The University of California San Diego has received a US$1.5 million donation to study DMT’s impact on the brain, helping to contribute to the growing body of research from the institution’s Psychedelics and Health Research Initiative.
The university announced receiving the funding on Tuesday from the philanthropist Eugene Jhong, a law graduate from Harvard University. The institution will be focusing on the study of the “extended state” of DMT made possible by continuously administering the compound to an individual by intravenous (IV) infusion.
“I am pleased to support this innovative effort to explore extended DMT and am confident it will shed new and important insight into the question of our true nature,” said Jhong.
It will be led by the neuroscientist and associate professor at the UC San Diego’s School of Medicine Fadel Zeidan and Jon Dean, Director of the Division of DMT Research for the initiative. The institution is the only one in the United States with a division dedicated to studying the effects of DMT administered through an IV.
“The objective of this study is to explore and chart the experiential, neurological, and physiological reactions to DMT within extended time frames enabled by infusion protocols,” said Zeidan.
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Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is a naturally occurring psychedelic compound found in plants and animals, including in the human brain where it is known to be produced endogenously during deep rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. It has been used ceremonially by Indigenous cultures for thousands of years for healing purposes through ingesting the medicinal psychedelic brew Ayahuasca.
UC San Diego says the Psychedelics and Health Research Initiative will soon be renamed as the Center for Psychedelic Research at the institution’s School of Medicine. It recently received approval to become its own academic centre.
The Psychedelics and Health Research Initiative is a collaboration between the School of Medicine’s departments of psychiatry and anesthesiology, the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination, the Center for Mindfulness and the Center for Human Frontiers at UC San Diego’s Qualcomm Institute.
“Our long-term objective is to gain a better understanding of how DMT and other psychedelics could be used in a therapeutic manner to address pain, trauma and various medical conditions related to the brain,” said Zeidan.
The Psychedelics and Health Research Initiative has also been actively involved with psilocybin studies to treat pain and depression and other research on the human mind.
“Our goals are to employ multi-modal approaches to study extended state consciousness elucidated by DMT to further appreciate the nature of reality as well as the role of endogenous DMT in the human body,” said Dean.
The study of intravenous DMT was pioneered in the early 1990s at the University of New Mexico by Rick Strassman and led to the publication of his renowned book DMT: The Spirit Molecule.
rowan@mugglehead.com
