We are in the midst of a psychedelic renaissance. More and more researchers and scientists are working tirelessly to legitimize a field of science that has been stigmatized for many years by social and political disapproval. For example, psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms and magic truffles, is increasingly being linked to new types of medication, but MDMA could also be groundbreaking in the treatment of PTSD. A new study now shows that DMT may also have unique applications.
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Therapeutic agents?
Many psychedelic substances that are so popular again today were labeled for years as illegal, taboo, recreational drugs with no scientific or medical value. In 2020, they are being rediscovered for their extraordinary therapeutic potential. Psychedelic researchers are increasingly welcomed into the medical world because it is becoming increasingly clear that when taken in a clinical setting, they could be extraordinarily effective in treating specific conditions.
Last year, Johns Hopkins University launched the first dedicated psychedelic research center in the United States, the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research. This initiative focuses primarily on studying the therapeutic potential of psilocybin, from its use in treating depression and anorexia to its potential as an aid in quitting smoking. The center’s director, Roland Griffiths, himself led a groundbreaking study in the early 2000s that investigated how high-dose psilocybin can induce mystical experiences of religious or spiritual significance —the first psilocybin study approved in the country in decades.
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DMT and strange entities
But there’s more going on at the center than just psilocybin research. One of the latest studies published by Johns Hopkins is the largest survey of its kind ever conducted. It examines the variety of experiences people have had with autonomous strange entities after smoking the powerful hallucinogen N,N-dimethyltryptamine, commonly known as DMT. It is the same substance found in the psychedelic brew ayahuasca, a substance increasingly used for therapeutic purposes.
Alan Davis, an associate professor and collaborator with the Johns Hopkins psychedelic research team, says that psychedelic research is on the fringes of science in many ways. He noted that there is a significant amount of subjective anecdotal reports describing highly detailed encounters with strange entities while under the influence of DMT. For example, a 2006 report identified 360 detailed DMT trip reports, with about 66% of all experiences involving interaction with entities. The researchers saw this as a great foundation for new research.
“There’s a lot of discussion about machine elves, extraterrestrials, and very intriguing encounters with robots,” Davis says in an interview with New Atlas. “So that made us very curious to try to figure out whether what is reported online is actually what people are experiencing.” For the study, experiences from over 10,000 people were examined, but after the group was narrowed down to individuals without prior diagnoses of psychosis and focusing solely on DMT experiences, the study was left with over 2,500 submissions.
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Extremely varied experiences
With astonishing results, Davis notes. The experiences reported in the survey differed from the classic iconic stories recorded in Rick Strassman’s seminal work— DMT: The Spirit Molecule. “It differed so much, in fact, that we were genuinely surprised by how many people described experiences that were very different from what Rick Strassman described,” Davis notes. “I don’t think that means those experiences weren’t reported. We certainly had a number of people who reported such experiences, but what I think our research shows is that there is a much greater variety of experiences that people have.”
Another striking result is that over 80 percent of all participants experienced a fundamental shift in their concept of reality. The majority of respondents described the experience as more real than their daily waking life, and 72 percent claimed that the entity encountered continued to exist after the DMT experience. Perhaps one of the most intriguing findings in the study is that more than half of the participants who identified as atheists or agnostics before the DMT experience no longer identified as such after encountering the entity.
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Most meaningful experience ever
In the study’s conclusion, Davis and his team point out that the vast majority of the 2,500 reports classified the DMT-induced entity they encountered as one of their “most meaningful, spiritual, and psychologically insightful life experiences, with lasting positive changes in life satisfaction, purpose, and meaning attributed to the experiences.” In short: DMT might one day be used as a therapeutic tool to help people change their view of the world. But according to the researchers, much more study is needed before that can happen.
“If you look at the core molecules for these substances, all classic psychedelics have a DMT base in the molecule. What we find when we look at DMT, or psilocybin, or 5-meo-DMT, is that we gain a window into a different part of the psychedelic spectrum—based on the route of administration, the duration of the experience, and the setting, as well as all the beliefs people bring to the experience,” says Davis. So could DMT play a role in future psychedelic clinical therapies? These are questions future studies will grapple with, Davis notes, but he himself sees great therapeutic potential in DMT—in some areas even more useful than psilocybin.
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‘Worth exploring’
“What we’ve seen with this research is that although these people didn’t report any mental health issues or use DMT for that reason, they described lasting positive changes in their mood, their relationships, their attitudes, and their beliefs. Those are the same signs we see in psilocybin studies. So for us, there’s a potential here that’s worth exploring,” he says. Only time will tell.
