Dimethyltryptamine, better known as DMT, is an illegal psychedelic drug you’ve probably never heard of that is produced by your own body.
DMT is created by mixing an enzyme with an amino acid, the latter of which is found in many forms of organic life.
It can be smoked, drunk or even injected and produces a powerful hallucinatory experience.
Users say you lose all sense of time, place and reality.
South American tribes drink a brew containing plants with DMT as part of shamanic rituals. The ritual is used as a means of spiritual healing allegedly allowing users to communicate with inter-dimensional beings.
In 1956 Stephen Szara, a chemist and psychiatrist living in the then communist nation of Hungary, read about the tribes' “spiritual” brew and decided to start experimenting with DMT.
Szara was looking for an alternative to LSD – impossible to obtain for a communist chemist. Hence, he began experimenting with DMT and it was then that the psychotropic effects of the drug were realised.
But even if you haven’t knowingly consumed DMT, a leading researcher of the drug suggests you have probably already felt its effects.
The theory is that in times of extreme physical stress, some near death experiences, and even during deep REM sleep, the body releases DMT.
The man behind the theory is Dr Rick Strassman.
But this theory is controversial, and has never been proven in a living human brain.
Stephen Szara does not agree with Strassman’s theories.
Strassman conducted clinical studies of DMT inside the human body during the 1990s and hypothesized that it originated inside the brain, coming from a small gland about the size of a grain of rice. The Pineal gland, otherwise known by some as ‘the third eye’, is responsible for regulating our sense of time, and is found in practically every vertebrate species.
But despite DMT being naturally produced in the body, it is classified as a schedule 1 drug, which by law makes it the equivalent of magic mushrooms, peyote cactus , and opiates, like heroin.
There is still so much that is unknown about Dimethyltryptamine - the drug produced in our brain that the mind is yet to understand.
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