Despite the difficulties we encountered, I am optimistic about the possible benefits of the controlled use of these drugs. Problems inside and outside of the research environment led to the end of these studies in 1995. I hope these many excerpts from over 1000 pages of my bedside notes provide a sense of the remarkable emotional, psychological, and spiritual effects of this chemical. On the other hand, I have written nearly nothing about the volunteers’ stories. The project generated a wealth of biological and psychological data, much of which I have already published in the scientific literature. The studies were not intended to be therapeutic, although all of us believed in the potentially beneficial properties of psychedelic drugs. Our research subjects were healthy volunteers. It then traces the DMT research project from its earliest intimations through a maze of committees and review boards to its actual performance.
“DMT: The Spirit Molecule” reviews what we know about psychedelic drugs in general, and DMT in particular.
One of these was a decade-long relationship with a Zen Buddhist training monastery. However, my own background powerfully affected how we prepared people for, and supervised, their drug sessions. The DMT project was founded on cutting-edge brain science, especially the psychopharmacology of serotonin. Only later, while the study was well under way, did I also begin considering DMT’s role in the “alien abduction” experience. These states might include birth, death and near-death, psychosis, and mystical experiences. Perhaps excessive DMT production, coming from the mysterious pineal gland, was involved in naturally occurring “psychedelic” states. I was drawn to DMT because of its presence in all of our bodies. This research took place at the University of New Mexico’s School of Medicine in Albuquerque, where I was a tenured Associate Professor of Psychiatry.
During the project’s five years, I administered approximately 400 doses of DMT to 60 human volunteers. These studies investigated the effects of N,N-dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, an extremely short-acting and powerful psychedelic. In 1990, I began the first new human research with psychedelic, or hallucinogenic, drugs in the United States in over 20 years.
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