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Discussion => Newbie discussion => Topic started by: Dutch Pride on September 01, 2013, 09:36 pm
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He finally said, "I think the best high dose is between 0.2 and 0.6."
We all laughed and the tension in the room dropped a few notches. Nils still had his wits about him, at least at that moment.
He continued, "There was the movement of the self. I am disappointed that it's ending. It was a cafeteria of colors. A familiar feeling. Yes, I've returned. They were there and we recognized each other."
I asked, "Who?"
"No-one or thing identifiable as such." He still seemed quite under the influence; I did not want to press him.
He continued, "Coming down from the high was very colorful, but it was boring compared to the peak. At the peak, I knew I was back where I had been when I smoked it last year. It was a lonely feeling leaving there.
"I thought I had gotten really sick. I felt you hovering over me, like I was dying, and you all were trying to resuscitate me. I hoped everything was all right. I was just trying to catch what was happening inside."
He paused, and said, "I'm tired. I'd like to nap, but I'm not really sleepy."
Nils had little to say beyond this, other than that he was ravenously hungry, having (fortunately) skipped breakfast. He ate heartily while filling out our rating scale. So, even Nils thought 0.6 mg/kg was "too high"!
I spent a few minutes in the nurses' lounge, reflecting upon what we had just seen. From a cardiac point of view, Nils' blood pressure and heart rate had been only moderately affected. although we missed the readings at their presumed peak. Thus, there seemed to be no physical harm from administering 0.6 mg/kg IV DMT. However, I was not sure if the thinness of Nils' report was because he could not remember what had happened, or if it was more of his style to keep most of what had taken place to himself.
I wondered about "them," with whom he had re-acquainted himself. What did he mean, "We recognized each other"? Why was he "lonely" as he left "them"? He thought they were "friends" and was sad to part. I was intrigued by Nils' sense of the "inhabited" nature of his experience. This did not jive with many of the stories I had heard about other psychedelics, such as LSD or psilocybin mushrooms, but did with many of the DMT tales I had heard while interviewing DMT users for the development of our rating scale.
We had clearly broken through the "psychedelic threshold." The suddenness and intensity of onset, the irrefutable nature of the experience, the temporary (and perhaps too prolonged) disorientation at the beginning while getting his bearings, the inhabited sense Nils described, all added up to a "full" DMT dose, according to both Nils' report, and with stories I had heard about DMT from other users. But was it too far beyond the psychedelic threshold? Nils was a self- acknowledged "hard head," requiring higher doses than most to attain comparable levels of altered reality perception from the same drug. How would Philip fare?
Philip and I walked down the brightly lit hall. We passed Nils in the hall, looking for more food. He felt great. I was happy to see how well Nils looked so quickly after being pushed off a seeming psychic cliff.
I asked Philip, "Are you sure you want the same dose?"
"Yes," he immediately replied.
I was not so sure.
I hoped Philip, as we prepared for his session, would decline undergoing an experience such as Nils just had. Perhaps he would settle for 0.5 or 0.4 mg/kg, which would have been easy enough to do, stopping short of emptying the entire syringe full of DMT solution. While I believed this dose most likely was physically safe, the mental effects loomed in front of all of us with even more uncertainty than they had before Nils' session. However, Philip was not to out-done by his friend and fellow "psychonaut." He was ready for his 0.6 mg/kg dose.
This tendency in our volunteers, to persevere even under the possibility of an annihilating psychedelic experience, was marked. It was most apparent during our tolerance study, in which no volunteer, no matter how worn out, refused the fourth and final high dose of DMT in one morning.
I was faced with a scientific, personal, and ethical dilemma. My training was such that one always had to prescribe a little too much of a medication to see what toxic effects were, to be able to recognize them quickly in various circumstances. This is even more important when a new experimental drug is involved. I could have told Philip I did not want to repeat the 0.6 mg/kg DMT experience with him. That was within my power as the principal investigator of the project. But, Nils seemed fine now, his blood pressure and heart rate never approached dangerous levels, and most importantly, Nils was the first and only person to get this dose of DMT. I had planned to give two 0.6 mg/kg doses that morning, and saw no convincing reason not to. Philip lived far from Albuquerque, and to force him to drive there again to get 0.6 mg/kg if 0.4 or 0.5 were not "enough," would have inconvenienced him. Also, I liked Philip, and he did want his dose of 0.6 mg/kg. How much of a role did my valuing our friendship, and doing as he requested to maintain it, play? Many competing priorities. I hoped I made the right decision by agreeing to give Philip 0.6.
Philip and I joined Cynthia and Robin, his new partner, in his room. Another 0.6 mg/kg IV DMT session was about to take place. Philip's bare and sterile room had brightly waxed linoleum floors; salmon pink walls; and tubes for oxygen, suctioning of secretions, and water, exiting from behind the bed. He had taped a poster of Avalokitesvara, the 1000-armed Buddhist saint of compassion, on the outside of the closed bathroom wooden door which faced his bed. A television attached by a maze of cables hung from the ceiling, looking down at his mechanized, single bed covered with thin hospital sheets. The air conditioning hummed loudly. He wore a t-shirt and pants, laid down on the bed, and made himself as comfortable as possible.
Cynthia smoothly and skillfully inserted an intravenous line into one forearm vein for giving the DMT. This arm also had wrapped around it the blood pressure cuff. His other arm had a larger IV in place for blood drawing, so we could measure concentrations of DMT in blood after administering it. This line was attached to a clear plastic bag dripping sterile salt water into the vein, so the blood in the blood-drawing tube would not clot. Cynthia and I sat on either side of Philip, not sure what to expect in light of Nils' reaction.
Robin sat off to the side, near the foot of the bed. Philip, fresh from Nils' harrowing session only an hour ago, needed little preparation for the process of drug administration, and what to expect from us while he was laying in bed, most likely unable to move, speak or otherwise interact. He knew we would get up and help him if he needed it. We wished him luck. He closed his eyes, laid back, took some deep breaths and said, "I'm ready."
I watched the second hand of the wall clock approach the "6", so I could finish the 30 second injection of drug at the "12", what was seeming more to me as "time zero." It was nearly 10 a.m. Just as I finished inserting the needle of the syringe containing the drug into his intravenous line, but before depressing the plunger, emptying the DMT solution into Philip's vein, there was a loud, insistent knocking on the door. I looked up, paused, and removed the needle from the line, capped it, and placed it on the nightstand next to Philip's bed.
Dr. Davis, the Director of the Research Center Laboratory, was waiting outside the door. We stepped into the hall, out of ear shot from the room. He said, in a curt and what seemed, in my own heightened state of awareness, a little too loudly, that previous blood samples for DMT analyses had been incorrectly collected. I told him we would modify our technique.
I then let myself back into Philip's room, and took my chair by the side of his bed once more. He seemed unaware of the interruption, having begun the inward turning and letting go which we have found allows for the smoothest possible entry into the DMT realms. For him, in this way, "the trip had already begun."
I took a deep breath, and apologized for the interruption. Trying to joke, I said, "Where were we now?" He replied with only a grunt, opened his eyes, nodded for me to proceed, and closed his eyes again. I uncapped the syringe, and inserted its needle into his IV. Cynthia nodded, too, to go ahead if I were ready.
I said, "Okay, here's the DMT."
I slowly and carefully began infusing the 0.6 mg/kg DMT into his vein.
Half-way through the injection, Philip's breath caught in his throat, sounding like a cough that never quite got out. Later, we were to find that whenever this catching in the throat followed a high dose injection, we were in for a wild ride. Twenty-five seconds after the infusion was complete, he began groaning, "I love, I love... " His blood pressure rose, and his heart rate jumped to 140 beats per minute, up from his resting level of 65 beats per minute. This rise in pulse is about what would happen racing up 3-4 flights of stairs. But in this case, Philip hadn't moved an inch. At one minute, he sat up, looked at Cynthia and me with saucer- sized eyes, his pupils hugely dilated. His movements were automatic, jerky, puppet-like. There seemed to be "no-one home" behind Philip's movement.
Philip leaned toward Robin and stroked her hair: "I love, I love..." Twice this morning, a volunteer in a dazed state, attracted to a woman's hair. Nils to Cynthia's, Philip to Robin's. Perhaps it was the most powerful image of living, organic, familiar existence available when one looked around, in such a highly psychedelic state, a dreary hospital room, as Philip and Nils both found themselves today.
To our relief, he laid back down without prompting or assistance. His skin was cold and clammy, as Nils' had been, his blood drawing poorly from the vein because of the intense vasospasm. This is where, due to high levels of adrenaline, the tiny muscles lining the veins clamp down, reducing "unnecessary" blood flow to the skin.
His body was in a classic "fight or flight" reaction: high blood pressure and heart rate, cold clammy skin, blood moving into the vital internal organs, all while performing almost no actual physical activity. At 10 minutes, he began to sigh, "How beautiful, how beautiful..." Tears ran down his cheeks. "Now that was what you would call a transcendent experience. I died and went to heaven." He continued, "There were less visual effects, more feeling."
His pulse and blood pressure were completely normal at 30 minutes.
"It was flying within a vastness. There was no relative space or size."
I asked, "What did you feel when your breath caught in your throat?"
"I felt a cold, contracting feeling in my throat. It frightened me; I thought maybe I would stop breathing. The thought, 'Let go, surrender, let go,' was there for a split second, then the rush of the drug swept even that away."
"Do you recall sitting up and stroking Robin's shoulder and hair?"