The following is an excerpt from p. 156-158 of Chapter 3, “Everywhere, All the Time: DMT and Drugism” from my book, Drugism (2022):
[Continued from “DMT, Power, + Instant Gratification.”]
In Food of the Gods, the 1992 book that is probably his most-cited work to date, Terence McKenna continued to urge people to try DMT. “DMT is real news,” he wrote. “We must send fearless experts,” he insisted, “to explore and report on what they find.”[i] This passage and others connote colonial exploration, fitting McKenna squarely into the tradition of explorers encountering DMT which started with Ramon Pane [who accompanied Columbus across the Atlantic]. For McKenna, DMT represented “new” territory just waiting to be overtaken by hungry Americans looking for an instant mystical fix.
Perhaps one of the most curious and, frankly, stupid ideas that Terence proposed about DMT is that it should not be considered a drug at all. He pushes the idea in both The Archaic Revival[ii] and in Food of the Gods.[iii] In this idea we see, glaring, McKenna’s own drugism.
DMT was so sacred to McKenna, so central to his worldview, that it pained him to describe it with a word that has such mundane and often negative connotations. McKenna here shows that even he is victim to social conditioning around drug use and language. DMT, one of the most potent and celebrated drugs for which McKenna is known, he himself is reluctant to “otherize” by characterizing as a drug. It is too special to him. Here we see his own drugism at play, his own culturally-created bias toward substances.
In The Food of the Gods, his rationale for not considering DMT a drug is that it is endogenously produced. However, this is a somewhat of a non sequitur. Because we produce DMT in our bodies, we should not consider it a drug when we smoke, eat, or inject DMT which is extracted from plants or made in a lab—according to McKenna. However, a drug does not cease to become a drug just because our bodies can also create the same compound. If that were the case, a whole host of substances including insulin and adrenaline would likewise be exempt from their status as drugs. But it is not so.
His argument is reminiscent of the passionate cannabis user who, out of deep love for the plant, refuses to recognize it as a drug, afraid of the cultural values the word brings to mind. Yet to anyone else (even other passionate cannabis users), this insistence that cannabis is not a drug is delusional. Similarly, the insistence that DMT is not a drug is utterly false and not helpful. The same applies to sugar, alcohol, tobacco, coffee, aspirin, etc. All of these things are drugs. And that is okay.
McKenna’s ideas about DMT became central to the culture which developed around its use during and after his life. His passion for the drug lives on in others, even after his untimely passing in 2001 from a brain tumor. (I cannot help but wonder if the cancer was related to his lifetime of heavy tryptamine use). Many of the drugisms around DMT seem to have started with or at least been amplified by Terence’s work. For example, the notion that it is “the strongest psychedelic,” or the idea that because we produce it endogenously it is somehow qualitatively different from or superior to other drugs.
These are just a couple of endless motifs that one will find attached to DMT thanks largely to the legacy of Terence McKenna. The aura of extreme, mystical intensity which the drug seems to possess has only grown in recent years. For Terence and Dennis, DMT was “the holy grail”—itself a quite Eurocentric reference—and so it is still for modern DMT scholars like Graham St John.[iv]
In St John’s writing on DMT, he continues, like Terence, to disseminate the notion that DMT is somehow different from and qualitatively superior to other drugs. He describes its effects as incomprehensible and ineffable, impossible to articulate.[v]
Such notions recreate the social dynamic between priests and laypeople which has permeated so many of the world’s cultures. Priests are (allegedly, at least) the ones who know—no one else is allowed, by religious law or social custom. Whether intentionally or not, we find this same dynamic perpetuated by users of DMT. They are the ones who know. But what do they know exactly? Any seekers who lack access to the drug must make do with hyperbole and trite metaphors.
Yet such concepts of religious piety are juxtaposed with more purely hedonistic motifs as well. For example, St John also describes DMT as an “epic” source of “next level kicks” to be pursued by “rugged individualists.”[vi] After all, DMT is a drug, and it can be used recreationally just as any other drug can. Evidently, the “kicks” provided by DMT are good enough that clandestine chemists have continued to produce it in rather large quantities throughout recent decades. And people have bought it up, at ever increasing rates.
[To be continued…]