Boldly going where no heads have gone before

Approach

Intravenous infusion (IV) application allows for extended DMT sessions dubbed ‘DMTx’ lasting hours at a time

By Colin Prahl from the exhibition Limit Sequence at The Chambers Project gallery till 16 September 2022. homepage image ‘Geodesia’ also by Prahl is available as a print from the artists’ webstore.

DMTx is an extended DMT trip applied by intravenous drip… in the ‘DMTx machine’ at Imperial College London.

“It’s crazy that ppl aren’t studying endogenous DMT more than they are,” says the man who brought ‘the spirit molecule’ to Western attention, pointing out that Dr Jon Dean of DMT Quest cannot get further funding for his revelatory 2019 discovery that DMT is produced in large quantities by the human body.

“Nature is gushing with DMT” according to Dennis McKenna. At least plant medicine got decriminalised in Dr Dean’s Michigan neighbourhood.

“How is DMT made?” Strassman prompts, “What’s its synthesis? What turns it on or off? Why should the brain when faced with this simple, ubiquitous molecule start constructing these alien realities? And what purpose does it have?”

Dr Strassman’s got plenty of ideas to get the ball rolling. He first put forward the notion of a DMaTrix in a 2016 paper published alongside Andrew Gallimore, a Japan-based British neuroscientist who could lay claim to being the most ambitious psychonaut in the global space.

“The DMT experience could be ‘titrated’ both in terms of duration and intensity, adjusting these levels to accommodate the specific needs of individuals”

The two pointed out in rigorous scientific detail that DMT was ideally placed to be administered by IV drip, hospital bed-style. 

‘There are potential clinical applications of a continuous IV infusion of DMT,’ they wrote, ‘Compared to the substantially longer effects of other psychedelic substances, DMT offers more discrete and therefore more easily manageable experiences. In conjunction with continuous target‐controlled infusions, the DMT experience could be “titrated” both in terms of duration and intensity, adjusting these levels to accommodate the specific needs of different individuals and indications.’

Colorado based Mindfulness Medicine picked up on this and began its DMTx awareness-raising project already preparing 21st Century to explore DMT hyperspace for extended periods. Gallimore’s enthusiastic lectures suggested they would y’know, get used to it after a while, find their feet and achieve a clearer, productive learning experience. The intensity can be dialled up or down, and explorers in dire straits can be pulled out of DMTx at the flick of a switch.

“I asked Rick how long he’d like to spend there,” says DMTx’s Daniel McQueen, a psychotherapist and psychedelic retreat organiser, and ‘Oh, a couple of days’ was the reply.”

On the practicalities of commuting to hyperspace Dr Strassman commented “Well, astronauts wear diapers” during his Vital lecture.

No prizes for guessing where the DMaTrix is up and running right now. Imperial College London, backed by the UK’s Small Pharma company are on the verge of publishing the results of their experiment SPL028 Prolonged DMT Series: An injectable formulation of deuterated DMT designed to deliver a more prolonged psychedelic experience.

At July’s Breaking Convention conference I chatted to a gentleman who’d been in the DMaTrix (already shortened to ‘The DMTX Machine’ in UK space argot), the day before; a young neuroscientist. He seemed pretty chilled, to be fair.

“I won’t ask you what it was like,” I said, flexing my fearless reporting skills. “Hm,” came the reply, in acknowledgment. He showed me photos, and there he was wired up to the machine in a technicolour Frankenstein’s laboratory transported into the secular era, with MSB doors plus health ‘n’ safety notices. And a dude playing the lute in the corner.

While it was one of those strikingly unfamiliar scenes that tickled my ontology, there was undeniably something exciting, creative, proactive and downright courageous about it too. This was bolstered by the presence of Robin Carhart-Harris himself, who’s taken personal charge of SPL028 (which is patented). Still, by the time you actually read this there could be a hole torn in the fabric of reality where Imperial’s South Kensington campus used to be.

“The important thing is not what the entities are, but what can we learn to better ourselves and society?”

Imperial’s model is considered ‘scientific’ in comparison to the DMTX org’s emphasis on spiritual preparation. The college’s secret weapon Dr Chris Timmerman though is out there detailing a combined model of approach and researching DMT’s similarity to a ‘waking dream’ state featuring the requisite rapid drop in alpha waves and rise in delta plus gamma waves, plus: “reduced modularity, increased integration and functional plasticity. These findings were complemented by psychological studies showing that the DMT state is one of immersive visual imagery, intense somatic experiences and partial disconnection from the environment, which we found shared significant overlap with near- death experiences. DMT administration also resulted in positive mental health outcomes in healthy volunteers providing evidence for the first time that DMT may provide a useful alternative to currently investigated psychedelic treatments.”

The space’s first documented encounter with stand-alone DMT came in 1961 when William Burroughs wrote to Timothy Leary urging him to have some apomorphine to hand if he gave it a go. Because Burroughs had thought he was fine with DMT until one of his companions turned into – what else? – a bejewelled jaguar. (Burroughs was already a veteran of the Amazon, having written about yagé over a decade previously. Neuroscientist Andrew Lees credits Burroughs, a failed doctor who became a writer, with inspiring him to sample yagé that in turn “broke down certain rigid structures that were blocking innovations” in Lees’ leading Parkinson’s disease research).

Leary write later that DMT was “the nuclear bomb of the psychedelic family. A sub-cellular cloud-ride into a world of ordered, moving beauty which defies external metaphor. There’s memory of structure, because space is converted into flowing process.” His crew’s reports were varied, and indeed DMT still gets a mixed reception today despite a John Hopkins compilation report maintaining 80% of users surveyed reported positive entity encounters. 

“The kids round here don’t need psychedelic guides. They’ve got YouTube and DMT vapes”

Lady Amanda Fielding described it as “a little harsh” with English understatement at the Psych Summit. But her Berkley Psytech concluded in its ayahuasca research that long-term use is beneficial. 

Might as well try microdosing it then.

“The kids round here don’t need psychedelic guides. They’ve got YouTube and DMT vapes,” said a friend of mine based in a large regional UK city when I told him about Vital. And indeed medical reports published in July 2022 shows how a diagnosed schizophrenic claimed to have healed himself with DMT and other psychedelics.

“During his final trip, he even encountered an “entity” in the form of a geometric shape called an icosahedron “with a consciousness”. Every thought that the teenager shared with the icosahedron was mirrored back to him as if it would have answers to all possible questions.

Taking his treatment a step further, the patient then began smoking low doses of DMT on a daily basis for an extended period of time. Doing so brought him into contact with yet more entities and produced an antidepressant effect. Eventually, he came to realise that “he wanted [to] belong to the society and the world, to live and enjoy life. He described that 'life had begun to feel like a life”.’

Well, The University of California says microdosing DMT works for rats.

Out there in the self-healing underground though, the “question everything” rule Dr Strassman swears by is alive. “Vaping DMT is spiritual masturbation” writes one discontent (a Chicken Licken or plant medicine snob? You decide). Carl Jung warned, “Beware of unearned wisdom” and with my apprentice ‘guide’ hat on I would remind everyone to actually live the lessons learned from the Icosahedrons or whatever they might really be above. 

“The important thing is not what they are, but what can we learn to better ourselves and society?” says Dr Strassman. And we cannot do that if we spend the whole time wired into a machine at Imperial College.