Andrew Gallimore

When they want to put you to sleep, make you unconscious, what they don't do, they don't just inject you with a drug and kind of hope that it keeps working whilst they've got you under the knife.

What they do is they use a very short-acting drug and they use an infusion machine, which...

delivers the drug, the anesthetic drug, into your veins and goes to your brain and holds the brain level of the drug constant over time so that they can keep you in the anesthetized state unconscious for as long or short a period as they like.

And so it occurred to me that, well, DMT has the right drug properties.

It's almost like it's designed for that kind of technique.

It's called target-controlled intravenous infusion.

And so I thought, you know, if we start if we take the DMT state seriously and we treat it as a new world to explore and, you know, intelligent beings with whom we can establish communicative relationships, then three minutes of a breakthrough trip is nowhere near enough.

And so I thought, well, let's take this technology from anesthesiology, target controlled intravenous infusion, and let's repurpose it.

So instead of an anesthetic drug that's delivered by programmed infusion, we instead deliver DMT by programmed infusion and induce somebody into the DMT state and stabilize their brain DMT levels so you can hold them in the DMT state for 30 minutes or potentially for several hours and have complete control in real time over the depth of the experience.

That was the idea.

So I worked with Rick Strassman.

I used his data, blood sampling data that he acquired in the 90s.

Fortunately, he had this old Excel file which he sent to me and I built this mathematical model of DMT's metabolism and distribution throughout the body.

And then we wrote a paper basically saying, we think this should work.

We think we should be able to extend and stabilize the DMT state for many hours.

But we didn't actually, it wasn't kind of human ready, so to speak.

And it actually took about five years before it was actually implemented in humans.

And that was actually done by the Imperial College London team.

So they still are, in a way, the leaders in psychedelic research.

And a guy called then a PhD student, I think, Chris Timmerman, worked to make this proof of principle model that myself and Rick Strassman had developed and get it human ready and actually test, you know, does it actually work?