The Early Days of DMT Research

During the 1990s, a fair amount of attention gathered around the psychopharmacological work of Dr. Rick Strassman. More than 60 people received doses of the psychedelic compound DMT across the course of his study. Apart from the experiments of the 1960s, this marked the first time the United States government had put federal money behind research of this kind.

Strassman's work added scientific weight to what was already known about the psychotropic qualities of DMT, or Dimethyltryptamine by its chemical name. Amazonian peoples have taken the compound for generations as part of Ayahuasca, a tea drawn from the Banisteriopsis caapi vine that grows in South America.

According to Strassman, the project drew backing from both private supporters and the government that funded it. Getting clinical grade DMT into the hands of volunteers turned out to be the hardest piece of the whole operation. He spent most of his time sourcing the extracted plant compound and working out exact dosages.

There were other obstacles too. Despite his academic record and the biological research he had carried out in the 1980s, Strassman was rejected by 19 of the 21 medical schools he approached about the study. The deeper problem was bureaucratic: he had to get the Food and Drug Administration talking to the Drug Enforcement Agency before anyone would clear the experiment to begin.

The study ran from roughly 1990 to 1995. Over those years, scientists gave DMT to about 60 volunteers, administering close to 100 doses in total. Strassman kept the design plain, a simple psychopharmacology dose study without grand claims attached to it.

He understood that a scientific, carefully controlled approach was the only way to win approval from the authorities overseeing the project. Conditions had to be safe, the chemical administered with care, the data recorded precisely. Dosages were measured so that no one would die, lose their mind, or come away hungry for more of the substance.

Strassman was conscious of the panic that surrounded these drugs in the 1960s and the lasting stigma it left behind. Avoiding that reputation mattered to him, so he framed the research strictly as inquiry, aimed at future medical understanding of how the compound affects people and animals.

His findings pointed to parallels between humans and lower animal forms in the way these drugs act on the brain. Strassman built an original measurement system to quantify different parts of the DMT experience, which let the team put numbers to the stages and the subjective texture of the drug's effects.

The numerical results were a first of their kind, yet the written accounts of what volunteers went through revealed far more. What participants described resembled the reports of people who have had near death experiences and of those who practice deep meditation. Spiritual experiences kept coming up.

To Strassman, the overlap between spiritual states reached with psychedelics and those reached without them hinted that both might trace back to a shared biological function in the brain. He once likened the DMT state to Buddhist enlightenment, though he later suggested it had more in common with the visions described in Western spiritual traditions. Eastern meditation and the Buddhist notion of enlightenment are often described as a kind of emptiness, a condition without form, thought, feeling, or even a body to register sensation.

The volunteers reported something quite different and far more active. Many described encounters with beings made of light, spiritual guides of a sort, that felt interactive and relational. Questions and answers passed between person and being, along with magical properties, spoken exchanges, and a sense of the self being tended through conversation.

One of the things Strassman found most striking was how consistent the accounts became. 'At first I was startled by people's strange stories about the experience,' he has said. 'Yet, year after year they became more consistent.' To him, that steadiness raised the possibility that some alternate reality might exist. - Brandon Petty