DMT Delivery Systems

The potent hallucinogen DMT, when taken orally, is inactivated by peripheral monoamine oxidase-A, an enzyme found in the lining of the stomach, whose function is precisely to oxidize molecules containing an NH2 amine group, like DMT. There are thus two ways to ingest DMT, or plants containing DMT, and experience psychoactive effects — by parenteral ingestion through nasal inhalation, smoking, injection, or rectal insertion; or by mixing the DMT with an MAO inhibitor that prevents the breakdown of DMT in the digestive tract. Let's look at these one at a time.

Inhalation     A number of indigenous peoples around the Orinoco basin in Venezuela ingest a snuff called epená, made from the sap of several trees in the genus Virola which contain large amounts of DMT; and the Guahibo of the Orinoco basin use a snuff called yopo, also called cohoba, vilca, and huilca, made from the DMT-rich plant Anadenanthera peregrina.

Smoking     Contemporary North American users smoke synthetic DMT as the free base. Burning DMT has a harsh, unpleasant, unforgettable taste and smell, variously described as being like mothballs or burning plastic.

Injection     In a well-known series of experiments, psychopharmacologist Rick Strassman administered DMT to his volunteer subjects using intravenous injection. Intramuscular injection was rejected because it gave an effect that was slower in onset and less intense than the smoked route. The smoked route was rejected because of uncertainty as to how much DMT was actually being absorbed, and questions about what DMT combustion products the volunteers might actually be inhaling.

Rectal insertion     I know of only one person who has reportedly tried this. Krystle Cole mixed 600 mg of DMT with butter, melted it, and inserted the mixture rectally, in three 200-mg doses, with a syringe, after having used an enema. She reports that the experience was not enjoyable.

Mixture     The ayahuasca vine (Banisteriopsis caapi) contains the ß-carboline harmaline, which is a potent inhibitor of MAO-A. Three plants of the Upper Amazon have leaves that are rich in DMT — the shrub chacruna (Psychotria viridis), the closely related shrub sameruca (Psychotria carthaginensis), and a vine variously called ocoyagé, chalipanga, chagraponga, and huambisa (Diplopterys cabrerana). Boiling the leaves of these compañeros, companion plants, along with the MAO-inhibiting ayahuasca vine produces a drink that allows the DMT to produce its hallucinogenic effect when orally ingested — a unique solution which apparently developed only in the Upper Amazon.

How in the world did they come up with this? Many mestizo shamans will claim, of course, that the plants themselves taught humans how to do this. Other commentators point to some mysterious ecological wisdom found only in indigenous peoples. I think the answer is simpler. I think people were looking for a better way to vomit.

It is harmaline, one of the ß-carboline components of the ayahuasca vine, that makes the ayahuasca drink such a potent emetic and purgative. These gastrointestinal effects appear to be related to the ability of harmaline to inhibit peripheral MAO; overdosing on an MAO inhibitor — they are sometimes used as antidepressants — is known to cause nausea and vomiting. Harmaline is also found in Syrian rue (Peganum harmala), from which it was first isolated and after which it was named; like the ayahuasca vine, Syrian rue has been used as an emetic and vermifuge. Doses of harmaline as small as 200 mg orally produce nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea in human volunteers. Five grams of Syrian rue seeds produce mild nausea and vomiting; higher doses produce both vomiting and diarrhea, in some cases serious enough to be incapacitating.

Now, I have found no direct evidence that any of the traditional companion plants has emetic or purgative properties. However, it is noteworthy that two Psychotria species, P. ipecacuanha and P. emetica, are widely used emetics, the former in Brazil and the latter in Perú. P. ipecacuanha is, of course, the source of the widely used emetic called syrup of ipecac. In the Colombian Vaupés, a shrub whose leaves are added to the ayahuasca drink, and which Schultes and Hofmann have identified as ocoyagé, is called by the Tukano “the ayahuasca that makes you vomit.”

If the companion plants have emetic properties of their own, it is plausible to hypothesize that the ayahuasca vine and its companion plants were first combined in order to synergize or modulate their emetic and purgative effects, with the serendipitous result of creating an orally effective delivery form for DMT.

Not quite so mysterious, but still, I think, pretty clever.

Ayahuasca and Schizophrenia

One of the primary motivations for research into hallucinogens has been the hope that it might shed light on the cause and nature of schizophrenia. Such research is largely premised on the belief that hallucinogens generally are psychotomimetic -- that is, capable of producing a model psychosis, which allows researchers to study the mechanisms of psychosis in non-psychotic subjects. This assumption is worth challenging.

Schizophrenia is a complex disease that affects almost every area of thinking, feeling, and relating. One standard text lists the main symptoms of schizophrenia as auditory hallucinations, experiences of being controlled, delusions, disorders of thinking, and emotional and volitional changes. Similarly, a classic list of the first-rank symptoms of schizophrenia includes audible thoughts; voices heard arguing; voices heard commenting on one’s actions; the experience of influences playing on the body; thought withdrawal and other interferences with thoughts; diffusion of thought; delusional perception; and feelings, impulses, and volitional acts that are experienced by the patient as the work or influence of others. The DSM-IV diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia require at least two of the following: delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, grossly disorganized or catatonic behavior, and negative symptoms -- that is, affective flattening, alogia, or avolition.

The cognitive problems reported by schizophrenic patients include distractibility, difficulty focusing, an inability to screen out irrelevant information, feeling overloaded with too many stimuli at the same time, and problems with information processing, abstract categorization, planning and regulating goal-directed behavior, cognitive flexibility, attention, memory, and visual processing. The cardinal affective symptoms include affective unresponsiveness; emotional withdrawal; inappropriate affect; shallowness, coarsening, and blunting of affect; retardation of affect; perplexity; and anhedonia.

Now some hallucinogens can apparently mimic some of the features of schizophrenia -- primarily alterations in cognitive functions and depersonalization, including difficulty in focusing on objects, tension, changes in mood, distorted time sense, difficulty in expressing thoughts, dreamlike feelings, and visual hallucinations. Psilocybin ingestion, for example, has reportedly led to disturbances of emotion, sensory perception, thought processes, reality appraisal, and ego function. These effects included derealization, an altered sense of time and space, loss of ego boundaries, visual disturbances, difficulty in directing attention, and synesthesias.

Few of these features of schizophrenia, apart from visual and auditory hallucinations, time dilation, and synesthesias, appear to be part of the DMT or ayahuasca experience. And in schizophrenic illness, visual hallucinations occur with significantly less frequency than do auditory hallucinations, and schizophrenics suffer from thought disorders and loss of affect and insight -- none of which is true of DMT or ayahuasca.

No one can seriously claim to have produced a hallucinogenic model for schizophrenic illness as a clinical entity. Attempts to draw the analogy have proceeded by narrowing the comparison: thus, for example, researchers say that hallucinogenic experience should be compared with early and recently diagnosed rather than with fully developed schizophrenia, or with paranoid instead of undifferentiated schizophrenia, or with acute rather than with chronic schizophrenia. Such shifting ground does not inspire confidence.

And any such comparison must take both set and setting into account. As molecular pharmacologist David E. Nichols puts it, “No clinician experienced with these substances would fail to consider set and setting as primary determinants of the experience.” It is difficult to maintain that participants in, say, a Native American Church peyote ceremony are temporarily psychotic in any meaningful sense at all.

Indeed, a formal psychiatric study has shown significant differences between long-term members of the União de Vegetal (UDV), a Brazilian ayahuasca-using church, who consumed ayahuasca at least two times a month in religious rituals, and demographically matched controls who had never consumed ayahuasca -- but hardly in the direction of dysfunction. Personality testing instruments showed UDV members to be more reflective, rigid, loyal, stoic, slow-tempered, frugal, orderly, and persistent, and with higher scores on measures of social desirability and emotional maturity than controls. The ayahuasca-using participants also differed from controls as being more confident, relaxed, optimistic, carefree, uninhibited, outgoing, and energetic, and with higher scores on traits of hyperthymia, cheerfulness, stubbornness, and overconfidence. Significantly, on neuropsychological testing the UDV group demonstrated significantly higher scores on measures of concentration and short-term memory, despite the fact that many ayahuasca users reported significant psychiatric and substance abuse histories prior to their church membership.

Now, there are certainly some problems with this study. UDV worship is a structured and stable environment. Participants remain seated, with long periods of silence during which they seek self-knowledge through mental concentration, aided by ayahuasca. The ayahuasca-using study participants had to have been members of UDV for at least ten years, with at least twice-monthly -- that is, highly regular -- attendance at these services. Thus, the ayahuasca users may have been preselected for personality traits of stability, persistence, and orderliness. Moreover, while subjects and controls were matched for age, ethnicity, marital status, and level of education, there was apparently no attempt made to control for regular churchgoing, a measure on which the ayahuasca users were preselected for perfect scores, and which may well be correlated with personality traits for which they also scored high. Still, the study certainly gives no grounds to believe that long-term UDV church membership, along with concomitant twice-monthly drinking of ayahuasca, has caused any personality or cognitive detriment to its members.

One may be left to wonder what is going on here. Some authors may be engaged in covert stigmatization of the hallucinogenic experience. Others may be staking out turf -- that is, advocating their own clinical use of hallucinogens for specific therapies while disparaging their use “recreationally in unsupervised settings.” There may be other sociological reasons as well. There seem to be three different types of people involved in hallucinogen research -- those who synthesize, characterize, and consume hallucinogenic substances; those who are passionate about rat brains, state-of-the-art agonists, and beta-ray radiography of thin slides of tissue after the administration of labeled ligands; and those who are engaged in the actual care and study of persons with schizophrenia. Apparently these three groups do not talk to each other, or at least not much.

The Omnipresence of the Spirits

I once asked don Rómulo Magin about his awareness of the spirits when not drinking ayahuasca. Don Rómulo said that he is constantly aware of being surrounded by the spirits, but he sees them roughly, vaguely; drinking ayahuasca, he said, is “like putting on glasses.” Doña María Tuesta agrees; ayahuasca makes the spirits bien claro, really clear. When don Roberto Acho smokes mapacho and concentrates, he says, he sees the plant spirits; he sees them now because he has seen them before, when drinking ayahuasca, but he does not see them as clearly. Most important, though, he hears them, clearly, speaking in his ear, instructing him -- heal like this, they say, suck there, sing this icaro, make such-and-such a medicine -- just as if they were standing next to him, just as, he says, you and I are talking right now. When he drinks ayahuasca, he both hears and sees the spirits clearly.

And, just as some shamans say that the spirits are always present, but are brought into focus by ayahuasca, some say that the songs of the plant spirits are always present, and ayahuasca brings them into audibility. Thus, don Carlos Perez Shuma says that the icaros are like radio waves: "Once you turn on the radio, you can pick them up." Or the songs are like prerecorded tapes. "It's like a tape recorder," don Carlos says. "You put it there, you turn it on, and already it starts singing.... You start singing along with it."

This reminds me of what Joan of Arc says to the Dauphin in George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan:

CHARLES: Oh, your voices, your voices. Why don’t the voices
come to me? I am king, not you.

JOAN: They do come to you; but you do not hear them.

So: we are always surrounded by the spirits and their music. We see them sometimes, at the edges of our vision. Their music is pura sonida, pure sound, the language of the plants, reflected in the silbando, the whispered singing of the shaman, and in the susurration of the shacapa, the leaf-bundle rattle. We can learn to listen for their music in the singing of the stars.

The Saga of Rick Strassman

After many years of effort, psychopharmacologist Rick Strassman finally got permission to administer DMT to human volunteers in a hospital setting. Out of this research came a steady stream of scientific articles and, eventually, a popular book, DMT: The Spirit Molecule. But the study ended in what can only be described as chaos and confusion, and it may be worth thinking about why that happened.

Strassman was himself a practicing Zen Buddhist, and he had hoped that his research would shed light on the relationship between hallucinogenic experience and spirituality. But Strassman came to believe that any such benefits of the DMT experience were transient, even for volunteers who had incredibly intense and remarkable experiences during high-dose DMT sessions. Follow-up interviews with the first group of volunteers, one to two years after their DMT experiences, found little of what Strassman considered to be positive carryover into their daily lives. Even those who believed they had benefited inwardly from their high-dose DMT experience showed little outward evidence of making significant changes in their lives — for example, taking up a spiritual or psychotherapeutic practice, changing jobs, or increasing community service.

“To my surprise and sadness,” Strassman said in a later interview, “people's initial high-dose breakthrough sessions were beginning to sound a little hollow. I think this was because, by following our early volunteers, I saw that the drug experience itself had little substantial impact on most people’s lives.” The relocations, marriages, or divorces that did occur in volunteers were all under way before their involvement in the studies.

Strassman came to believe that this lack of long-term positive effect was the result of the experimental setting itself. The biomedical model, he concluded, was intrusive and dehumanizing, as was a neutral and nondirective supervising style. There needed to be more emphasis on treatment, he thought, and less on descriptive mechanistic brain-chemistry studies. DMT by itself had no beneficial effect, Strassman concluded; in fact, he became concerned that he was harming rather than helping his volunteers.

Other factors as well led to the cessation of the New Mexico research. Strassman had hoped to begin therapeutic work -- as opposed to mechanistic studies in the hospital -- with the longer-acting psilocybin, but the ethics committee refused to allow him to take his research out of the hospital setting. Off-site therapeutic work became even less likely when a volunteer on psilocybin had a paranoid reaction and fled the hospital. A graduate student began taking drugs with volunteers after hours; hoped-for colleagues did not arrive, and in fact began setting up their own foundations competing for scarce resources and colleagues. Long-term benefits were meager, and adverse effects were adding up. The frequency with which volunteers reported contact with other-dimensional beings was unexpected and personally disorienting to Strassman. His wife developed a serious illness, and they moved to Canada so she could be closer to family.

In addition, Strassman had begun a relationship with an American Zen Buddhist monastery in the early 1970s, which provided ongoing spiritual training and support. Many monks shared with him the importance of their earlier psychedelic experiences in choosing a spiritual lifestyle, which supported his emerging theories regarding psychedelics and mysticism. Buddhism also stimulated many of the ideas guiding the studies, providing the model for developing a new rating scale for DMT effects, and informing Strassman’s method of supervising drug sessions.

However, a disastrous conversation with a monk who knew little about psychotropics coincided with the terminal illness of the monastery’s leader and the consequent lobbying for succession. The monk condemned Strassman’s work, which caused formerly supportive monks to either turn silent or reverse long-standing support. The issue came to a head when Strassman published an article linking psychedelics and Buddhism in Tricycle, The Buddhist Review. In this article, he said, among other things, that “dedicated Buddhist practitioners with little success in their meditation, but well along in moral and intellectual development, might benefit from a carefully timed, prepared, supervised, and followed-up psychedelic session to accelerate their practice.” The head temple called on Strassman to stop his work, which further wore down his remaining desire to continue the research. Several months after moving to Canada, he ended his work and returned all drugs and the last year of grant support to the Federal government.

This is an intriguing story, on many levels. Strassman largely attributes the outcome as a result of the experimental set and setting. To the extent that the scientific protocol -- and, importantly, its funding -- depended on a hospital environment and biomedical approach, he says, the setting may in fact have been subversive of long-term personal change.

But is long-term personal change what DMT is even about? With his own preexisting biases, both Buddhist and countercultural, Strassman thought that spiritual transformation was the endpoint of the hallucinogenic experience; he was personally surprised and disoriented by the frequently reported contact with other-dimensional beings. Perhaps the hospital setting was less important than Strassman’s own unmet expectations. Perhaps DMT -- like ayahuasca itself -- is not a psychotherapist but a teacher, leading where it intends -- not to some sort of enlightenment, not to self-improvement, not to community volunteer work; but into the dark and luminous realm of the spirits.

Sucking

The foundational triad of mestizo shamanism in the Amazon is shacapar, rattling; chupar, sucking; and soplar, blowing tobacco smoke. Amazonian healers are classic sucking shamans.

Not all sucking is physical. I was taught that there are three ways through which the shaman’s mouth can draw out intrusive objects, sickness, darts, and magical harm from the patient’s body – by sucking with the lips directly on the skin; by using one’s cupped hands to make a tube through which the sickness can be drawn out; and by pulling with the mouth from a distance. Still, the preferred method remains placing the mouth right on the patient's body, right where the sickness is located, and sucking like crazy.

The sucking or pulling removes the haire, air, and the flemocidades, phlegmosities, of the sickness. The shaman is protected by his or her own flema, phlegm, stored in the chest, and raised into the throat as mariri, rarefied phlegm, like air, vibratory and protective. The phlegm of the healer contests with the phlegm of the sickness. The painting below, part of a larger picture by Pablo Amaringo, shows a shaman sucking a patient; the white material is the healer's own mariri.

As the shaman sucks, the sickness comes out into the mouth -- sometimes like cold air, sometimes like a metallic object, sometimes as rotten meat, darts, toads, scorpions, insects, razor blades. In fact, what comes out of the patient's body may have a sweet taste, tempting one to swallow -- a temptation to be resisted. The healer then spits out what is bad and keeps what will increase the healer’s own power. Often what is sucked out is so vile that the shaman gags and retches dramatically before spitting it onto the ground. If the object sucked or pulled from the patient is a powerful pathogenic object like a dart, it enters the mariri to become part of the shaman’s own dart collection; or, if the healer wishes, the dart caught in the mariri can be projected back onto the one who sent it.

Healing by sucking is widely distributed among the indigenous people of the Amazon. The Matsigenka shaman sucks out pathogenic objects – thorns, leaves, bones, spines – and shows them to the audience; the blood sucked out is said to be black. The Toba shaman sucks out little stones, sticks, worms. Anthropologist Philippe Descola describes an Achuar shaman sucking out and revealing “half a dozen pieces of glass, opaque with age.” Among the Aguaruna and the Shuar what is sucked out is said to be darts. The practice is old. A report of the Tupinambá dating to 1613 gives this account:

I see the shaman at work, sucking up the patient’s illness, as hard as he can, into his mouth and throat, pretending to hold them full and distended and then quickly spitting outside the enclosed space. He spits with great force, making a noise like a pistol shot and says that it is the illness which he has sucked.

Similarly, in North America, the Chippewa make use of a “sucking doctor.” Anthropologist John Lee Maddox has listed many Native American peoples among whom the doctor sucks the affected part and exhibits some foreign body, including the Florida, Sioux, Algonkin, Kernai, Ojibway, Apache, and Shingu. He described how the Californian Karok doctor sucks the patient, then vomits up a frog; and how the Cumana suck disease from the patient, then vomit a hard black ball. Australian Aborigines extract quartz, bone, bark, charcoal, or glass marble objects from their patients. Beatrice Whiting describes extraction by suction among the Paiute:

Sucking is part of nearly every ceremony. The doctor often sucks out some foreign object and thus effects a cure. He spits the object out of his mouth and shows it to the people. He then mixes it with dirt in his hands, rubs his hands together, and the object disappears. Sometimes he vomits the object into a pan of earth to make it disappear.

Sucking out a disease is risky, dramatic, frightening, unpredictable. To suck out a disease means committing to deal with something disgusting and dangerous. It is also a direct and personal challenge to the sorcerer who sent the sickness, and thus risks creating a powerful enemy. No wonder some shamans keep silent about their knowledge and abilities.

The Future of Shamanism in the Amazon

Mestizo shamanism in the Upper Amazon is expanding and declining at the same time. It is expanding at the expense of other indigenous shamanisms, and it is declining in the face of biomedicine and the reluctance of the young to undergo the sufferings required to become a shaman.

This does not mean that there is no interest in the shamanism of the Upper Amazon, and particularly in the psychoactive effects of ayahuasca. That interest, in fact, is great. Every year since 2005, Alan Shoemaker has organized, on behalf of his organization Soga del Alma, a conference on ayahuasca shamanism in Iquitos, Perú. These gatherings have featured such heavyweights as Dennis McKenna, Luis Eduardo Luna, Pablo Amaringo, Jacques Mabit, and Benny Shanon, as well as a number of indigenous curanderos. There is no doubt that these gatherings achieve their aims. They bring together famous scholars, psychonautic enthusiasts, serious seekers, and a variety of mestizo and indigenous shamans. Everyone gains an aura of legitimacy from this interaction, and the shamans pick up some much-needed cash. But then everyone goes home, and the shamans are left without what the tradition really needs — apprentices.

One reason shamanism is declining among Indians and mestizos is because young people do not want to keep the difficult diet; young Shuar, for example, nowadays prefer to learn magia, magic, by reading books and following their instructions, rather than undergo the restricted diet and sexual abstinence required to become a shaman.

None of the four shamans with whom anthropologist Luis Eduardo Luna worked twenty years ago had a successor. They all told him that young people were not interested in or were unable to endure the diet and sexual abstinence necessary for learning from the plant spirits. Their roles have been taken, they said, by charlatans who do not possess any knowledge of the plants. And things have not changed much since then.

Don Mauricio Fasabi Apuela, a shaman from Lamas in San Martín, is willing to take on young people as apprentices in ayahuasca shamanism, which requires periods of sexual abstinence. He has had no takers. "I have no disciples here, just me," he says. "In the end they prefer the girls." Shaman Casimiro Izurieta Cevallos puts it this way: "Youngsters today don't have the same curiosity." My own maestro ayahusquero now has one regular apprentice, his son. No one else in the local community is currently working with him or has asked to be his apprentice. The foreigners, he shrugs, come for a single experience; few come to learn the ayahuasca path. But, he says hopefully, “the medicine will continue.”

Many Amazonian shamans continue to have patients, especially in rural villages and poorer urban areas, such as in Iquitos or Pucallpa. But few shamans nowadays have apprentices. Without students, as one shaman put it, there is no future. And then a thing of great beauty and power will be gone.

Richard Doyle on Ayahuasca

Richard Doyle – you can check out his website and his curriculum vitae – is currently Associate Professor of Rhetoric in the Department of English at Penn State University. He received his PhD from the University of California–Berkeley in 1993, and is the author of two books of interdisciplinary scholarship on science and technology.

His first book, On Beyond Living: Rhetorical Transformations of the Life Sciences (Stanford, 1997), analyzed the complex interplay between language and scientific innovation, arguing that creative transformations of scientific language have been crucial to the rise, success, and impact of molecular biology in the 20th century. His second book, Wetwares: Experiments in Postvital Living (Minnesota, 2003), looked at the effects of contemporary biotechnology on our practices of pleasure, identity, and embodiment, emerging scientific paradigms in which life is primarily a matter of information -- as he puts it, wetware. Doyle also recently completed a novel on the work of science fiction author Philip K. Dick, to be entitled The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, itself the name of an imaginary book in a phildickian story.

Okay, he's an interesting guy. What does all this have to do with ayahuasca?

Doyle has written a lengthy essay on his own ayahuasca experience. And he is now working on a new book on the history of archaic and contemporary ecstatic practices and their role in the biological and technological evolution of human beings. The book is to be called, according to different sources, either Mitochondriac! or Ecodelic!, with the subtitle Plants, Rhetoric and the Evolution of The Noösphere – or perhaps, instead, Darwin's Pharmacy: Rhetoric, Ecodelics and the Evolution of Mind. Whatever the title, Doyle is interested, he says, in the role archaic information technologies – including ayahuasca – have played in the evolution of mind. “Compounds that systematically and consistently alter human consciousness abound in the terrestrial ecology,” he writes, “and have been frequent adjuncts to the rhetorical toolkit of orators, shamans, oracles and psychiatrists.” There is thus a link between rhetoric and psychoactive substances: they are both part of a “huge archive of techniques for altering consciousness.” Hence he seeks to understand consciousness pragmatically – in terms of its capacities to be altered through a wide variety of media. The book will “link these techniques of ecstasy to a new evaluation of the role of inebriants in human evolution.”

So. Here is a half-hour video of a talk Doyle gave at the Beyond Biopolitics symposium at the Center for the Study of Women and Society, CUNY Graduate Center of New York, March 2006, entitled Biometrics and the Human/Plant Interface:

And the following is a talk entitled Ayahuasca Montage that Doyle gave to the Society for Literature, Science and Art in Amsterdam in June 2006. The talk discusses the role of what he calls montage and discontinuity in representing the experience of drinking ayahuasca.

As I said, an interesting guy.