DMT vape pens are bringing world's strangest drug into everyday life

Vices By Reilly Capps

Compared to anything else, the psychedelic drug DMT is nuts.

As the UFC is to a toddler slapfight, as Niagara is to a bath, so DMT is to marijuana ... plus the Challenger disaster, your first orgasm and electroshock therapy all mixed together.

Explaining a DMT trip is like a horse who's been brought skydiving explaining it to the other stallions. "There was this wind and the barn was small and I was like above the barn somehow and … holy fuck dude."

So you'd think smoking DMT would be a whole big ordeal, an epic adventure, a huge event. After all, to trip on the DMT-containing tea ayahuasca, which is actually the training-wheels version of smoked DMT, users often drive or fly to a remote location, do a ritual diet, are guided by a shaman who's been trained for generations before spending a few days "integrating."

DMT, though: kids are smoking it at parties. Kids vape it in their car after school. If you cultivate an awareness of the odor — like grandma's burned shag carpet — you can smell it at Red Rocks. Kids smoke it like it's a cigarette or a Swisher Sweet, instead of the closest thing we have to interdimensional space travel. And then these kids go right on with their lives.

And when we say kids we often mean kids — 15 to 17 year olds.

"I use to like to smoke it before school," one regular user, who started manufacturing DMT in his basement at 17, tells Rooster. "It's a real pick-me-up."

It's even stranger to hear these stories because the majority of teens and young adults are actually less druggy than the generation before them, just as they're less likely to have sex and have a driver's license.

But, anecdotally, it looks like a small minority of kids compensate by being unrepentant fiends. The internet has given them knowledge of, and the dark net access to, an alphabet soup of mind-cranking molecules, from 2C-B to 4-AcO to 5-MeO. Truthful information on the internet teaches them these psychedelics are relatively physically harmless, and so these psycho-nots are nom-nom-noming a whole cheese plate's worth of drugs. (The stories of kids getting spun out on psychedelics are less well-shared online.)

No other drug carries the sleek cultural approval and awe that DMT does, and if a kid smokes a breakthrough dose at a party, it can get her the kind of respect other kids in other generations got from jumping off a rooftop or smashing a beer can into their foreheads.

And then there's this ultimate sign of DMT's ubiquity:

DMT vape pens.

A vape pen, of course, is a simple, sleek, pen-shaped electronic device that lets users easily inhale drugs — usually nicotine or THC.

But modified versions of them can easily be filled with DMT. That obviates the need to use a complicated smoking apparatus like a dab rig, that can be clumsy and prone to misfires.

There were tutorials uploaded about DMT vape pens at least six years ago.

The first time we heard about DMT vape pens was a year and a half ago, when comedian Shane Mauss told us a story about loading up two vape pens with DMT to get higher for longer. Since then, we've seen them for purchase off the Dark Web, in the inventory of dealers and bragged about on Facebook.

Now discussions of them are much more common, teaching anyone, step by step, how to modify the e-cig, mix DMT with alcohol and blast off.

As DMT vape pens become more common, expect more people to more easily try it out. No doubt, they'll all come back with their own interpretation of the weird DMT world.

The fact DMT is tentacling into everyday lives probably has to do with a heightened tolerance for bizarreness. Now that everything is so apeshit all the time, at least according to the internet, a regular dab sesh or day drunk just doesn't cut it, and we need to be totally shocked out of our minds in order to feel something, like a soldier ripping off a toenail to feel something besides the inanity and cruelty of war, which is how regular people feel now after they've spent more than five hours reading Twitter.

DMT is insane, but it's here to stay. And DMT vape pens put the insane right in your pocket.

[Cover photo of a DMT vape, as shown on Reddit.]