DMT Experiments: Szara and Strassman
Scientific inquiry into the psychotropic properties of N,N-Dimethyltryptamine, better known as DMT, traces back to the mid-1950s. The Hungarian psychiatrist and chemist Stephan Szara ran those first studies, though his path toward the compound was not one he chose outright.
Szara had wanted LSD. His orders to the Sandoz laboratory in Switzerland were turned down, apparently because the company worried about what might happen if the drug reached a communist country. Sandoz was where the psychedelic effects of LSD had been identified in 1943 by Arthur Stoll and Albert Hofmann. Interest in it climbed through the 1950s and into the 60s, but the substance attracted a reputation as dangerous, and testing wound down before much could be formally established about any medicinal or spiritual applications. With LSD off the table, Szara turned to DMT.
His work looked at how the compound metabolized in both healthy volunteers and volunteers diagnosed with schizophrenia. He tracked the biochemical responses to three related tryptamine cogeners: dimethyl-, diethyl-, and dipropyl-tryptamine, abbreviated DMT, DET, and DPT. What Szara took from the results was that the biological and psychological changes produced by DMT could open a window onto how the brain operates, both in ordinary waking consciousness and under the pull of a psychedelic.
Decades later, in 1990, the compound drew fresh attention from Dr. Rick Strassman, a psychiatrist and pharmacologist. Working at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, Strassman found that injected DMT behaved much like the DMT the body already makes on its own in the pineal gland. Volunteers who received it reported intense hallucinations, and those accounts lined up closely with descriptions people give of near-death experiences.
There is documentation suggesting that as a person approaches death, the pineal gland releases a chemical close enough to DMT that it can bring on dreamlike hallucinatory states, visions, and shifts in awareness that strike the person as coming from somewhere beyond this world. Strassman's injected volunteers described the same territory. He took this as reason to think the pineal gland sits at the center of spiritual cognition.
In the early stages of the experience, many volunteers moved through psychological material that included replaying old traumas alongside feelings of love, hope, safety, and spiritual insight. Strassman argued the DMT itself triggered these episodes, and that they could carry a healing, restorative quality.
The accounts could get strange. Cassandra, a volunteer who had been raped as a teenager, said she found deep bodily healing after making contact with sentient beings she had never encountered before, beings that cared for her while the drug worked through her system. A volunteer named Chris described three reptilian creatures that opened their chests to demonstrate how their reproduction worked. Another participant recalled being placed on an examination table and fitted with a tracking implant that he remained convinced was real even after returning to ordinary awareness.
The volunteer given the largest dose followed a brilliant white light and met joy, love, and a kind of understanding he had long been searching for. Afterward he said, "I saw myself as an infant, reborn, and pure." Across all the reports he collected, Strassman was struck by how consistent the places and the beings turned out to be from one person to the next.
Not every trip was gentle. Some volunteers passed through fear and pain, yet according to Strassman they emerged able to handle those memories in new and constructive ways once the session ended. Most described the sentient beings as helpful and caring, carrying an awareness that seemed to reach past the physical body. The encounters tended to feel instructive, offering a glimpse of what existence might be like without the body's limits.
- Brandon Petty