Aussiewaska: a cultural history of changa and ayahuasca analogues in Australia

The compound DMT (N,N-dimethyltryptamine), best known as the psychoactive ingredient in ayahuasca, has had its own complex cultural history that scholars have largely overlooked. DMT was first identified as a psychotomimetic in 1956, became a recreational drug in the 1960s, and was later classified as dangerous with no medicinal value. Since the 1990s it has been reframed as an entheogen enabling access to "hyperspace." DMT produces sudden, short-lasting effects including geometric patterns, synesthesia, out-of-body states, and encounters with beings. Though recognized as an endogenous neurotransmitter that crosses the blood-brain barrier, its purpose in humans and ubiquity in nature remain unexplained.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Introduction While the complexities of the global ayahuasca proliferation have drawn the attention of scholars in recent years, the cultural career of DMT (N,Ndimethyltryptamine) remains conspicuously under-researched. Most known for its role in the ayahuasca brew – where it is orally potentiated by beta-carboline harmala alkaloids contained in the liana Banisteriopsis caapi – the tryptamine compound DMT has made an independent, if gradual, release into the modern cultural bloodstream. DMT's psychopharmacological actions were discovered in 1956 (Szára, 1956) after which it was identified within psychiatry as a "psychotomimetic," before its appearance as a recreational drug in the 1960s and subsequent classification as a "dangerous drug" with "no medicinal value."2 Given these developments, along with its recognized occurrence throughout world flora and mammals (Shulgin & Shulgin, 1997), its "coming out" in the 1990s-2000s as an "entheogen" (Ott, 1996) enabling access to higher dimensional "hyperspace" (McKenna, 1991), and its role in customizable "ayahuasca analogues," DMT has had a complex career of its own (see St John, 2015a). DMT is responsible for sudden and short-lasting (20-to 30-minute) effects ranging from complex geometric patterns and synesthesia to out-of-body states and encounters with disincarnate beings, and its impact is apparent within a networked cultural movement of experimentalists, artists, and alchemists. While today recognized as a serotonergic neurotransmitter that crosses the blood-brain barrier, where it has an affinity with various receptor sites (Hanna & Taylor, n.d.), and where its endogenicity to humans has prompted its veneration as "the spirit molecule" (Strassman, 2001) and "the brain's own psychedelic" (Strassman, 2008), the ubiquity of DMT throughout nature and its purpose within the human brain remain a mystery.