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122 + SET, SETTING, AND DMT Harvard had created cliques of drug-taking graduate students. These stu- dents developed an "us" versus "them" mentality that contributed to intense conflicts within departments between those participating in psy- chedelic research and those who were not. Such envious and competitive ill will at Harvard was a significant factor in the ultimate expulsion of Leary's group. Several volunteers in this new group were social or professional ac- quaintances. Two were academic colleagues in the psychiatry department, one was a friend of my former wife, and seven belonged to a social group to which I was introduced several years after the research began. The nearly three dozen remaining people found out about the study by word of mouth; they were friends of volunteers, received psychedelic newsletters describing the Albuquerque research, or just happened to be in a conver- sation during which the studies were discussed. For the sake of convenience, I will invent a hypothetical volunteer named Alex, a thirty-two-year-old married male who worked as a software pro- grammer outside of Santa Fe. Since most of our research subjects were men, I hope no one is put off by making our generic volunteer male. Alex's first step was to make a phone call to my office, which was fielded by the psychiatry department secretary and subsequently answered by a member of the research team. After a brief conversation regarding age, previous psychedelic experience, and medical and psychiatric health, Alex and I made an appointment to meet in my department office. Before this meeting took place, I sent him a packet of files, including a copy of the informed consent document for his particular study, several popular articles about DMT, and a paper I wrote some years before about the pineal gland, DMT, and consciousness. Later, when the project was well underway, I included papers describing the results of our own work. This meeting took at least an hour. I needed to learn enough about Alex to decide whether to include him in the study. In a comparable man- ner, Alex needed to know I was someone he could trust to supervise his deeply psychedelic DMT experiences. An important issue was how stable his life was at the time. If it seemed