TUNE IN, TURN ON, DROP OUT ... FOR 15 MINUTES

Micromanaging Psychedelic Experience

For 15 seconds, Nils felt nothing but the acrid burning of the smoke on the
back of his throat. Then, all of a sudden, with "a smooth almost drop-like
effect, like a bubble of oil dropping off with a bloomp," he found himself
in a forest, talking with badgers.

Three minutes later, the psychedelic visions faded. He sat up from his
horizontal position on the lawn, picked up his briefcase, and within half
an hour Nils was back at work as an accountant for a Toronto ad agency,
feeling absolutely normal.

Welcome to the world of the 15-minute psychedelic trip. Drugs like
dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and Salvia Divinorum, psychoactive drugs whose
effects last less than 15 minutes and demonstrate no noticeable
after-effects or unpleasant "coming down," are indicating a new trend in
recreational drug use: the micromanaged psychedelic experience.

"Thirty minutes after it's over, you could go on a TV talk show - you're as
right as rain," says Richard Metzger, the Los Angeles-based editor of the
newly published Book Of Lies (Disinformation), which features a seminal
essay on DMT by psychedelic popularizer and Timothy Leary successor
Terrence McKenna. "You could like, go to work."

Roger, an event planner from Winnipeg who has experimented with DMT,
agrees. "There's a reason it's so short: it capsulates a whole psychedelic
experience. You do actually get 8-12 hours worth but you do it in like, 20
minutes. And you don't get hung over from it either."

"It wasn't engaging in an eight to 12 hour psychoactive commitment," says
Roger of his reasons for trying DMT.

"People don't want to get in a 10-hour tirade of psychedelic madness all
the time -- you may as well just rent Fear and Loathing and live
vicariously through that."

Known as the "businessman's lunch" because of the way someone can smoke
some over lunch and be back to work within the hour, DMT is the most
notorious of the newly popular micromanageable drugs. They are not new
drugs. They have been known about since the Age of Aquarius, but they have
recently begun attracting the attention of authorities.

Unlike the illegal and relatively rare synthetic DMT, many increasingly
popular psychoactive plants are both perfectly legal and widely available.
Salvia Divinorum -- a member of the mint family related to common sage --is
offered for sale on hundreds of Internet sites, in various concentrations.
Smoked or chewed, its effects are intensely profound and last for only a
few minutes.

Last year, the United States tabled legislation to add it to Schedule I of
the Controlled Substances Act, which would make it illegal under U.S. law.
Australia has already declared Salvia illegal and on Aug. 23 of this year
Denmark followed suit. While the so-called "analog law" states that any
drug which is pharmacologically similar to one currently illegal becomes
automatically illegal itself, the naturally occurring mint Salvia is more
difficult than many synthetic drugs to classify as illegal. In Canada, as
well as in the United States, it remains legal.

Long considered connoisseur drugs by the older psychedelic elites ("the
acid of acid," according to one Internet testimonial on drug database
Erowid.com), these 15-minute psychedelics are no longer just for "the elite
psychedelic people, the ones who want the gourmet experience," Metzger says.

The quick hits are increasingly popular among younger users in their
twenties like Nils, at prices that almost anyone can afford. From $40 per
quarter ounce to $125 per ounce, Salvia costs about as much as marijuana.
Although DMT is more expensive by weight -- about $250 a gram -- a typical
dosage is about 40 mg.

A crystalline substance most often melted using a bent glass pipe to
produce a smoke that tastes, as one devotee has described it, "like smoking
a ground-up tire factory", DMT's appeal lies in the fact that it has almost
none of the addictive or behavioural after-effects of drugs such as ecstasy
or heroin. The 12-hour trips and weekend-long recovery periods of LSD do
not apply.

The DMT experience is very intense, however, and it is difficult D.M.
Turner writes in The Essential Psychedelics Guide (Panther Press), "it can
range from heaven to hell, cyberspace to jewelled palaces, fear or
personified evil, visions of jungle animals, contacts with
extraterrestrials, links with ancient spirits or adventures with fairies
and elves. The DMT user should be prepared for anything."

The differences in experience speak to the drug's unpredictability.
Metzger, a self-professed psychedelic aficionado, describes everything from
meeting nine-foot-tall alien beings to being surrounded by benign,
bouncing, chirping balls. "It's the equivalent of a bungee jump or being
shot out of a cannon, a psychedelic cannon as they say," he says. The
27-year-old Nils describes the experience more peacefully: "I felt calm and
secluded. It was sort of like the most intense, mind-blowing,
Earth-shattering feeling of calm, if that makes any sense."

Less a new trend than a re-emergence of an old one, these psychedelic drugs
have ancient roots. Turner traces Salvia Divinorum to the Mazatec Indians
of Oaxaca, where it was used for thousands of years and known by names such
as Diviner's Sage, the herb of Mary and the Shepherdess. DMT, meanwhile, is
derived from the South American ayahuasca vine, the "travelling" or
visionary vine long favoured as a purgative remedy by Peruvian witch
doctors. South American jungle cultures used the ayahuasca or yage as a
visionary aid to help, among other things, locate prey for the hunt.
William S. Burroughs made yage famous in a series of letters to Allen
Ginsberg in 1953 about his quest for the plant, subsequently published as
The Yage Letters.

After making the rounds at Berkeley in the 1960s -- where Terrence McKenna
discovered it -- the use of DMT and many other psychedelics as mystical or
spiritual enhancers fell into disrepute. Ironically, it is the very yuppie
world that rejected the hippie excesses of day-long acid and peyote trips,
which may yet prove to be the most fertile ground for the new
experimentation with hallucinogens. The fact that a Salvia or DMT trip can
be scheduled into a 30-minute slot in a day timer means that, for the first
time since their teenage years, anyone from young professionals to greying
corporate executives might actually have the time to engage in a little bit
of psychedelic experimentation -- if not necessarily during their lunch
break, then on a Saturday or even Tuesday evening.

Some of the rekindled interest in DMT can be traced to the first new human
psychedelic drug research in the United States since the 1960s. Undertaken
by Dr. Richard Strassman at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine
in 1995, the trials were funded by the U.S. government. Sixty volunteers
took more than 400 doses of DMT over the course of the experiments, with
Dr. Strassman noting the range of effects -- from blissful euphoria to
abject panic -- and attempting to judge the drug's worth as a psychological
healing tool.

A naturally occurring alkaloid produced in the pineal gland as a
neurotransmitter, DMT is easy for the body to assimilate. Says Metzger:
"It's as if a house that was built in the frontier in the 1890s had plugs
for telephones. Does this mean that there's this weird dimension that is
raging like your next-door neighbour, accessible by a thin membrane? This
has major implications to us as human beings, to the human race as
religious, to people as spiritual questers."

Nevertheless, experts like Dr. Strassman and D.M. Turner agree DMT is not
an inherently beneficial tool for psychological development. "The DMT
experience can be like a quick trip to the void or the funhouse," writes
Turner. "Since it is so different than normal reality it can be difficult
for the user to bring any of the trip back to daily life."

Regardless of the increasingly vocal activists carrying the late Terrence
McKenna's torch -- people such as Daniel Pinchbeck, who recently published
Breaking Open The Head about his journey to the Amazon to try the ayahuasca
brew -- short-term psychedelic drugs such as DMT and Salvia Divinorum seem
unlikely to develop broad mainstream appeal. The experience is too
overwhelming.

"It's like being in a car crash or jumping out of a plane -- you just
wouldn't want to do it a lot," laughs Metzger. "It's too scary."

The intensity of Salvia is often described as being to DMT what DMT is to
LSD, an order of magnitude greater. One user described it as making "DMT
look like a water pistol." Salvia can be a shocking, fearful experience,
one that likely precludes the drug being fully embraced by the mainstream.

Roger agrees. "Sure, you can incorporate it into your daily life, but
anything's possible with people and their habits -- there's people that
keep down thousand-dollar-a-day coke habits and hold CEO positions at major
companies. [DMT] is not a drug to be taken lightly."