Page Content (OCR)
first place. 50 * THE BUILDING BLOCKS This "decent burial" came soon enough. Within a year or two, the last paper on human DMT research appeared. Few scientists shed tears to mark its passing. Was DMT buried alive by those whose careers and reputations were endangered by a controversial area of research? The DMT-psychosis field was no different from any other biological psychiatry research endeavor investigating complex and uncertain relationships between the mind and brain. Encouraging its abandonment appears to have been as much po- litically as scientifically motivated. In general, there were two types of studies investigating the DMT- psychosis theory. One compared blood levels of DMT between ill patients and normal volunteers. The other study design compared the subjective effects of psychedelic drugs to those of naturally occurring psychotic states. The NIMH team that discounted the theory of a DMT-psychosis relation- ship, leading to the demise of human DMT research, critiqued both approaches. They pointed to the lack of consistent differences between blood levels of DMT in normal volunteers and psychotic patients; they also rejected claims that the effects of DMT and symptoms of schizophre- nia demonstrated enough similarities to justify additional research. First, let's discuss the blood level data. Essentially all DMT studies measured its concentration in blood drawn from forearm veins. How- ever, it seems unreasonable to expect these levels to accurately reflect DMT's function in extraordinarily small, highly specialized, distinct brain areas. Finding a close relationship between blood levels and brain ef- fects would be even less likely if the DMT originated in the brain in the This difficulty is one that all scientists recognize, even for such well- known brain chemicals as serotonin. Dozens of studies have failed to convincingly relate serotonin levels in blood drawn from the forearm to psychiatric diagnoses with presumed abnormalities in brain serotonin. Therefore, it was unlikely, using DMT blood levels, that any real conclu- sions could be drawn regarding differences between normal and psychotic individuals. If psychiatric researchers demand such data for all brain chemicals, where is the call to bury serotonin?