My wife is an avid reader of Apple News. Today she sent me a link to a story in New York Magazine that she correctly realized I'd be interested in, "Who will own the 'God Molecule'?" Subtitle: Psychedelic devotees are racing biotech entrepreneurs to turn 5-MeO-DMT into a pharmaceutical.
It isn't possible for me to share the entire lengthy story, so I'll just talk about some things that struck me in the piece, along with some excerpts.
I experimented with psychedelics (LSD and mescaline, primarily) while in college during the 1960s. They were a big part of the flower power counterculture in the San Francisco Bay Area, along with many other parts of the world.
It wasn't a coincidence that when the Beatles sang about "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," the key words in the song started with LSD. My motivation for using psychedelics was a mixture of curiosity, pleasure-seeking, and a search for an alternative reality beyond the confines of everyday life.
At that time I wasn't at all religious, so I didn't give much thought to the undeniable fact that a small amount of a certain chemical substance could produce effects that were similar, if not identical, to mystical experiences -- which typically are viewed as pointing to a supernatural realm.
But there's no persuasive evidence that any domain beyond the physical actually exists. When it comes to psychedelics, all we can be sure of is that a physical substance produces physical effects in the brain. True, many users of psychedelics find those effects deeply meaningful, sometimes calling them one of the most profound experiences they've ever had, life-affirming and life-changing.
Here's some descriptions from the story of what ingesting 5-MeO-DMT can be like.
The new company’s target was not LSD but a far more obscure substance: 5-MeO-DMT, also known as “the God molecule.” It was one of the most formidable drugs in the world. The Feildings believed it might also be one of the most salable.
Psychedelic adventurers first became interested in the drug — full name 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine — in the 1960s, when it was identified in entheogenic snuffs used in the Amazon thousands of years ago, derived from plants such as the tall flowering yopo tree. It’s found in even greater concentrations in the defensive toxins secreted by a toad species from the Sonoran Desert.
Contrary to a popular misconception — and a sequence in the new movie Friendship, starring Tim Robinson — licking the toads has no psychoactive effect and can lead to a painful death. Instead, one must express the poison from glands on the animal’s limbs and neck and allow this to dry into brittle flakes. Smoking a piece the size of a matchstick head is sufficient for a full-blown trip, which comes on within seconds and typically lasts less than half an hour.
Like other psychedelics, it can be profoundly mystical. But the drug is singular in its intensity — “ego death” is common — and its relative lack of visual illusions. “If most hallucinogens … merely distort reality, however bizarrely,” a user attempted to explain in the 1980s, “5-MeO-DMT completely dissolves reality as we know it, leaving neither hallucinations nor anyone to watch them.” One early adopter, Dr. Andrew Weil, an alternative-medicine guru popular in the ’90s, described the trip as “a rocket ship into the void.”
...Within just a few years, the popularity of toad smoking exploded, thanks largely to an evangelizing Mexican doctor named Octavio Rettig, who claimed that the practice was a lost Indigenous tradition (a widely discredited idea). Soon, a host of public figures — Mike Tyson, Hunter Biden, a Spanish porn star named Nacho Vidal — were promoting the drug for such diverse afflictions as depression and crack-cocaine addiction.
With the hype came the attention of mainstream researchers, and in 2018 the first studies showed the potential of 5-MeO-DMT for treating depression, PTSD, and drug dependency. For clinicians, the brevity of the psychedelic trip was especially compelling: a half-hour on 5-MeO-DMT had the potential to be far more convenient than six-hour voyages on psilocybin or even longer spans on LSD.
But the drug had significant risks. Ralph Metzner estimated that one in ten 5-MeO-DMT sessions he oversaw during his three decades of research involved “dissociative, psychotic, or fear-panic reactions.” “It’s a fully developed hell,” he wrote, recalling early experiences of his own, “with demons torturing me, reminiscent of concentration camp accounts or the torture chambers of the Inquisition.” Some users have reported thinking during their time on the drug that they’d accidentally killed themselves. Flashbacks, which are common, are sometimes agonizing and lasting.
The molecule in its purest form is low in toxicity, but some users vomit; some tense up as if in rigor mortis. High doses can flood the body with excess serotonin, which can be fatal. Of the few reported deaths during and shortly after trips, some seem to be due to unsafe facilitation practices. (Between 2013 and 2018, at least three people died during toad-medicine ceremonies with Rettig, who habitually blew tobacco snuff up his clients’ noses and poured water down their throats, believing this prompted them to relax and surrender to the experience.)
In the past few years, at least three people who took part in underground sessions have committed suicide after their trips; a handful are known to have been admitted to psychiatric wards.
So 5-MeO-DMT possesses both promise and peril. The story describes how two companies, Beckley Psytech and GH Research, are trying to develop the molecule into a safe and effective pharmaceutical product. I wish them luck, as it never hurts to explore new ways of enhancing the human experience.
The philosophical implications of 5-MeO-DMT, as with psychedelics in general, fascinate me. A key question is whether these sorts of drugs (1) demonstrate that mystical experiences are inherently brain-based even though they may seem other-worldly, or (2) demonstrate that certain chemicals can mimic mystical experiences that are inherently windows into a supernatural realm.
I strongly lean toward (1) being more likely to be true. However, there's a non-zero probability that (2) is true.
My problem is that (2) reminds me of another spurious argument from believers in the supernatural: the human brain doesn't generate consciousness, but is a conduit for a non-physical consciousness that uses the brain as a receiver in the same way a radio receives and decodes electromagnetic waves.
This also seems highly unlikely to me, though it isn't outside of the realm of possibility (in science, nothing is 100% certain, as there's always a chance that a current view of reality is mistaken).
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