DMT

It's tough to find a book on psychedelics that doesn't come from an overtly biased perspective. Usually the author is someone who is a fanatical proponent of everyone trying psychedelics and/or someone who has maybe tried a few to many themselves. This book is a nice exception to that. Strassman is Buddhist and clearly has had positive experiences with psychedelics but only mentions his Buddhism towards the end of the book and never talks about his personal experiences with drugs.

Instead, Strassman offers a refreshingly level-headed report on his DMT studies.

This doesn't mean it's not weird. It's weird. Really weird.

I'm really not sure what to make of DMT. It's a chemical our bodies make. There's speculation that it's made in the center of the brain in the pineal gland and that it's released at birth and death. It's present in many other animals and plants. When it's smoked or injected, people have an extremely intense 12 to 15 minute trip in which they see and experience very strange and intense things. I guess that's not exactly revelatory and after reading 350 pages you'd expect that maybe I'd have something more profound to say. Well, not having used the drug, I have no personal insights to offer and I really do not know what to make of the experiences that people who have used it had.

They see humanoid or reptilian beings with whom they can interact. The beings are sometimes, but not always, friendly. At times they are mischievous or indifferent. Other times they are hostile. There is often a white light or white tunnel like you hear about in near death or alien abduction experiences. The visions are incredibly lucid— “more real than real” and they don't go away when the eyes are opened.

It seems that Strassman doesn't know what to think either. In the last chapter he makes some wild guesses about the meaning and origin of the visions, but no explanation is really satisfactory. He says “whenever I tried to react to being-contact sessions with anything I knew or believed previously, it just didn't work. I was stuck.”

Eventually, for a variety of reasons, he gave up the study of psychedelics. Prominent among them is that he could never say for sure that they have any definite benefit or that if they do, that the benefit can't be realized in the hospital setting he was confined to working under. Towards the end of the book he says “Now that this stage of my involvement with psychedelics is over, I don't necessarily feel they are as important as I once did, nor that I would want to do them myself.”