Terence McKenna's First Hit of DMT
...was rumored to have come from the CIA-funded Stanford Research Institute
The following is an excerpt from p. 141-142 of Chapter 3, “Everywhere, All the Time: DMT and Drugism” from my book, Drugism (2022):
[Note: today’s excerpt picks up where “The Complicated Legacy of Nick Sand” left off.]
Around the same time that Nick Sand was developing his friendship with Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (aka Ram Dass), and the Millbrook crew, a young chemist at Stanford by the name of Rick Watson had his first DMT trip. A chemistry student, Watson worked summers at Stanford’s School of Medicine. By the mid-1960s he made the acquaintance of chemists conducting drug research for the Stanford Research Institute (SRI).[i] Much if not all of the SRI’s drug research in this period was funded by the CIA. Several SRI projects were directly overseen by Agency operatives and/or associates, such as Willis Harman.[ii]
It seems likely that one of these SRI programs was the source of Watson’s first dose of DMT, although the exact details around the situation are unclear. Watson penned a piece, decades later, which contains some clues. The story is unpublished, but it was made available to DMT scholar Graham St John for his research. In Watson’s piece, he describes Stanford chemists offering him “several canisters” of “orange, semi-crystalline” DMT for $100 per gram.[iii] As St John explains, “the key revelation in [Watson’s] story is when the author realized he was a research guinea pig.”[iv] In Watson’s piece, he suspects that he may have been offered government-sourced DMT deliberately, as an experiment.
[Note: On another occasion, Watson suggested that his first batch of DMT may have come from “someone in [Ken] Kesey’s circle.” But Kesey, it should be noted, had himself sourced various drugs from a CIA-sponsored research program that took place at a facility less than ten minutes away from the Stanford campus. Watson also later revealed that he personally knew chemists at SRI who were working with DMT. See Mystery School in Hyperspace by Graham St John and Acid Dreams by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain.]
Regardless of the precise origin of Watson’s DMT, we do know that by the summer of 1965, he had smoked it multiple times.[v] And in the fall of 1965, Watson gifted some of the same DMT to Terence McKenna, who would go on to become the drug’s biggest advocate. The two of them had attended high school together, and were good friends when Watson introduced McKenna to DMT. According to Watson, after McKenna came down from his first DMT trip, he “announced that he would devote his life to seeking out the origins and meaning of this experience.”[vi]And that, he did.
McKenna’s recollections about the origins of his first dose of DMT are similar to Watson’s. In a 1993 talk, McKenna recalled the DMT “had been boosted from a US army chemical-research operation down at the Stanford Research Institute.”[vii] McKenna immediately developed an intense fascination with the drug. It later became a primary theme of his lectures and talks, an integral ingredient in his legacy.
Terence’s younger brother Dennis would go on to a similarly important position in the field of DMT—though less as an outright advocate; his approach is rooted in clinical science. Both Terence and Dennis have become formative figures in the culture around DMT, to whatever extent one can be said to exist. In some ways they represent the modern continuation of the work of Ramon Pane, Alexander von Humboldt, and Richard Spruce.
In Dennis’s memoir, Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, he recalls the first time he learned of DMT. It was also the first time he used cannabis, with his brother Terence, on a blanket in a park. Reflecting on the impact of DMT on their lives in Brotherhood..., he wrote, “in some ways, DMT is what this book is all about.”[viii]
After Dennis had dabbled in drugs a bit more (hash, acid, etc.), he bought an opium pipe specifically to use for his first experiment with DMT. The opium pipe he obtained from a shop in the Bay Area Chinatown; the DMT was provided by Terence.[ix] “It was waxy, orange-colored paste” remembers Dennis, and it smelled “kind of like shit.”[x] It was 1967 by the time Dennis got to it, roughly two years after Terence’s first experience.[xi]
Dennis’s first DMT trip was “the most bizarre thing that ever happened to me,” he wrote in a journal shortly afterward. He found DMT to be “overwhelming,” “more than the mind can handle.” Gently refusing any attempt to verbalize the experience, his older self insists “all of the descriptions” of DMT “fall short of the actual experience.”[xii]
Interestingly, even in Dennis’s account we can see that DMT is prone to habituation. In the same journal quoted above, a few weeks later, Dennis wrote, “I have done it [DMT] too often in recent days.” Yet he insists “I regret none of the times; I have profited by each one.”[xiii] Such back-to-back renunciation and praise of DMT is not unusual among its users. It is simultaneously too much and not enough. A good DMT trip can leave one feeling like one has solved all of life’s problems—at least until it wears off. The egocentric head trip eventually gives way to the external world. All of which can, if one is so inclined, play very nicely into a desire to use more.
one thing that struck me reading Brotherhood... was the mention of meeting with someone from the Summer Institute of Linguistics when they were on their adventure in Peru... have you checked that out? https://indiafacts.org/religious-crusades-cia/