Page Content (OCR)
2 * PROLOGUE Philip and Nils both had previous experience with DMT, and I was glad they did. About a year before starting our study, they had attended a ceremony in which a Peruvian folk healer gave all participants ayahuasca, the legendary DMT-containing tea. The two men were enthusiastic about this orally active form of DMT and were eager to smoke pure DMT the next day, when a member of the workshop made it available. They wanted to feel its effects in a much more immediate and intense manner than the tea form allowed. Philip's and Nils's experiences smoking DMT were typical: a startlingly rapid onset of effects, a kaleidoscopic display of visual hallucinations, and a separation of consciousness from the physical body. And, most curiously, there was a feeling of "the other" somewhere within the hallucinatory world to which this remarkable psychedelic allowed them entrance. Their prior experience with DMT was a very important aspect of bring- ing them in as the first volunteers. Philip and Nils were familiar with the effects of DMT. Even more crucial, they were familiar with the effects of smoking the drug, which would help them gauge the adequacy of the two different administration methods I was considering, intramuscular (IM) or intravenous (IV), in reproducing the full effects of the smoking route. Since recreational users of DMT usually smoke it, I wanted to approximate as closely as possible the effects as they occur when taken in this manner. On the day Philip received the first dose of DMT by the intramuscu- lar route, I already was thinking ahead. Perhaps the IM method might be too slow and mild compared to smoking the drug. What I had read about IM DMT suggested it took up to a minute to start working, substantially longer than when it was smoked. However, since all but one of the previ- ously published human research papers on DMT reported giving it intramuscularly, I was obliged to begin this way. This older literature sug- gested that the dose I was to give Philip, 1 milligram per kilogram (mg/ kg), about 75 mg, probably would be a moderately high dose. Philip was forty-five years old when he began participating in our research. Bespectacled, bearded, and of medium height and build, he was an internationally known clinical psychologist, psychotherapist, and