TLDR: You came for the trip reports, you stayed for everything else. Lots of great trip reports, of different kinds, so you won’t be disappointed. Otherwise the book goes pretty deeply into his accounts of the background of the research, detail about how he got funding, FDA and DEA permission, the DMT itself, and the politics he faced around his studies. He also talks about how lost he felt trying to make sense of what do with these experiences, and how to run better experiments in the future. The best part of the book for me was the end, when he envisions a clinic where people would be able to come to trip. All in all a great read no matter what you’re in it for.





Review

Rick Strassman is the doctor responsible for re-ingiting medical research into psychedelics in the early 90s, and for that we should be thankful. This book is very different in content than the movie in that it’s so much more about the things going on around the DMT experiments than the DMT experiments themselves. As there are so many trip reports on the web already, the passages not involving the DMT trips become the more valuable part of the book. This isn’t to say that the trip reports weren’t valuable, instead to say that the other stuff is harder to come by and gives insight into the real life going ons of a doctor trying to do the impossible: quantifying psychedelics.

The book is laid out in four parts, though to me the first and second parts go hand in hand. The first is what DMT is a bit of history, the second was a glimpse into the bureaucracy, the third the trip reports, then finally bringing everything together.

The first two section I have to say were very interesting reads. At one point he talks about his research with the pineal glands and his work on melatonin, a close chemical relative to DMT. This research ended up not being very fruitful and Strassman moved to investigating his real interests. The bureaucracy was interesting as well, though not something I recall very well. He goes through his trials of getting approval, getting the DMT, getting permission to do the studies, what he will do in his studies and his methodology. At many steps of the way, this study could have failed in any number of ways and reasons, but through his perseverance and knowledge of the government networks, he managed to get permission to study the substance.



He aimed to do four studies: A double blind study, a tolerance study, and two studies to see if he can find infer the root action of DMT by suppressing its action with other chemicals. Largely though, in the trip reports, it looks like the studies all kind of came to the same conclusion, little was found regarding the root action, and what came out was a whole lot of tripping.

One of the claims that Strassman makes is how DMT is endogenous to the body and likely the pineal gland, but recently it’s coming out that this is untrue. I’d very much like to find out where/how Strassman makes his claims and to see if this was verified.

The trips make up a bit more than a third of the book. They are varied and very interesting to read. He breaks the trips down by what type of trip the volunteers had: light trips, heavy trips, trips with beings, facing death, mystic trips, and bad trips. Based on the experiences of the volunteers one could break the trips down by what sort of entities they faced, if they had visions of other Earth-like places, if they just faced the tunnel of colors and so on. From what he describes very few of his people encountered the machine elves of McKenna and more lizard people looking to examine and probe the users. One of the bad trips even involved two reptilian alligator beings anally raping the user. Talks of sexual encounters with the DMT beings, implants, nurseries, and other almost hospital like metaphors showed up. Strassman also makes the connection wtih alien abductions and near death experiences as possible natural DMT trips.

The most valuable part of the book, is the last part. Strassman makes a great point here, one which I’ve struggled with myself, as did Aldous Huxley in Doors of Perception. So what? Going to outerspace doesn’t necessarily beneficial to us, and the extreme brevity of the trip doesn’t allow for people to do much internal work. Many of the users didn’t have a lasting change based on the trips, and while the study wasn’t designed to create one, you can sense the disappointment Strassman felt at not uncovering anything more valuable than an amazing ride.

Strassman then goes into many of the issues he faced during the study, and why he ended it prematurely. Many of these political, some personal, the DMT study wore him down, but at least he paved the way for future study. His account of the politics within his Buddhist community were notable as he recalls the acceptance he received from that community when he started, but as his study grew, and the community changed, it turned on him denouncing psychedelics altogether.



When dealing with the other-worldly nature of the DMT trip, Strassman struggled. At some point during the study he is forced to drop his psychoanalytic frameworks, that didn’t work to interpret the trips as symbolic dreams, and just take them at face value. The DMT world was too real, so disconnected from the users, that it didn’t make sense to consider it strictly a hallucination or dream. Strassman doesn’t say whether the world is a consistent world/universe that exists outside of our minds, but is unable to give any other good explanation as to what it might be. He does at some point hint that DMT may be connected to our experience of reality, and the more that we have in us, the more real the experience feels, much the way current anti psychotic and anti depressant drugs disconnect you from that same feeling of reality.



The last chapter he goes on to speculate, as is common in psychedelic books, on what exactly DMT is doing. He gets his physics wrong, as most do, when talking about how DMT might connect you to dark matter and parallel universes, though he at least does get a physicist to comment on his work. The best part of the chapter is when he dreams about creating a psychedelic community center in nature run by staff qualified to administer and care for people while tripping. This type of organization would be a dream come true, a place we can come to free of stigma to work on ourselves using psychedelic drugs, not just in the context of therapy, but in any regard we see fit.



His epilogue was also great, the final trip report of the book, and perhaps the most stereotypical one, where the volunteer found the machine elves and with their multifarious voice they asked “Now do you see?” His only answer was “Of course!” when faced with this exciting and totally novel world.