I've smoked DMT 300 times, here's my advice to you before doing it

Vices

If Schedule I drugs fry your brain like the government says they do, then "Darius," a CU-Boulder student, ought to have a cranium full of charcoal.

He keeps track of what he does. Along with dabbling in party drugs like cocaine, he's fiended on hippie drugs, too, and has smoked cannabis over 4,000 times, drank kratom 1,400 times, dosed LSD 86 times, and smoked DMT an astounding 200 to 300 times. Yet he isn't a pile of drool; he's walking and driving and using his turn signal like the rest of us — even graduating soon with a valuable degree in a difficult subject of which he doesn't want us to get too specific about because some of the stuff he does is obviously illegal as fuck.

However, we're mostly curious about his DMT use. While we know a lot of ents and acidheads, we've never met anyone who's used DMT that many times. If any drug were going to fry your brain after extended use, you might think it would be DMT, which is a nuclear pixie dust that teleports the user into a hallucinated world of intricate geometry and crazy fractals and robe-wearing beings who look like aliens. Plenty of people avoid DMT because it's too scary. But "Darius" says no: DMT is a safe shortcut to sanity, happiness, deep insight and some amazing Tuesday mornings in the dorms.

Here he is, in his own words, which we've edited for length, clarity and flow:

DMT has made me happier.

There's this mindset that people need to get themselves prepared for DMT, but I don't think that's the case at all. You can't really prepare for it. It's just an experience that overcomes you.

I think DMT is the safest drug there is. I mean it's already getting made in your body, it just gets broken down too fast for you to feel it. When you smoke it, it actually feels like it's meant to be there. It's a lot like dreaming. The DMT experience is just shorter and more hectic.

I got started when I was about 17 or 18. I just had the basement to myself basically, and I bought some Mimosa hostilis from the Internet and extracted DMT from it. That's the only way I had access to it, and I really wanted to try it. Extracting DMT was about the same level of difficulty as making pot brownies, which I'd done a lot, it just took longer and had more dangerous ingredients. We ended up with a white crystalline powder. I asked my friend, do you think this is actually DMT? And his response was, what the hell else would it be? Then I smoked it and it was obviously DMT.

Since then I've probably done it somewhere in the range of 200 to 300 times. Most people never push more than 15 or 20 times. But in my experience that was right around when I totally got rid of the apprehensions, and that allowed me to get into the nitty-gritty of the experience.

It only takes about six minutes. I would do it before school because I found it would balance my day in a similar way to 20 minutes of meditation. It's mother universe giving you a hug.

You'll know if you smoke enough to blast off because you'll reach this door that is intricately decorated, and if you step through that door you reach a three-dimensional visual hallucination, like the picture-perfect hallucination. The oranges are the perfect orange. The purples are the perfect purples. The curves of the room are the perfect curves.

There are two different kinds of beings in the DMT experience. And when I say "beings," I'm just saying they look like beings; I don't really think they're actually beings. I think they're just a visual expression of processes in your brain. Anyway, there are the machine elves and this feminine goddess kind of thing. I've never made out with the feminine goddess. She's never touched me. The feminine goddess is trying to explain something that is key to living life, but the machine elves are literally doing backflips, going crazy trying to distract you from what the feminine goddess is trying to tell you.

The feminine goddess is trying to tell you something like, she wants you to be here, be in the moment. I've always studied Buddhism. In Buddhism you always hear, "Be in the now," almost so much that it's been watered down to nothing. But then you smoke DMT and then you fully realize and understand it. To analyze the DMT experience too much, to think about what you're going to tell your friends afterward, to not be completely in what's happening, that's a disgrace to life.

I have introduced a lot of people to DMT. Like 100 or so. When I introduce someone to it, I try to make sure I'm there for it so that they can have a good experience. I bring them into my bedroom and then ask them to meditate for a while, until they feel like their heart rate is lowered, and then I offer them headphones if they want them, 'cause I find that's good for certain environments, especially if there's other loud noises around, like if we're smoking it in the dorms.

We use a dab rig. If you use a pipe you have to take three big hits, but if you use a dab rig you can get it all in one small hit.

The experiences have always been positive. It's extremely fascinating and it opens them up to something new. The only bad thing that happened is that one guy puked in the trash can, but he pukes from everything. Even he ended up saying he liked it.

I had a friend who I gave my extraction kit to who got in trouble with it. He smoked it over and over again because he was like, "I didn't want to be in this regular everyday reality anymore." That has got to be the most unhealthy use of DMT I can think of.

To me, it's shown me that it's a disgrace to the life force — or whatever you want to call it, I guess Christian people could call it 'God' — me, I'm a pantheist, although that comes more from my LSD experiences — to not be completely in the moment; it's disrespectful not to pay attention to every single moment. And I don't want to be disgraceful to the life force or whatever you want to call it. So I will pay it respect by paying attention to life.

[originally published August 23, 2017]