Dr. Gabor Maté: Healing Addiction

DMT, short for dimethyltryptamine, was first made in a lab in 1931 by the English chemist Richard Manske. That first synthesis passed almost without comment, and it seems no Western researcher understood the compound could alter the mind until the mid-1950s. The turning point came in 1956, when a Hungarian chemist named Stephen Szara pulled DMT from the root bark of the Jurema shrub and injected it into himself. What he felt was an intense psychedelic experience, something the West had no vocabulary for yet, even though shamans across South America had worked with DMT for a very long time.

By the 1970s, DMT had been placed in the Schedule I category, which made serious study of this remarkably strong psychoactive nearly impossible. Dr. Rick Strassman at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque became the first person to be cleared to research it.

The evidence is not final, but there are good reasons to think the brain's pineal gland can make DMT on its own. The gland holds all the chemical building blocks the molecule requires. DMT that the body produces internally, what researchers call endogenous DMT, appears to help regulate how the brain perceives the world. Strassman's findings point toward a strange possibility: strip away those naturally occurring amounts, and the world might look flat and lifeless.

His work also looked at what happens when DMT is introduced from the outside. People in his studies reported waves of vivid hallucination, and then, afterward, an overwhelming feeling that they were loved. The mechanics of how the compound moves through the brain begin to hint at why it might help with illness.

Dr. Gabor Maté has spent years studying how Ayahuasca can treat sickness and disease, folding its use into a whole-person approach to care. Ayahuasca is a brew made from a DMT-bearing plant native mostly to the Amazon basin. People have used it in shamanic and religious ceremonies for longer than anyone can date with precision. To make the DMT active when swallowed, the plant is boiled into a tea with one of two companion plants, Chacruna or Chagropanga, which shut down a gut enzyme that would otherwise neutralize the DMT before it could act. Slowly, Ayahuasca has been gaining a name as a serious healing agent for patients carrying a broad range of emotional, psychological, and physical conditions.

Maté has built a different way of thinking about addiction entirely. He wants a treatment model that reckons with the blind spots in how society views drug dependence, and he argues forcefully that Ayahuasca can help people break free of it. The cure, as he frames it, rests on a single aim: guiding the patient back into contact with themselves, through psychotherapy, counseling, and Ayahuasca sessions working together.

Strassman and Maté have moved the collective understanding of DMT forward in big ways, and yet the open questions pile up faster than the answers. The thought of where future study might lead with a compound this common in nature is genuinely thrilling, since each new finding tends to spawn a dozen fresh puzzles. What is DMT actually for, and why is it tied to the pineal gland? Why does it turn up in every living thing? What accounts for its healing force? Knowing a little about what it does inside the brain, and what that might mean for disease and dependence, starts to chip away at those questions without ever fully settling them.

Ayahuasca exerts its strongest pull on three brain regions: the neocortex, the insula, and the amygdala. The neocortex is often described as the part that makes us human, the seat of reasoned choice. The amygdala keeps much of our earliest emotional memory, especially the painful experiences that can carve themselves permanently into our neural wiring. The insula, or insular cortex, is thought by neuroscientists to bridge our emotional impulses and our capacity to decide.

Those insular connections matter a great deal to Maté's work on addiction. This region reveals that our supposedly rational choices rest on a bed of emotional memory. When the brain sizes up something new in order to act, it leans on what came before. Painful events from the past band together into what amounts to a shortcut, a stored pattern the brain reaches for when processing anything new. Trauma marks the brain much the way a physical wound leaves a scar on the skin.

The unusually high dose of exogenous DMT in Ayahuasca sparks a surge of activity in exactly these memory-holding regions. During that heightened state, the DMT can surface memories a person had buried, or it can reshape how they read a memory they already carry. That is where the deep healing and reconnection needed to move past addiction can take hold.

Maté may offer the most coherent picture of addiction anyone has put forward. Each of us, he says, arrives in the world whole and perfect, carrying the full capacity to grow into our potential. He insists, without hedging, that pain sits underneath every addictive behavior. A person caught in addiction reaches for substances that quiet pain, or that trigger brain chemistry which does the quieting.

Society gets a share of the responsibility in his account. He faults Western medicine for its narrow habit of treating disease as a purely biological affair, with anything emotional or spiritual shoved aside as beside the point. The worst ideas to grow out of that habit, he argues, are that mind can be cut away from body, and that a person can be cut away from their surroundings. In designing an Ayahuasca-assisted form of psychotherapy, part of his goal is to crack open how the culture thinks. We have to accept, he says, that people are bio-psycho-social creatures by their very nature. Addictive behavior has to be followed back to where it started, in emotional and spiritual wounds. Early pain lays down patterns that steer later decisions, and then a culture built on consumption keeps whispering that we are not enough, pushing us to chase outside things in the hope of finally feeling whole.

He uses a heroin user to show how addiction works and why it clings so hard. The drug reaches a region of the brain that eases pain and floods the system with pleasure, reward, and a sense of human connection. One of his patients said heroin made him feel like a small child held by a loving, attentive mother. If a person has never once felt the full force of human connection, and the first place they ever taste it is a needle, then leaning on that drug for some imitation of love and relief becomes almost inevitable.

The first move in helping someone is to walk them back toward themselves, back to the fact that a deep core of worth, beauty, and strength already lives inside them. Ayahuasca, set within a planned and personal course of psychotherapy, lets a patient see their own past differently and release what no longer helps them grow. The regret over what they did while using, and the damage that trailed behind it, loosens its grip, and attention can return to the present.

Maté puts it plainly: Ayahuasca shows you your full potential as a loving, connected being. He speaks from his own experience, describing a certainty that he was loved, not by any one person in particular, simply loved. For anyone fighting a dependence on drugs or anything else, that carries real weight. Addiction grows out of the urge to soothe pain, and sometimes the pain is the belief that you were never worth loving in the first place. Ayahuasca-assisted therapy returns a person to the self that knows, past any doubt, their own vast capacity to be love, which in turn dulls or dissolves the behaviors that fear of inadequacy once drove. Plants that hold DMT, Ayahuasca among them, deserve far more study and a real place in comprehensive treatment.