#299 - #1 DMT Scientist: BANNED Research, Biblical Prophecy & the CIA | Dr. Rick Strassman

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Danny Jones Podcast 2h 44m 7 speakers 8 chapters transcribed
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What are the adverse effects of DMT?

Danny Jones 0:07
So hi Danny, nice to meet you. Hi Rick, pleasure to meet you too as well.
Rick Strassman 0:10
Before we started rolling, we were talking about the effects of DMT. I told you I was super afraid to try it again by myself. And people I've spoken with that know more about this than I do, which isn't saying much, said that there's not really any, there's not any documented cases of people having any like real adverse effects of using DMT or overusing DMT.
Unnamed Speaker 1 0:37
Yeah, that's not been my experience. Every once or twice a year, I get a note from a family member or a friend of somebody who has smoked way too much DMT. And they develop a certain kind of mental state. It's kind of messianic that they feel they have the answer. And if people don't agree with their answer, they get mad. Yeah. So they're convinced it's kind of messianic in nature.
Rick Strassman 1:10
Have you ever heard of anybody smoking DMT and sort of like not coming back fully getting like stuck in like this weird, uh, slippery version of reality, like for forever. Cause I've had, I have friends that in high school that took a lot of LSD or smoked a lot of weed. And after a certain point, they were just never the same.
Unnamed Speaker 1 1:36
Yeah, that's hard to say. I mean, personalities get modified, I think, or can be modified under the influence of a psychedelic. But it's more, I think, that they made those changes more real in their lives. And that might be what people are referring to as they've changed. They maybe took more action on some of the ideas they had than otherwise would have been the case. I think that's how psychedelics work actually, is they just increase the strength and power of things which already exist in the mind. If you want to be a happier person, you might become happier after taking a psychedelic because it's convinced you that it's good to be happy.

Is DMT the source of human consciousness?

Rick Strassman 2:31
You were the first person in the United States to do human research on psychedelics. You are probably like one of the most legendary people in the psychedelic world. And one of the things that really blew my mind was that you were explaining on, I think it was Hamilton's podcast. I could be wrong. I think it was Hamilton's podcast. You were explaining how you had the idea to get this funded when you were hanging out with Terrence McKenna And you guys decided that it would be the best way to get it funded through the war on drugs.
Unnamed Speaker 1 3:09
Right, right. That's crazy. Yeah, it was 1988. And I was kind of at a crossroads of where my career was going. The melatonin and pineal work hadn't quite panned out the way I wanted it to. But I was still interested in the pineal gland and in psychedelics mostly. Yeah. And I met Terrence a year or two before. He's the first person to give me DMT, actually.
Danny Jones 3:35
Oh, really?

What happened during extended state DMT experiments?

Unnamed Speaker 1 3:37
Yeah, 1986 or something.
Danny Jones 3:38
Oh, wow.
Unnamed Speaker 1 3:39
And then a couple years later, I was driving down from Canada, stopped at their place, and we spent the day up in his loft library. Wow. Yeah. And, um, you know, we just, the, uh, the war on, uh, you know, the war on drugs was in full steam ahead. Uh, there was a lot of money being poured into it.
Danny Jones 4:02
What a clever idea.
Unnamed Speaker 1 4:03
And we, we, we came up with the idea of the ultimate study, give DMT to people and see what it does. You can't really, you can't really argue with that. And, uh, I describe it as an abusable drug. It's a prototypical classic psychedelic. And people were still using psychedelics. And we didn't know how they worked or really what they did in the face of like 20 years of intervening animal research. So there are pretty straightforward kinds of arguments that could have been used against studying the drug or for studying the drug. And I framed it as let's find out more and no value judgment placed on the work, no therapy or religious motivations.
Rick Strassman 4:54
What do you think DMT in a healthy dose does to the human brain? not necessarily i'm i know it's speculative when you're talking about what it's doing to the brain when you're taking it when it's active right but like oh kind of like when it when it subsides like what do you think the after effect is

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