DMT: The Spirit Molecule Page #3

so interesting by a hundreds of cultures for thousands of years are prohibited?

How did these cultures that consider themselves to be enlightened

democratic and scientific get to declaring plants "illegal"?

It can seem weird, but there's clearly something deep and revealing

about the nature of these societes.

Our society values enlight problem solving and consciousness

devalues all other states of consciousness.

Any other kind of consciousness that is not related

to the production or consumption of material goods

is stigmatized in our society today.

Of course, we accept drunkenness.

We allow people some brief respite from the material grind.

A society that subscribes to that a model is a society

that is going to condamn the states of consciousness

that have nothing to do with the enlight problem-solving mentality.

And if you go back to the 1960s, when there was a tremendous upsearch of exploration of psychedelics

I would say that the huge backlash that followed that had to do with the fear on the part of the powers that be. That

if enough people went into those realms, had those experiences

the very fabric of the society we have today would be picked apart

and most importantly,

those in power at the top would not be in power at the top any more.

There was an optimism that was ungrounded, you know

the Vietnam was happening, all this real stuff was going on.

and that the psychodelic movement wasn't really addressing that

in a real way. And that Timothy and that, that bunch sold us a fuss, a bill of goods that didn't really work.

"We are now, whether we like it or not, is a psychochemical age.

In the future, it's not going to be what book you read, it's going to be what chemicals do you use

to open or close your conscienceness.

Chemicals can help us learn faster, chemicals can help us

expand or contract our consciousness."

The atmosphere in the 1960s was

"We're doing research here, we are dedicating our lives

to trying just about everything on the planet."

So we'd try it, the we would talk about it the we'd evaluated.

We regarded ourselves more or less as "spiritual pioneers."

The way I look at the 60s you can see as a kind of failed attempt

at a mass, cultural voyage of initiation.

People would, you know, try to go out to these other realities, but they didn't have a basis

there weren't wisdom traditions, elders, there weren't like connections of shamanic lineages.

People would grow out and they would like kinda smash apart.

Timothy Leary really so discredited a scientific approach to studying this

because we started off doing interesting research and then

got into advocating use in a way that was incredibly threatening. Culturally we reacted

and politically it became impossible to do this sort of research.

Funding agencies didn't make resources available, regulatory agencies

increased the practical hurtals for initiating this kind of research.

And I think people, who had interest in research

of this type largely were discredited because

of their interest in the research.

Social, political, scientific issues

that came together pushed these drugs out of the scientific marketplace.

The public opinion in many cases had become that psychedelic research was dangerous.

The wide public was uninformed about the true nature of these compounds

and what their importance may be in the understanding of perception itself.

One of the tragedies to me is that the clinical research

on these substances pretty much stopped

around 1970.

And for me it is especially tragic because

I really believe that these substances played a mayor role

on the development of our philosophy

and thinking throughout the world.

What a lot of people don't realize is that psychiatry up until the 50s

in the field in general had no concept that

neurochemistry played any role in emotion or behavior,

which today seems really bizarre. And the

discovery of LSD and its potent effects on the human psyche

occurred almost contemporaneously with the discovery of serotonin

as a molecule in the brain.

And it was really when people looked at the structure of serotonin

and compared it with LSD that they really began to think, you know

states". If LSD had not been discovered, I doubt we would have

any of the drugs we have or at least not as quickly

as we do have for treating depression and so forth.

Once these drugs became abused and scandalized, psychiatry had to really work hard

you know, to distance themselves from any valid scientific, you know, scientifically meritorious relationship with psychedelics.

Being a psychiatrist and saying you want to learn or study about psychedelics it's, you know, it's not that well received.

And a, And I made one mention, one time that

I was really discouraged from bringing it up again for actually a number of years.

For cultural reasons

the whole class of compounds got pulled of the clinical bench

and no research was going on for 40 years.

So scientifically, I can't imagine a more exciting area to be persuing

How does one go about studying these plants and compounds?

Plants and compounds which produce unimaginable experiences

and can put a shed of light on one of humanity's greatest mysteries

In order, to answer that question,

Dr. Strassman conducted the first

human psychedelic research in a generation.

One of the things that I had established early on was being able to descriminate

between studies in the scientific round and recreational use.

But in the early 1980s I reviewed all of that literature and could pretty well established

on that if people were really carefully screened

and supervised and then followed up that the incidents and adversary reactions to LSD

and related psychodelic drugs was extremely low.

The drug or the compound or the chemical that seemed like the best candidate

to sort of reopen the U.S. front on psychodelic research, would be DMT.

It was really exciting for me because I though this is the first study

in a generation, and not only that.

Despite the fact that DMT had been used safely in earlier studies

and it was a natural component of the brain

DMT is one of the most profound and potent psychedelics known.

So it wasn't just an initiation of clinical research

it was a reinitiation of clinical research with an extremely potent drug.

I was at a strong opinion that you could do this studies

and Rick agreed so we had a number of discussions

and at some point the discussion came up, you know

"Dave, what if I do all this paperwork and spend all this time

and get to end of things and I'm ready to go and I can't get the DMT? "

And that was a real possibility, because DMT, clinical gray DM

wasn't a chemical used by on shelves somewhere

And I told Rick:
"If you get to that point, and no one will make it

then I will do it. "

And ultimately Rick got to that point, and I made it.

The design of the study was fairly straightforward:

give people DMT and measure as many variables as possible.

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