Dimethyltryptamine (DMT)

Okay, so the word is on the street that my last few posts...er, make that all of my posts, have been, how shall we say, a tad dry. And chock full of comas. Ergo, I am totally going to post about psychedelic drugs for a while, since pretty much everyone thinks that these things are rad.

According to this groovy textbook I acquired today, the term "psychedelic" was coined by this dude named Humphry Osmond, a Canadian psychiatrist who: a) helped pioneer the use of psychedelic drugs in psychotherapy and b) turned Aldous Huxley (the guy who wrote Brave New World) onto mescaline. In essence, psychedelic drugs are those that produce LSD-like effects on the human psyche. They include LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline (the big three), as well as a bunch of other drugs that have similar chemical structures as the three biggies. One of these other drugs is dimethyltryptamine, better known to those in the know as DMT.

Dig these facts about DMT:

• present in a number of plants used by the indigenous peoples of the Amazon rainforest and the Caribbean
  
• has a relatively simple chemical structure that is present within the structures of both LSD and psilocybin
  
• occurs naturally at low levels in the human body and may have roles in dreaming and near-death experiences (far out!)
  
• became popular in the 60s as "businessman's LSD" since a typical trip lasts only an hour (onset of effects within seconds, peaks in 15 minutes, and return to normal within less than an hour)
• got a rep for producing more bad trips than LSD, but Timothy Leary and his Harvard buddies injected each other with it and found that this was bogus

Perrine, Daniel M. The chemistry of mind-altering drugs: history, pharmacology, and cultural context. Washington, DC: American Chemical Society, 1996.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyltryptamine