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PAIN AND FEAR «+ 263 Laura and I conferred about bringing him in for four 0.3 mg/kg doses for the tolerance study. While this was slightly less than the 0.4 mg/kg high dose, we kept asking ourselves, "What if he suffers a stroke?" The answer was, of course, "We can't take that risk." Kevin was disappointed, but we tried to make the most out of what he had undergone. I said, "You have lots to mull over. You experienced a high dose of DMT, something few people ever do. I probably shouldn't have bent the tules in the first place with your abnormal cardiogram." On the drive home through the mountains at the end of that day, I won- dered how the road signs I passed on the highway would have looked if Kevin were dead. Exhausted, I ate dinner listlessly and went directly to bed. Effective screening and preparation was key to keeping serious adverse effects as infrequent as we did. While the rate of negative effects may have been even lower with better screening, it's difficult to see how we could have improved upon our methods. Looking back on it now, one thing I should have done was to trust more deeply my intuition about certain volunteers’ psychological suitability or cardiovascular health. Perhaps our doses of DMT were too high. This was a razor's edge. Too small a dose would have fallen short of the psychedelic threshold, but too high a dose, as we saw in Philip's case (as described in the prologue), was dangerous. In retrospect, 0.3 mg/kg may have been better as our top dose. No one experienced this as "sub-psychedelic." We chose 0.4 mg/kg based upon clinical judgement and our research aims. Nevertheless, this high dose of DMT may have compromised the safety and well-being of the minority of volunteers who lost their way, struggled to find it, and were traumatized in their journey. When all is said and done, the fact remains that the spirit molecule does not always lead us to love and light. It can open our eyes to terrifying realities, too, and mark us with those experiences for as long as do any beatific ones. DMT is a potentially dangerous drug. For that reason, we must think long and hard about using it in ourselves and on one another.