Maddy wrote:I'm at work today, and the buzz from the woman who came in to do some interviews is that the "kids" are now using this drug called DMT, which is a "natural drug created by the brain during sleep" (her words). How are they getting it? Who knows.
With a quantity of a plant that has the compound--there are many, many plants with it, including canary grass and some species of mimosa--an acid, a base, a solvent and some glassware and a little bit of patience and not much else.
Since it is made in the body, DMT can be metabolized safely. Doses are around 25-50mg for DMT. 5-meo-DMT, a related compound, is consumed at doses around 5mg. As always, it's the dose, not the substance, that makes the poison. USE A SCALE.
You can also make a traditional recipe--usually called "ayahuasca"--which is a tea or soup or broth made out of several different plants and vinegar or lime or lemon for acidity to leech the DMT out, usually cooked for about two days or so. If you eat DMT in a plant your stomach and intestines won't absorb it, unless you get an MAOI compound, too, that's why plants are combined. Also because people like to fiddle with recipes for the hell of it. South and Central Americans have been doing this forever. Anyway, you drink as much of the tea as you can stand--it tastes awful, awful, awful, you keep it down for as long as you can stand, then vomit, vomit and vomit some more. Sometimes it causes the runs. It's also called "la purga" for obvious reasons. All that vomitting is supposed to be good for you though, helps relieve stress... pack a toothbrush.
If you drink ayahuasca, you're pretty much out of commission for several hours while dead people and other entities drop by to say hello. You could get up and walk around and do stuff, and you don't lose coordination or anything like that, but, uh, it'd be inconvenient. It's not like acid and not really like mushrooms IMO, though kind of similar. With ayahuasca my friend's friend's nephew's uncle's sister's friend always said he felt like the things that started interacting with him had a 'reality' and 'independence', and there's just a lot less psychological content, that doesn't seem to happen with shrooms or acid.
IMO the 'dead' thing comes up a lot on it. There's also a sense when it first comes on that you're 'going' somewhere, though that fades.
If you smoke it straight, most people spend about four or five minutes curled up in a ball thinking they're dead, that their body disintegrated and that they're flying very, very fast through some platonic realms. Terrence McKenna's theory was that smoking it led to experiencing language, visually and tactilely in addition to through hearing. He also goes on about "Elves". I've never smoked it but now people who have.
Most people, though, are hippies lacing joints with a little bit of the crystals to sort of get some visual edge into being stoned. And they're not selling this shit, really, at least not to people they aren't friends with.
Snorted or plugged my understanding is it lasts around an hour or ninety minutes and is halfway in between.
Like I said, you can fully metabolize through normal pathways so it really isn't a health concern as long as you keep the dose at an acceptable level. You're not going to pickle your liver. KIDS, READ THAT PART ABOUT "ACCEPTABLE" FOUR MORE TIMES.
She said something about the possibility it came from a cactus? (wtf?)
I think she's thinking of Peruvian torch, which has
mescaline like peyote, just in much, much lower doses. Mescaline is not even in the same class of chemical as DMT. (you need to eat a pound or so of the cactus to get a moderate dose).
Or that they "stuck a needle into the brains of dead people and pulled it out" (okay, clearly everyone at work agreed that this was some fabulous myth).
Actually this is possible. IIRC it was first discovered in cadavers. It is produced by the brain, which means that consuming it is kind-of safe b/c the metabolism has a natural way to deal with it. I think this is confusing DMT with "adrenochrome" (a real compound in the body, just not one that gets you high) from Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas.
At any rate, that's what the kids were spreading about. And she said it was very hard at her clinic to drug test for it, since its something the body creates, naturally.
I really doubt this. It's not fun. Among the people I know who've smoked it, it's kind of a joke, as in "I can't believe Chris put
Dee
Ms
Ters on that joint last night at the show, it really ruined my evening". I've never heard anyone say "Man DMT is AWESOME!". I have, however, heard "I didn't like it" and the especially common "I thought I was dead". It's like Salvia, I guess, in that it's definitely not recreational. The US Supreme Court preliminarily ruled that traditional preparations of DMT--which are a broth or soup made from several different plants are acceptable in religious circumstances, in part because there's so little appeal.
But that said, I actually think it's kind of good for you psychologically, at least as ayahuasca, as long as you do it in a safe place. You eat some food afterwards, go to sleep and you'll wake up feeling a little stiff (the plants usually have have a lot of tannin (a lot more than tea) which can cause soreness in high doses) but otherwise almost refreshed. I don't mean like an 'afterglow' or 're-integration' either. More like putting things into perspective, but not in like an ecstasy sort of way. (Unlike, say, acid, which IMO can make you into an egomaniac).
OTOH, it's also probably very difficult to ban DMT, because so many plants contain it, and so do most mammals, so maybe these kids were disparate or experimenting. Likewise it's not illegal to clean cement or have a swimming pool, make soap or thin paint, so all the chemical supplies needed to make it are widely available. Unlike, say, meth manufacture. If you like cops following you around, go buy a vat of red phosphorous ("really officer, I make matches at home, it's one of my hobbies"). Cop's going to have a hard time giving you crap because your drain is clogged (NOTE TO KIDS: STOP BEING FUCKTARDS AND DO NOT USE DRAINO TO MAKE THIS UNLESS YOU LIKE GETTING SOME EXTRA-SPECIAL TOXIC ADDITIVES IN YOUR RECIPE. DO YOUR GODDAMN HOMEWORK. I AM BEING SERIOUS HERE. YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR OWN STUPIDITY.).
As long as they
know how much they're smoking they'll be okay. It doesn't seem like the type of thing you do every day, or every week, unless you're going all vision-quest. IMO you don't need to worry if you're drinking ayahuasca because you're never going to keep it down. The only thing I've read or heard of has been that sometimes the final crystals aren't fully cleaned and so your leftover base stays on the crystals--which meant you were too lazy to check the pH or do a water and/or ammonia rinse afterwards. I also knew a guy who snorted some at home, thought he was okay, then went to a party and walked around convinced he had died for about two hours and looked like hell the next day.
