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WINDING DOWN + 279 the research team an especially troubled and troubling graduate student. I chose to disregard reports I had heard about contact with beings on DMT and was unprepared for dealing with their frequency in our work. I ought to have predicted what would be my Buddhist community's response to publicly linking psychedelics with Buddhist practice. Certain developments truly were completely unexpected, but in ret- rospect they appear related to the strain of performing the research, and its effects on those around me. My former wife's sudden development of cancer falls into this category. The repercussions of working with spirit molecules are so complex, so widespread and far-reaching, that no one who was not there from the very beginning could really understand what this research was like. How- ever, the purpose of this book is to tell the entire story. Part of every story is its end. For those who are now working, or wish to work, with psyche- delic drugs, it's important to convey these details, in a spirit of "informed consent." You'd better know what you're getting yourself into. There were several threads running through these projects, and early on they all lined up rather neatly. I wanted to give a lot of DMT, see what various doses did, and then give more. The first two projects, the dose- response and the tolerance studies, felt like the appetizer and the main course. Single high doses of the spirit molecule were incredibly psyche- delic, and repeated dosing made it possible to assimilate and work more effectively with the access it provided to profound altered states. How- ever, the model that allowed me to begin also negatively constrained sub- sequent research projects with DMT. The biomedical model's explicit task is to dissect, dig deeper, and explain-by-describing the biological phenomenon under examination. Since this model holds sway in psychiatric research, I learned it thor- oughly and presented the DMT studies in those terms. In the dose-response and tolerance studies, the biological measure- ments were less personally compelling than were the psychological effects of DMT. We drew blood and measured vital signs and tempera- ture, and with these data we could mathematically demonstrate that