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xvi ¢ Introduction 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. DMT: The Spirit Molecule reviews what we know about psychedelic drugs in general, and DMT in particular. It then traces the DMT research project from its earliest intimations through a maze of committees and review boards to its actual performance. Although all of us believed in the potentially beneficial properties of psychedelic drugs, the studies were not intended to be therapeutic, and so our research subjects were healthy volunteers. The project generated a wealth of biological and psychological data, much of which I have already published in the scientific literature. On the other hand, I have written nearly nothing about volunteers' stories. I hope the many excerpts I have included here, taken from over one thousand pages of my notes, will pro- vide a sense of the remarkable emotional, psychological, and spiritual effects of this chemical. Problems inside and outside of the research environment led to the end of these studies in 1995. Despite the difficulties we encountered, I am optimistic about the possible benefits of the controlled use of psyche- delic drugs. Based upon what we learned in the New Mexico research, I offer a wide-ranging vision for DMT's role in our lives and conclude by proposing a research agenda and optimal setting for future work with DMT and related drugs. The late Willis Harman possessed one of the most discerning minds to apply itself to the field of psychedelic research. Earlier in his career, he and his colleagues administered LSD to scientists in an attempt to bolster their problem-solving skills. They found that LSD demonstrated a power- fully beneficial effect on creativity. This landmark research remains the first and only scientific project to use psychedelics to enhance the cre- ative process. When I met Willis thirty years later, in 1994, he was presi- dent of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, an organization founded by the sixth man to walk on the moon, Edgar Mitchell. Mitchell's mystical expe- rience, stimulated by viewing Earth on his return home, inspired him to