposes that the brain generates spiritual experience”. He also proposes why precisely the ancient model of prophecy rooted in the Hebrew Bible is the most appropriate way for Westerners to understand the DMT experience, instead of, for example, Latin American shamanism or Eastern religious disciplines (Strassman has studied Zen Buddhism for many years and in 1984 received lay ordination in a Western Buddhist order; he also co-founded, and for several years administered, a lay Buddhist meditation group associated with the same order).
Strassman has published nearly thirty peer-reviewed scientific papers and has served as a reviewer for several psychiatric research journals. He has been a consultant to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Veterans Administration hospitals, the U.S. Social Security Administration and other state and local agencies. In 2007 he founded, with Steve Barker and Andrew Stone, the Cottonwood Research Foundation. He has been writing full-time since mid-2008, and, as he says in our conversation, is currently working on a translation (from Hebrew to English) and commentary on the Book of Genesis.
Looking back – from the moment you began your research on DMT to the point where you’re at now – was it like opening Pandora’s box, or has it been your “hero’s journey”? What good has come out of it all?
Well, yes, it’s been quite some time since I started this study. Thirty-one years ago. I gave my first dose of DMT in 1990, and I finished the study in 1995, so that’s twenty-six years ago. I had mixed feelings about the whole thing; I mean, it was so complicated. And I was the only one in the world giving DMT and the only person in the United States who was giving psychedelics, so it was pretty stressful, but it was something I had really wanted to do for a long time. Did this study answer the most fundamental questions that I brought to bear and then stopped? You know, I thought it might take a while for the rest of the scientific community to realise what we had done.
In a lot of ways, the study took place under the radar. Albuquerque is kind of off the beaten track; a lot of people don’t even know that it’s part of the United States (US). And the University of New Mexico is pretty small. There was not a lot of publicity generated from our study. The chief editor of the Archives of General Psychiatry was a fellow named Daniel Freedman, who was quite keen on my work, and he was planning to write an editorial about the importance of breaking through the regulatory barriers to get this work taking place again in America. But he passed away before the papers were published, and the new editor-in-chief wasn’t all that interested in psychedelics. Keep in mind, this was 1995. So the articles came out, and they just came and went. There wasn’t a lot of hoopla about their publication.
There was a small study at the University of Arizona a few years after mine giving psilocybin to people with obsessive compulsive disorder. And then there was a research project at the University of Miami, but that never really got off the ground, either. A long time passed from when we finished our study to the Johns Hopkins work, which came out ten years later. And because of the scope of that, and the heft of Johns Hopkins, their work got a lot more publicity and media attention.
So, ten years went by, and I had returned to clinical practice. I was just seeing patients and not doing research anymore, and I was curious to see if anybody would pick up the ball after we completed our work. In the US at least, the Hopkins studies initiated a lot more interest, both in the mainstream and in the scientific communities.
I’d say that pretty much all of the studies in the US have been quite rigorous. They haven’t overreached, except perhaps theoretically. But from a practical point of view, the studies in the US have been level-headed, sober, rigorously designed, good results. So I’m gratified in that respect, that it wasn’t a Pandora’s box.
On the other hand, there’s been a tendency for some researchers to glorify the benefits of psychedelics and to minimise the harm. As a result, they’re calling for the rescheduling of psychedelics into a much less harmful category, or a closely restricted category. Also, I think some of the mainstream books about psychedelics are fostering a certain casualness about increasing the availability of psychedelics. A number of cities have decriminalised psychedelics, the entire state of Oregon, and California is considering a statewide decriminalisation of psychedelics. I don’t think that’s especially prudent at this point, because we don’t really know what kind of safeguards would be necessary to prevent large-scale occurrences of adverse effects as well as the abuse and misuse of psychedelics. Once there’s an increase in availability and a certain casualness regarding potential adverse effects, I think we’ll be seeing more bad publicity, and in that case, it will be a Pandora’s box being opened.
I don’t think it’ll be quite the scale that took place in the first wave of psychedelic use, where people were using LSD rather than mushrooms, which is a lot stronger and longer-acting drug. And back then there just wasn’t the “street lore” about how to prevent bad trips. A lot more information has now been accumulated and is easily available for people in order to minimise adverse effects. But still, all it will take is a couple of suicides – you know, people jumping off buildings because they think they can fly – before there’s a backlash. So, it’s always a balance.
There’s been really good research, it’s being commercialised, there’s billions of dollars in evaluations of these new psychedelic startups. So I think there’s more pressure to keep the ball rolling and less pressure to recriminalise or increase the penalties. But I think the progressives need to be careful. The decriminalisation movement is being spearheaded by the progressive community, but there can then potentially be an association made between progressive causes and adverse responses to psychedelics. Kind of like a replay of the conflation of LSD use and the Vietnam War back in the 1960s. You know, “These drugs are making people too liberal, and they’re threatening to overthrow their government.” So I think that the liberal community needs to be careful that the right wing doesn’t say, “Oh, you know, there’s all this Black Lives Matter or LGBTQ rights…” If those are seen as being spurred on by psychedelic use, I think that the community needs to be prepared to explain themselves.
In the meantime, there are various completed studies, and some still on-going, about the positive effects of psychedelics in medical use. Especially the use of psychedelics in the fields of oncology and palliative care, as well as the possible benefits in treating depression and the use of psychedelics in psychotherapy.
Yes, the studies that have come out of university or academic settings are uniformly quite positive in a whole range of conditions. And also in terms of enhancing wellness. You know, nature appreciation, meditation, etc. There were also some studies earlier on about creativity. So, beyond just purely medical use to treat a pathology, there’s going to be a concerted effort at the same time to carefully define the conditions in which you can increase wellness.
Returning to your research work, you decided to explore how both science and religion can contribute to understanding DMT. Was that also a kind of personal spiritual journey? Did these studies bring you closer to who you are?
Well, the spiritual questions I brought to bear on the DMT work were quite personal. They weren’t part of the grant proposals and research protocols, which themselves were quite humdrum – it was dose-response studies of psychedelics from the point of view of psychopharmacology, serotonin receptors, neuroendocrine responsivity, autonomic variables. So the spiritual things were couched in extremely everyday research models.
But at the same time, I had personal questions about the spiritual properties of psychedelics. One of them was whether psychedelics are inherently spiritual. In other words, if you just gave the drug with a minimum of preparation, which spiritual effects would emerge? The spiritual effects I was expecting were based on my years of involvement in Zen Buddhism study and practice. The goal in Zen Buddhist meditation is the experience of enlightenment, known as kenshō or satori. The flash of white light – there’s no ego, there’s no personality, no time and space, no content per se. It’s sometimes described as emptiness, so it isn’t interactive. And these were the kinds of experiences I was expecting.
Clearly, if I had been steeped in another tradition that valued and sought other kinds of experiences, I would have expected those kinds of experiences to occur. But the model that I brought to bear was the Zen Buddhist model. And most of my volunteers were involved in some kind of meditation practice as well, so they were expecting those kinds of effects, too. So, there was the expectation or the question of whether DMT is inherently spiritual, whether it causes spiritual experience of a certain type in my volunteers.
The other question was more mechanistic. I was curious whether the effects of DMT overlapped with descriptions of non-drug spiritual states. Like NDE (near-death experience), the mystical experience, dreams, the kenshō experience… If giving DMT caused effects similar to those that occur in non-drug-altered states, one could argue for the role of endogenous DMT, that is, naturally occurring in the brain in those non-drug states. In other words, if you gave DMT and certain things occurred that were similar, for example, to the near-death state, you could then say that perhaps endogenous DMT is involved in the near-death state as well. So those were the kinds of expectations of effects that I brought to the research.
I was curious whether the effects of DMT overlapped with descriptions of non-drug spiritual states. Like NDE (near-death experience), the mystical experience, dreams, the kenshō experience…
The actual effects of DMT were not inherently spiritual. Instead, they were basically a magnification or an amplification, or clarification, of what was already going on more or less consciously in the volunteers’ minds. The one NDE that took place was in a nurse with a long-standing interest in NDE; she had been studying books on the experience and was hoping to have one as a result of our study. And in the end, she was the only person with a classic or near-classic NDE. The one mystical experience took place in a physician with a long-standing interest in mystical experience. In college he had been a religious studies major and for twenty years after that he had been involved in a group that was interested in unitive mystical experiences – the white-light kind of experience, no personality, no time or space. And he was the only person in our study with that kind of experience. A software designer entered into a white room with, you know, zeros and ones coming up, so he saw the basis of information. Somebody with mild post-traumatic stress disorder was able to work through that. A couple of people with a history of depression got depressed again. So it was clearly dependent on what was already going on in the individual’s mind more or less consciously. You could have been completely unconscious, but still it was there, and the DMT amplified it or made it conscious.
So my answer to the question of whether DMT is inherently spiritual was “no”. Psychedelic means “mind manifesting” or “mind disclosing”, which is a more generic term than “entheogenic” or “mystical mimetic” or “psychotogenic”; it just depends on what’s already in the person’s mind. The other thing that was interesting is that almost all of the experiences were full of content. You know, full of information and beings and feelings and thinking, communication, visions, voices, and also the maintenance of one’s individual personality. There was no merging with the One. The participants were still there, interacting and relating to the full contents of the state.
So my answer to the question of whether DMT is inherently spiritual was “no”. Psychedelic means “mind manifesting” or “mind disclosing”, which is a more generic term than “entheogenic” or “mystical mimetic” or “psychotogenic”; it just depends on what’s already in the person’s mind.
Once I finished the study, I wanted to look into other models that would be able to contain the idea of articulating the theory of altered states. You know, how do you get the most information you can or the best highly altered states of consciousness. And because the state I had been seeking or valuing up until then was Zen Buddhist kenshō, I started looking for one that was more compatible or more comparable with the effects of DMT. You know, full of content, interacting, time-space gone, you can communicate and what not. A series of happenstances led me to the Hebrew Bible and the prophetic state of consciousness, which is the highest state in biblical Judaism. That led me to compare the DMT state with the prophetic state and resulted in my book DMT and the Soul of Prophecy: A New Science of Spiritual Revelation in the Hebrew Bible, which came out in 2014.
I recently spoke with Eben Alexander, and when comparing his NDE with the DMT experience (he did DMT afterwards to find out how much overlap there is between the two), he described his DMT experience as “looking through a keyhole and trying to discern this incredibly rich environment out there”, while the NDE, in comparison, “was more like being granted access to the penthouse suite with panoramic views”.
That’s very interesting. Well, the quality sounds identical. If he saw through the keyhole, on a small scale, what took place in his NDE, that’s your confirmation in a way. At least for the qualitatively similarity between the two states. Quantitatively, he was in that state for a long time, for a week or so, right?
Yes, he spent seven days in a coma.
Yeah, and the DMT experience is ten minutes. So you have a lot more time to explore the DMT state, if that’s what it is, if you’re in it for a week.
Interestingly enough, speaking of being in a DMT experience for a week, toward the end of my DMT book I proposed keeping people in a prolonged DMT state by continuous infusion. We were able to demonstrate no tolerance to repeated dosing of DMT. We gave a large dose every half hour, four times in the morning, and the first trip was just as intense as the fourth trip. There was no tolerance developing. In other words, no reduced effect with repeated dosing, which does occur with the other psychedelics, such as psilocybin, LSD and mescaline. I mean, DMT is unique in that way. But because the DMT experience is so fleeting, you can’t work with it, you can’t characterise it, you can’t interact with it. You theoretically get the most out of it in the space of a ten- or fifteen-minute experience. I proposed that if you could prolong that state by giving a continuous infusion of the drug, you’d be able to learn more about it and get more out of it.
Japan-based British scientist Andrew Gallimore and I published a paper (“A Model for the Application of Target-Controlled Intravenous Infusion for a Prolonged Immersive DMT Psychedelic Experience” – Ed.) a few years back on modelling how you would do that. You know, what kind of initial dose, what kind of maintenance dose if you wanted to increase it, what to do if you wanted to decrease it, etc. Theoretically, you could keep someone in a DMT state for a week or a month, or something like that. One of my harebrained ideas is: if you’re going to Mars and the trip is like 150–300 days or something like that, you could just keep astronauts in a DMT state for as much time as you see fit, and they’d be highly entertained. They wouldn’t get bored.
One of my harebrained ideas is: if you’re going to Mars and the trip is like 150–300 days or something like that, you could just keep astronauts in a DMT state for as much time as you see fit, and they’d be highly entertained.
What is the main source of DMT in the human body? Is it the pineal gland, and what is the role of the lungs in the production of DMT? In addition to secreting DMT, the pineal gland was also found to contain the necessary enzyme (indolethylamine N-methyltransferase, or INMT) for converting tryptamine to DMT. This enzyme is found throughout the lungs as well, which provided the foundation for the hypothesis that the lungs are a major source of DMT. There’s also a hypothesis (which is still quite polarised) that we could increase the level of DMT (at least for a moment) with special breathing techniques. For example, by the prolonged breathing practised by Wim Hof, which is based on the ancient tummo meditation practice.
Well, DMT was first discovered in the lungs of rodents and rabbits, so interest focused on the lungs – the precursors, the ingredients required and the enzymes that convert the ingredients into DMT. But more than twenty years ago, Michael Thompson at the Mayo in Minnesota looked a lot more carefully at the necessary enzymes for DMT synthesis in both the rabbit and the human.** The enzymes required for DMT synthesis were not prevalent in the lung, but they were more prevalent in the brain. And so, interest then started turning more towards the brain, the central nervous system.
In my DMT book, I speculate about the possibility of the pineal gland making DMT, and I do marshal a lot of circumstantial evidence. At the time it was all sound, scientific, but circumstantial evidence, and that piqued the interest of Jimo Borjigin, a researcher at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She started looking for DMT in the pineal gland. And in 2013, she and Jon Dean, one of the graduate students there, published an article that demonstrated the presence of DMT in the living rodent’s pineal gland. So that confirmed my thinking from years before that.
The discovery of high concentrations of DMT in the rodent brain and confirmation of the same enzymes in the human brain is quite interesting. The concentrations are comparable to those you would find for the major neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine.
This same group published a much more sophisticated study in 2019.*** They found quite high concentrations of DMT in the rodent brain, but they weren’t able to replicate the pineal finding. The enzymes to make DMT are abundant in the pineal gland as in the brain, but there doesn’t seem to be DMT in the pineal gland after all. They concluded that the DMT they measured in the 2013 paper was a contaminant from the brain. In other words, there was DMT in the brain tissue they had to go through in order to get pineal fluid. So it was the brain DMT that was being measured in the 2013 paper rather than pineal DMT.
But still, the brain making a lot of DMT is much more interesting than the pineal gland making it. The pineal story is more esoteric, it’s more fun – you know, the pineal gland as the third eye, the crown chakra… But people can live okay lives without their pineal glands. If you’ve had a pineal stroke or a pineal tumour, you can still live a normal life; you still dream, you’re still like a normal person. The reduction in melatonin if your pineal gland is removed can cause some jet-lag type of problems, but other than that, you can live a fairly normal life without a pineal gland. So, if the pineal gland was the major source of DMT and it was destroyed for whatever reason, it would be hard to explain how you could still live a normal life, presuming that DMT plays a role in normal consciousness.
The discovery of high concentrations of DMT in the rodent brain and confirmation of the same enzymes in the human brain – although they weren’t able to study the living human brain, but you can study a living rodent – is quite interesting. The concentrations are comparable to those you would find for the major neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine. So that points to the possibility of a DMT neurotransmitter system in the mammalian brain, which is quite mind-blowing. I mean, what is DMT doing in the brain, and especially in high concentrations like that?
That same 2019 study also demonstrated that concentrations of DMT increase quite robustly in the brains of dying rodents, especially in the visual cortex. Even though there are quite a few compounds released in the dying brain that could be mediating certain features of the near-death experience, the fact that DMT increases in the visual cortex of the dying rodent brain is support for the potential role of DMT in some of the features of the near-death state.
Whether you can increase levels of naturally occurring DMT through breathing exercises is still speculative. Wim Hof and I corresponded a number of years ago. He was interested in measuring changes in the level of DMT in the blood and urine as a result of his breathing exercises. But concentrations of DMT are still too hard to measure in the blood and the spinal fluid and urine. So we weren’t able to do a study confirming whether breathing exercises activate endogenous DMT production. But you know, to the extent that non-drug-induced states resemble those brought on by giving DMT, it makes sense that naturally occurring DMT would play a role. But we still don’t have the technology to measure concentrations of DMT accurately enough to detect a change.
I think one will need to look at activation of the genes that make the enzymes that synthesise DMT. If those genes are turned on as a result of the breathing exercises, then you could argue for a role of naturally occurring DMT. But we’re just learning about the mechanisms that turn those genes on and off. I think we’re still some years from confirming or refuting that theory. And the same with any breathing exercise or yoga technique. You can’t, you know, decalcify the pineal gland by removing fluoride from your diet or your drinking water. That’s all kind of wild-eyed speculation. It could be true, but it probably isn’t. And if you state those theories as fact, it’s basically fake news and you’re misleading people. You might try some crazy stuff to decalcify your pineal gland, which could be harmful. So, there’s no support for that idea at this point, either.
I think one will need to look at activation of the genes that make the enzymes that synthesise DMT. If those genes are turned on as a result of the breathing exercises, then you could argue for a role of naturally occurring DMT.
But the question of DMT in the neurotransmitter system is quite interesting, because if that’s the case, what would it be regulating? The hallmark of the big DMT experience is the feeling that what you’re witnessing is more real than real, and wouldn’t it be interesting if the role of the DMT neurotransmitter system is to regulate our sense of reality? So, yeah, that’s an interesting thing to speculate about.
If DMT is also increased in the brain in conditions of dying, that would tie in with the findings of DMT increasing neuroplasticity and neurogenesis in the brain. It stimulates the growth of new nerve cells and also increases connectivity between existing nerve cells. Something else which is the case is that DMT is neuroprotective of nerve cells in conditions of low oxygen. If you put nerve cells in a test tube and starve them of oxygen, they begin to die; but if you give them DMT, their survival rate is increased quite a bit.
If DMT is also increased in the brain in conditions of dying, that would tie in with the findings of DMT increasing neuroplasticity and neurogenesis in the brain. It stimulates the growth of new nerve cells and also increases connectivity between existing nerve cells.
Interestingly, just last year there were some studies coming out of Hungary in which DMT reduced the size of an ischemic stroke. It also speeds up recovery from strokes. ****These studies are in animals, lower animals. But DMT is neuroprotective, reduces acute stroke size and also speeds up recovery. Those stroke results could be a result of DMT’s effect on neurogenesis and neuroplasticity. So it’s kind of a tidy package. You know, you can speculate that in a dying animal, or if you have a damaged brain, that DMT is released in order to reduce the insult and to increase recovery. And then that’s also the reason it’s increased in the near-death state, as you’re dying. But still, that doesn’t quite address the issue of why DMT is so psychedelic.
Interestingly, just last year there were some studies coming out of Hungary in which DMT reduced the size of an ischemic stroke. It also speeds up recovery from strokes.
I mean, if you’re just going to release a compound whose only responsibility is to increase your brain’s chances of survival, why would it have to be psychedelic? It could just be sedating. Or it could have no effects at all. So, in a way, that kind of raises the stakes about what is DMT doing in the near-death experience? You know, if it’s mediating our last awareness of life in the body, then what happens after we die? Is it a continuation of that, or what exactly? It does raise some very interesting questions.
Yeah, will you forever be in a dream state, or… we don’t know.
We just don’t know. Because, despite some interesting case reports, there just isn’t that much information about what it’s like to be dead dead, as opposed to only near-dead.
Despite some interesting case reports, there just isn’t that much information about what it’s like to be dead dead, as opposed to only near-dead.
Do you think technologies to measure the level of DMT could be developed in the near future?
Well, I think it’ll be in terms of measuring the activity of the genes. Can we do that now? I’m not sure. We can demonstrate the presence of the enzymes, and we can tell if certain genes are turned on in any number of conditions. So it would be feasible to determine the level of activity of the genes making DMT. But strangely enough, there isn’t a lot of interest in studying naturally occurring DMT. It still isn’t that well known.
There’s this compound that the brain makes that, in just a couple of heartbeats, catapults you to a completely independent-seeming, free-standing level of an alternate reality. And it isn’t that well known. Terence McKenna used to joke that this should be on the front page of The New York Times. But it’s not. Instead, psilocybin, as the new super-Prozac, is getting all the press. But DMT is a lot weirder story. And I don’t think it would be all that palatable; it might just disturb too many people to be on the front page of The New York Times. And, as a result, it isn’t a “growth industry” in the psychedelic research community.
But still, it’s true that DMT has these effects. And, yes, there’s more human research and animal research that ought to be done. With the interest in DMT as stroke treatment, it’s going to become more popular. So then it remains to be seen how far that extends into people pursuing and characterising the regulation of endogenous DMT.
There’s this compound that the brain makes that, in just a couple of heartbeats, catapults you to a completely independent-seeming, free-standing level of an alternate reality. And it isn’t that well known. Terence McKenna used to joke that this should be on the front page of The New York Times. But it’s not.
There’s a hypothesis that our detachment from nature and all that has come with that has lowered the DMT concentration in us. What happens when the DMT-synthesising gene is silenced? For example, although it’s widely believed that a serotonin deficiency plays a role in depression, maybe DMT levels are connected with it somehow as well. What’s your opinion on this?
There are a couple of ayahuasca studies that demonstrate anti-depressant effects, and they’re quite fast – within an hour or so. Because DMT is the visionary ingredient in ayahuasca, there’s been speculation about whether it’s the DMT that’s involved in the anti-depressant effect. But the thing that complicates ayahuasca research is that it’s a combination of two plants – one contains DMT, and the other contains a compound that allows the DMT to be orally active. And, well, those orally activating compounds are also anti-depressants, MAO inhibitors, so that complicates any interpretation of the ayahuasca data.
But still, psilocybin helps depression, LSD helps depression. So naturally, you would wonder if DMT could help depression as well. And it’s not a six- or twelve-hour experience, either; it’s over quite quickly. Even if you do a continuous infusion, let’s say. You could do it even for an hour, you know, like a ketamine infusion, for example.
Especially with these new data demonstrating that DMT increases nerve growth and connections among nerve cells, it seems to be a common mechanistic feature shared with ketamine. Ketamine improves depression within an hour, and ketamine increases neurogenesis and plasticity. So the thinking goes, if ketamine helps depression through neurogenesis and plasticity, and if DMT stimulates neurogenesis and plasticity in the same way, then perhaps DMT is an anti-depressant as well. A couple of studies are ongoing or in the planning stages in which people with treatment-resistant depression are given one big dose of DMT, and they’re measuring markers of neuroplasticity to correlate them.
Ketamine improves depression within an hour, and ketamine increases neurogenesis and plasticity. So the thinking goes, if ketamine helps depression through neurogenesis and plasticity, and if DMT stimulates neurogenesis and plasticity in the same way, then perhaps DMT is an anti-depressant as well.
You decided to use extracted DMT in your studies. However, in natural plant form, in ayahuasca, it’s not only pharmacologically safer but also brings other benefits. By injecting DMT, you kind of choose the rational “surgeon’s approach”. But DMT is not rational; you call it a spirit molecule. From today’s viewpoint, was the technical tool of injection the right way to try to measure and understand the complexity of DMT?
It was a two-year process for me to get permission to give DMT. If you think about it, DMT was studied in the 1950s and 60s in humans, and there was a lot of data in highly regarded psychiatric journals on giving DMT safely. But even with that preliminary data or background data, it still took me two years of working with the government to get approval. And this was 1988. Who knew about ayahuasca? I mean, I had never heard of it until about 1995 or 1996.
I’ve been involved in protocols that have tried to get permission to give ayahuasca in the US, but it’s just impossible, even now. You know, because there are all of these plants… What’s the pedigree of the plants? What about mould? What about other compounds in the plants other than DMT and monoamine oxidase inhibitor? It’s just impossible. Or, it’s been impossible. But with the loosening of restrictions and the increased acceptability of doing clinical research, I think an ayahuasca study isn’t far behind. But still, I’m not consulting on any in the US, and I’m not aware of any overseas, either.
Back to creativity. You already mentioned it, but is there any correlation between levels of DMT and creativity, or is that just a myth?
Well, in my study, not really. There were highly educated people who took part in my study, intelligent, successful in their careers. But there weren’t a lot of so-called creative types; there weren’t any artists, singers, poets, filmmakers. Well, there was one documentary video maker, but I don’t remember him having a spur of creativity.
Pure DMT is quite fast-acting. And it’s all you can do to get your bearings about you. It’s a very short-acting effect, and you’re not going to be getting a lot of answers to creative problems in that short a state.
I think the lack of creative breakthroughs in my volunteers speaks to the whole notion of psychedelics as “the mind manifesting”, “the mind disclosing”. So, if you aren’t a creative person or an especially creative person in the first place, you’re not going to become more creative, at least creative for the first time.
Could altered states of consciousness help us to have a better understanding of what consciousness is?
Well, it depends on what you mean by consciousness. If you’re looking at the hard problem of consciousness, I think they won’t be able to give us an answer about why we’re conscious rather than not conscious. I don’t think psychedelics can do that. But I think that they can help us characterise the mechanics of consciousness and how consciousness works. You know, what are the mechanisms of the different components of consciousness. They can help us understand the unconscious – how mental content can exist and influence us without any awareness on our part. They can help with creativity.
I believe they can also help with understanding the placebo effect. If you read the literature, psychedelics seem to be panaceas. You look for a benefit, and you find it. And, as you know, the placebo effect works that way, too; it just amplifies the conditions that lead to healing. Your innate biological and psychological mechanisms of healing are turned on through the placebo effect. Your biologic immune function improves, the inflammatory response, endocrine, cardiovascular variables, endorphins, all kinds of things… So, placebo has biological effects; there are biological underpinnings. Because of the fact that psychedelics appear to be panaceas, and panaceas operate at least in part through the activation of the placebo response, I think that psychedelics can be good tools to start to understand the placebo response. And to exploit it scientifically and medically in novel ways.
I believe they can also help with understanding the placebo effect. If you read the literature, psychedelics seem to be panaceas. You look for a benefit, and you find it. And, as you know, the placebo effect works that way, too; it just amplifies the conditions that lead to healing.
Are there studies going on, or not yet?
You know, I’ve tried hard to get people to study the placebo response in psychedelic research. But so far no one has really expressed a lot of interest. I’m not sure why that is. I think once you start doing research, you develop tunnel vision. If you change the study in any way, you don’t want to mess things up. If you change your focus in any way, you’ll lose your funding, your friends won’t like you anymore and so on (laughs). Those kinds of things.
So, to start talking about the placebo response as mediating the psychedelic effect, I think it’s a bit too peripheral right now. At least in the current state of the art of psychedelic research. But hopefully, in a few years people will start thinking about the panacea-like effects of psychedelics and whether that can help us understand the placebo response.
There are simple studies that could be done. For example, you’d expect that conditions with a high placebo response would do better with psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy: things like inflammation, asthma, allergies, irritable bowel… You’d expect that if you added psychedelic psychotherapy to the mix, you’d see an enhanced response to that intervention, as opposed to conditions that do not demonstrate a big placebo response, like cancer, for example. You wouldn’t expect a good response to cancer by giving psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, at least most of the time. So, that would not be a hard study. You could assess the hypnotisability in your research subjects before giving them a psychedelic, and you’re correlated with outcome. Would it be that more suggestible people respond more to psychedelics as opposed to not hypnotisable people?
So those are simple studies, and I’ve floated them out there to my colleagues and students, but so far, it’s like a balloon, it just kind of goes flat.
It’s interesting, because we have more and more mental problems now, but at the same time, at least on our side of the world, aside from legalisation issues, not everyone in traditional psychotherapy circles is open to the integration of psychedelic therapy in psychotherapy practice.
It’s kind of like the description I was just giving on why researchers aren’t thinking outside the box. For example, looking more carefully at the placebo response. It’s a bit paradoxical. Like, psychedelics are supposed to make you more open-minded, and most of the researchers studying psychedelics have had their own experiences. But instead you become more fixated on your area of expertise, you believe more strongly in the truth of what you believed before. And, you know, that’s a placebo response. That’s an endogenous DMT effect. You’re more convinced of the truth and the reality of what you already believe. So, unless you’re careful, you get more closed-minded in a way.
Could your studies on DMT and the proposition of a new model – theoneurology, in which “the contemporary scientific and mediaeval metaphysical-religious worldviews meet as equals” – be considered one of the keys that will help put the “meta” back in physics?
You’re referring to a summary of my book DMT and the Soul of Prophecy. It’s a top-down model, and I call it theoneurology. The brain makes DMT in order to allow divine communication to be manifest visually, for example. As opposed to the reigning paradigm of the neuroscience of spirituality, which is neurotheology and a bottom-up kind of model. It’s “your brain on drugs” giving you the impression of divine communication, as opposed to a means of divine communication occurring, which is the top-down model.
I use a lot of mediaeval metaphysics in my working out a mechanism of prophetic experience or spiritual experience. You know, correlating it to the DMT effect and DMT biology.
I use a lot of mediaeval metaphysics in my working out a mechanism of prophetic experience or spiritual experience. You know, correlating it to the DMT effect and DMT biology. And I do refer to Aristotle – you know, the imaginative faculty and the rational faculty. Those are all metaphysics, how the mind-brain complex works. This was state of the art; the best and the brightest for 1500 years applied themselves to understanding consciousness and especially spiritual experience, because they were interested in the Bible and God and angels and visions as being important indications of the structure of the universe and our interacting with it. With the Enlightenment came the splitting off of reason and faith into science and theology. But I think that, by focusing on spiritual experience, you can begin to maybe not reconcile, but at least you can engage in a discussion between parties that are normally separated by quite a chasm. The theologists and the physicists, for example.
So you’re talking about metaphysics coming out of a careful and open-minded study of the psychedelic experience to the extent that it can reveal properties of consciousness – consciousness of ourselves and consciousness of the universe outside of us. It could enlarge the discussion by bringing in points of view, one of which would represent faith and theology, and the other psychopharmacology. That’s what I attempt to do in DMT and the Soul of Prophecy. I speculate about a role for DMT in Aristotle’s imagination. And another aspect, which would involve training and learning and education, would stimulate the intellect. So, you can combine neuroplasticity – you know, the intellect with DMT and the imagination, for example. And I think some interesting conversations could take place.
With the Enlightenment came the splitting off of reason and faith into science and theology. But I think that, by focusing on spiritual experience, you can begin to maybe not reconcile, but at least you can engage in a discussion between parties that are normally separated by quite a chasm. The theologists and the physicists, for example.
Dennis McKenna has a hypothesis that the ancient Egyptian tree of life was in fact an acacia tree, known also as Mimosa hostilis, which contains 1%–2% DMT. Is DMT, as McKenna states, a neurotransmitter for the Gaian brain? Is it a kind of code in all of us that could help – if we are ever capable of decoding it – to find answers to the fundamental questions about our existence?
Well, I think the role of specific plants needs to rest on data rather than just speculation. For example, Moses getting high from DMT released from the burning acacia bush. That could have been the case, but still, I mean, there isn’t any evidence of people using plants or any other exogenous substances to attain prophecy. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, David, Abraham, Daniel… there isn’t any evidence of psychoactive substances in the Bible anyway.
I don’t know much about Egyptology. But you know, if you’ve got images of somebody holding a cup and squeezing acacia into it, and then in the next panel they’re drinking it, and in the next panel they’re flying into outer space, that’s strong evidence. But just seeing an acacia plant somewhere in the corner of a fresco, I don’t find that’s very supportive.
Regarding interplanetary, or intraplanetary, communication, I joked a number of years ago about DMT being like spiritual Esperanto – the common language among all organisms that contain it. Like trees that contain DMT, perhaps we can communicate with them better. Maybe cats have more DMT than dogs, or something like that. But that remains highly speculative.
Regarding interplanetary, or intraplanetary, communication, I joked a number of years ago about DMT being like spiritual Esperanto – the common language among all organisms that contain it. Like trees that contain DMT, perhaps we can communicate with them better.
And whether DMT can help us answer the big questions? I just don’t think so. I think it’s more important what you do with your mind in general than what drugs you take or what neurotransmitters you can activate. Those experiences need to work on something, and that something is who you are and what you occupy yourself with during the day. So, if you’re a horrible person and you like being horrible, then increasing your levels of endogenous DMT is not going to automatically make you into a nicer person. You know, a lot of people were joking about if only Donald Trump took psilocybin. And I said to myself, I would not want to be around Donald Trump getting psilocybin. I mean, that could be really unpleasant.
It becomes idol worship in a way, like you’re evoking the power of a substance. I think it’s a disservice to humans if you think that drugs are going to change existence in and of themselves. And it’s an inaccurate portrayal of the drugs themselves. You’re kind of glorifying one at the expense of the other, which is kind of the reverse of the way it ought to be.
You know, a lot of people were joking about if only Donald Trump took psilocybin. And I said to myself, I would not want to be around Donald Trump getting psilocybin. I mean, that could be really unpleasant.
In a 2015 conference devoted to DMT, Rupert Sheldrake said in his speech that “psychedelics are inspiring the quest for truth”. Do you agree?
No. I think if you’re interested in the truth, then you’ll be more interested in the truth. If you’re not interested in the truth, psychedelics won’t make you more interested in the truth. It’s the Donald Trump analogy. You give Donald Trump psilocybin, and he’s not going to change; there’ll just be more the way that he already is.
Even a heroic dose?
Well, if someone like Donald Trump changed as a result of a big psychedelic experience, you’d have to propose that the kernel of that change was already there. You know, the seed. But there are a lot of people who are even more nefarious and/or bigger jerks as a result of tripping. Charles Manson is a case that’s brought up all the time. He just got more evil and more dedicated to evil and effected evil more readily as a result of his psychedelic experiences.
So, if you’re not interested in the truth, it’s not going to inspire you to be more interested in the truth. That’s why the whole idea of “how to change your mind”, which is the name of Michael Pollan’s book, is a misnomer. I think a more accurate title would be “how to become more convinced of what you already think is the case”. I think that would be a more truthful description of the psychedelic effect.
How about the role of set and setting? As we know, they’re quite an important part of the psychedelic experience.
Yes, you have to steer the effect in the direction that you wish. So, your set (your preparation) and the setting (the environment, the people you’re with, your intention, your pre-existing personality), all of those things need to be channelled. That was the finding of my DMT study, that if you minimise the setting and the expectation, people just have their own trips. Like an NDE in someone with an interest in NDE, or a mystical experience in someone with an interest in that.
So I concluded that there was no inherent spiritual effect of the drugs. If I were interested in enhancing spirituality, it would require a lot more attention to all of those set and setting issues, like a team and a new building, or a new room and all that. I had already gotten the answer to my question about inherent spirituality, and so I wasn’t prepared or interested in taking it to the next step.
Why, in comparison to the 1960s and 70s, is the Western world today turning more to shamanism than to Buddhism? At least that’s how it seems, considering also the ongoing renaissance of psychedelics and the huge popularity of ayahuasca. In your book, you mention the Brazilian Christian-spiritist syncretic churches that use ayahuasca as their sacrament, thus beginning to bridge psychedelic consciousness with Western spirituality. You write: “The next stage in this evolution of joining Western religious models with the psychedelic drug experience would be to more explicitly incorporate these substances into an extant Western religion, rather than developing a new tradition around the substance. (…) I encourage those who take psychedelic drugs for spiritual purposes to turn to the Hebrew Bible for guidance in strengthening their rational faculty in order to infuse the relatively message-poor but imagination-rich drug state with additional meaning.” Why do you consider Christianity the most resonant model, also in applying the insights resulting from psychedelic states in the context of our life?
Well, it’s a Jewish model. It’s based on the Hebrew Bible, the so-called Old Testament. The Hebrew Bible is the foundational text of Judaism. It’s the text Christians use to legitimise Christianity as supplanting Judaism. It isn’t quite as fundamental to Islam as it is to Christianity.
The model is based on a careful reading of the Hebrew Bible, and the peak spiritual experience in it is the prophetic state. You know, where you see visions and you hear voices and you’re out of body; God speaks to you, or angels speak to you. So it’s much more consistent with the DMT experience, which is interactive and relational. Things speak to you, you speak to them; things are done to you, you do things to them; you maintain your personality, your ego, your sense of self. I think that the vocabulary of the prophetic state is relevant to the character of most of our psychedelic experiences, including the DMT ones, which are interactive and full of content.
And techniques. If you read the Hebrew Bible carefully, you learn ways of interacting with this state. I mean, how to get the most out of it, how to get yourself out of tight squeezes. I think it is relevant to the Western mind that’s looking at the best spiritual platform with which to understand and apply the psychedelic experience. More than shamanism. We don’t come from a shamanic culture, and Buddhism isn’t quite consistent with the Western mind, either, despite all the attempts to conflate the two. So I think it bears consideration to refer to our own spiritual traditions as a way to understand the spiritual properties of the psychedelic state.
I think that the vocabulary of the prophetic state is relevant to the character of most of our psychedelic experiences, including the DMT ones, which are interactive and full of content.
Do you yourself still meditate or not?
Yeah, I still meditate every evening before bed for fifteen to twenty minutes.
Is your meditation still based on techniques you learned while studying Zen Buddhism, or has it changed?
It’s Zazen, very simple. You just sit. I learned it in my early twenties, and I’ve been doing it ever since.
After practising meditation for so long, have you managed to get into a state comparable to the DMT experience?
No (laughs). I wouldn’t say my Zazen is like a DMT experience. But I suppose there was an episode at the monastery. I was on retreat there with our meditation group, and the monk forgot about us. Like, they started the meditation, and normally they come back in a half hour and ring the bell. Well, here this monk got tied up with other things, and hours and hours and hours went by, and we’re just sitting there. The amount of stress that was involved in that meditation episode was, I guess, comparable to a low-dose DMT experience.
Other than that, I use my meditation to decompress from the day. Just breathe, feel my body, feel my mind loosen up a bit at the end of the day. So it’s not psychedelic at all. I suppose there might be one DMT gene activated, but it would be pretty small-scale.
Are you working on a new book at the moment?
A couple of years ago I published an autobiographical novel called Joseph Levy Escapes Death.
It’s a fictionalised account of a year of poor health I had in 2014. I was quite sick, and it took a long time to recover. I live in a small town in western New Mexico. The healthcare was terrible; it was just unbelievably bad. And I swore that if I survived, I would write a story about that year of malpractice and recuperation. So I did. It’s a short book, about 220 pages. And it’s still only in English, as opposed to the DMT book, which has been translated into thirteen or fourteen languages by now. But still, that’s the most recent book I wrote.
I’m working on a translation and commentary of the Book of Genesis, from the Hebrew to English. I’m about two-thirds of the way through the first draft. This will probably be 1000 pages or more. I love the Hebrew Bible and spend as much time in it as I can, so I don’t want all that work to go to waste. That’ll come out in, I don’t know, five to ten years from now.
And I’ve got some other ideas for more instalments in the life of my alter ego, Joseph Levy. Like the drug experiences he had in college and in his 30s, his psychoanalysis, his spiritual career. I’ve been keeping a journal since I was in my twenties, and I have a lot of raw material to present some more episodes in the life of that character.
I’m working on a translation and commentary of the Book of Genesis, from the Hebrew to English. I’m about two-thirds of the way through the first draft. This will probably be 1000 pages or more.
Your book DMT and the Soul of Prophecy: A New Science of Spiritual Revelation was published in 2014. It’s 2021 now. Have you found an answer to the question you asked so many times: “If so, so what?”
At the beginning of our conversation I mentioned Danny Freedman, the editor of the Archives and one of my mentors. That was the title of one of his review papers on LSD in the 1960s. And, well, I think I’ve got an answer to that question. It’s easy to conceptualise if you think about the division of the mind first put out by Aristotle, you know, the imaginative faculty and the intellectual faculty. And if you think of psychedelics as stimulating voices and visions, those occur in the imaginative faculty, and they contain information, either personal information, outer-space information, spiritual information. The visions and the voices are not random; they’re dependent on you and the location of the manifestations in your imagination.
So if you want to get the most out of it – “if so, so what?” – if these drugs are amplifying the imagination, then what you do with that? Well, you improve your ability to extract information from the visions, and you do that through the development of your intellect, meaning study, self-discipline, the practice of virtue, meditation, all those things that improve your ability to think.
So if you want to get the most out of it – “if so, so what?” – if these drugs are amplifying the imagination, then what you do with that? Well, you improve your ability to extract information from the visions, and you do that through the development of your intellect, meaning study, self-discipline, the practice of virtue, meditation, all those things that improve your ability to think. You know, not like stop thinking; instead, think better, think smarter. Think good things rather than frivolous or bad things. If you adhere to the model of Aristotle and the mind and how to be an accomplished philosopher, or the best possible person you can be, you can stimulate the imagination with drugs, and you can stimulate the intellect through study and also through lifestyle. So I think that’s the answer. You want to develop your intellect, and at the same time you’re stimulating the imagination.
Thank you very much.
* https://www.technologynetworks.com/neuroscience/blog/could-the-spirit-molecule-dmt-assist-in-stroke-recovery-346249
** “In 1999, Michael Thompson and coworkers at the Mayo Medical School in Rochester, Minnesota, using cloning and sequencing techniques of molecular biology, discovered the human gene that codes for the enzyme (indolethylamine-N-methyltransferase; INMT) that synthesizes DMT from tryptamine (Thompson et al., 1999). The Thompson discovery renewed discussion in, and significantly strengthened hypotheses about, a role for endogenous DMT in states of consciousness such as spiritual exaltation, dreams, creativity, near-death experiences, and other possible physiological roles. The view that the presence of DMT in mammalian tissues is only an artifact now seems untenable.” (https://maps.org/news/bulletin/articles/476-bulletin-spring-2013/8637-psychedelic-breakthroughs-in-neuroscience-how-psychedelic-drugs-influenced-the-growth-and-development-of-psychopharmacology)
*** https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-45812-w
**** https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34023338/; https://www.globenewswire.com/fr/news-release/2021/05/27/2237256/0/en/Algernon-Pharmaceuticals-Highlights-New-Animal-Study-Showing-Effectiveness-of-Psychedelic-Drug-DMT-in-Treatment-of-Stroke.html
