Hamilton Morris describes the history of 5-MeO-DMT

so so all right here we go so i'm going to be filming this if that's okay with everybody i hope you don't mind i uh made a documentary about bufo alvarius in 2017 and there were a number of mistakes in it that i feel bad about and i want to correct so in the new season of my show i'm dedicating an entire episode to mistakes and correcting them and in this presentation i'll address a couple of the mistakes [Applause] give it up for making mistakes okay but uh yeah so i hope that i can address a couple of mistakes and ways to avoid these sorts of mistakes in the future um one of the most amazing things about watching this conference over the last couple of days has been how much discussion there is about best practices or abuse or the spirituality and how little is actually known about this substance that everyone is here gathered to talk about there's almost nothing known about it until april of this year the previous published analysis was from i mean there is almost nothing dr jerry published a little tiny thing in one of his books but for the most part this substance is a chemical unknown and even that analysis from the 1960s wasn't actually on the expressed secretion from the gland it was on total extraction of the toad's skin or on the excised gland that had been homogenized and extracted with acetone so okay i'm going to review i actually can't see the presentation which is unfortunate but i'm going to review a couple of uh a couple of salient details about the pre-history of five mio dmt so like dmt 5meodmt was first discovered synthetically before it was ever found in nature there was a canadian natural product there was there was a canadian natural product chemist named richard hellmuth manske who first synthesized dmt in an effort to create references for potential natural products but he never actually found it in nature and the closest thing that was known to exist was bufotenin which had been isolated from the extract of the common european toad bufo bufo during world war one and that in and of itself was pretty amazing to extract a crystalline substance from a toad that was known to have this sort of biological activity but at that time neuroscience didn't exist in any capacity relative to the way it exists today i mean they were aware that it could accelerate heart rate and things like that but they didn't know that it was a psychedelic they didn't know that it really did anything in the brain and they weren't looking so it was it was more of a chemical oddity than anything else but it still inspired new generations of chemists so you had in japan you had a group of two chemists who were synthesizing derivatives of bufochanin they made the methyl ether of bufotenin which is 5meo dmt that was partially inspired by the work of manski in canada and also because it bore a structural resemblance to a compound called phasostigmian kind of and they were interested in that resemblance then it was found in nature it was found in a dictyloma species and the concentration was so low that it wasn't really that notable i mean it was less than 0.1 percent and then that was kind of it for a little while in terms of indigenous use there's a separate timeline and people will you know debate endlessly what was done where and when but due to the lack of a written record in many of these cultures it becomes very difficult to say with any degree of certainty what truly happened and when it comes to these plant preparations what you can say is that it wasn't pure 5 amio dmt it was typically a combination of 5-meo dmt dmt bufotene and other things and a notable example would be a discovery that was made earlier this year of a of an interesting is this on the screen yes it's an interesting pouch made out of three stitched together fox snouts and it was found to contain dmt bufotanin and 5-meodmt that was thought to come from some kind of an adenantara typeseed although they didn't definitively identify that okay and okay so so the the human use of five meow dmt containing plants can be dated back maybe a thousand years but it wasn't isolated material it was a combination of different things the real breakthrough in 5mu dmt research was made by an italian chemist named vittorio or spamer and er spammer is best known for having discovered serotonin he didn't name it he called it enteramine but he was very interested in finding serotonin-like molecules in nature and his methods were pretty brutal by today's standards when he was trying to isolate serotonin initially i believe he used 30 000 pairs of salivary glands from octopuses so they were using absolutely enormous amounts of biological material to isolate these substances and when it came to toads he had that same sort of methodology which was which was really great in a certain sense because he was able to very carefully profile the chemical composition of the toad secretion but again as i said earlier he wasn't expressing the venom in the way that it's done today he was cutting the entire gland out of the dead toad and for that reason i don't think that his numbers are necessarily relevant or they have to be qualified as not being the same and i think the major difference that you'll find is that the bufotenin concentrations are much higher so here let me let me uh go here so i wish i could see this but um as in the total skin of the toad the ratio of bufo tuning into 5-meo dmt it's still more 5-meo dmt but there's a substantial quantity of bufotenin when you transition into the excised gland it's only a trace quantity of bufotenin and when it comes to the analysis of the expressed secretion at least in terms of my own analysis from three different samples one was a reference sample from sigma aldrich of the colorado river toad and two of the other samples were collected in different locations in sonora some years ago there is no bufotenin whatsoever detected and the the analytical technique here is called asap ms it's a very sensitive technique it may appear that there are many different components but it's a bit tricky because even a single compound will provide many peaks because it fragments in the mass spectrometer so i can't say with certainty how many different things were there but 5-meodmt was present serotonin o-sulfate was present in both samples and one of the samples contained an interesting compound called bufo viridine which is um could also be called bufotenin o sulfate this is non-quantitative so it doesn't say anything about the actual concentrations of these compounds just that they were there and i think it's interesting that bufotenin was not detected so that was pretty much it there's the er spammer work there's this unpublished stuff that i did a little while ago and then in april of this year a new paper came out that's really fascinating it was published in psychopharmacology it's not actually a chemistry paper it's really more about the human response to five amio dmt but it included this analytical section that's pretty mind-blowing it's almost so weird that i uh i'm a tad skeptical but it uh they found dmt in the secretion which has never been detected previously as well as d-e-t which has never been found in nature period and i'm kind of surprised they were even looking for something like that because it's uh it's not the sort of thing you would expect and i would like to see these results replicated because they're pretty extraordinary but there's a few takeaways from this research and from the er spammer research from the 1960s and one of the major ones is you can actually see that there's a tremendous amount of variation in the concentration of 5-meo dmt in this more recent the more recent work from 2019 um there's about a 50 percent increase from the lowest potency sample to the highest with the er spammer research it's a 300 percent increase and i think this really is important to acknowledge because i've heard some people complain about people eyeballing the dose of the medicine at these ceremonies well you can weigh it on the most accurate precision balance in the world but it won't matter if there's tremendous variation between the samples that you give people and this is really you know this is not an insubstantial difference i mean this is the difference between assuming a 100 milligram dose i think it goes from i haven't written on the slide but i think it's the difference between 20 milligrams and 30 milligrams of fiber dmt so and that's less than would be expected from the previous analysis that was done in the 60s so there could be tremendous variation it hasn't even been looked at really but i think that that's something that has to be acknowledged in the 1980s there was an amazing character who i'm going to talk about a little bit more named albert most or that was the pseudonym and he i think predicted some of these problems and suggested homogenizing the extract to reduce that variability that's one technique but i think that this is something that needs to be really seriously considered and is one of many advantages that synthetic material has over the natural product okay so this is just getting into the actual structure of the gland what we're talking about there's a lot of debate about what to call this stuff whether it's a secretion poison bufo toxin venom i prefer the term venom because that has been the chosen term of most of the people that have seriously examined the microscopic structures of the gland um additionally it does sort of behave like a venom you know it it squirts from specialized pores in response to stress or threats but this is a nice illustration that a herpetologist sent me that shows a dissected gland and you can see the pore where the venom escapes as well as the lobules that compose the gland in cross-section okay and here is a little bit more sort of like a powers of ten with the bufo alvarius gland you can see the different levels of magnification the person that did this research i think did an absolutely he's another one of these guys who did this this work um decades ago that no one has followed up on i called him on the phone to ask him if he'd done any subsequent research on buffalo various and he hung up on me so i don't know if i was maybe he gets a lot of calls but i kind of doubt it i don't know maybe just didn't like me okay um so yes this is a sad photo so so there's a lot of talk a lot of very well intentioned discussion about how best to milk these toads and you know i think that a lot of the things that i've heard are definitely good you don't want to load a huge number of toads together in a single container where they might be able to transfer fungal infections to one another you don't want to stress them out unnecessarily you don't want to milk them too frequently but the reality is that they are facing so many different threats simultaneously that it's hard to even say what is responsible for what it's this really kind of tragic situation if you go to sonora you see that we've created all these roads the roads have artificial lights the toads congregate around the artificial lights because the lights attract insects for them to feed on but then they get hit by cars constantly because they're on the road it also makes it easier for humans to catch them and it probably exposes them to other sorts of human pollution i mean there's issues with climate change there's issues with habitat destruction there's issues with pesticide contamination it's there's a lot of different problems that they're facing and for that reason i feel very strongly that the best conservation tactic would be to use synthetic material and yeah i guess someone agrees that's good use synthetic material and dedicate any resources that you have to just preserving their habitat or protecting them because i don't think there is a good sustainable way to milk these toads especially if this material keeps gaining popularity at the rate that it is okay let's see here so i'm going to talk a little bit about that okay so here's here's the the big question now is this kind of it really boils down to a spiritual argument i think is can this be replaced synthetically there are arguments that there are a number of different compounds that have been isolated from buffalo various and they all may contribute to the effect of the venom in an in the same way that people talk about the different cannabinoids and terpenes creating an entourage effect that modulates the activity of smoked cannabis and i think that's possible but there's no evidence for it and i think it's really important to think about this in an evidence-based way because it has a huge implication for conservation the same thing happens with other rare plants like peyote people say oh well peyote has these different alkaloids that modulate the experience or enhance it in one way or another like peyotene thus we need to use peyote we can't use san pedro we can't use synthetic masculine well if that is truly the case why is nobody synthesizing peyote to figure out whether that is really a contributor why not actually test these things why you know why if it's so important then do the work and figure out if they're really contributing i think that they're probably not contributing all that much because even bufotenin which is the only other compound that has ever been found in buffalo various that is definitively a psychedelic is never present in very high concentrations if at all it wasn't present in any of the analyses that i did and it's a much weaker psychedelic than five amio dmt so it'd be like if you made a sauce that was like a bucket of habanero peppers and then you put one basil leaf in it and you said oh well the basil really contributes it plays a big big role and maybe probably not probably not a major effect i mean five-minute dmt is very much active at five to ten milligrams bufotenin requires tens of milligrams the effect is different it's longer-lasting it's more nauseating i don't think that it plays a major role in the experience that everyone has collected here to talk about um although buforching is interesting and is you know worthy of evaluation so the first question is what is in this stuff let's analyze it which i think is really kind of the only justifiable reason for milking toads right now is to analyze the venom figure out exactly what it contains figure out how it changes seasonally and then figure out a sustainable synthetic way to recreate it so that we don't need to bother toads and luckily it's really easy to do that you know when five amio dmt was first synthesized in the 1930s the chemistry was really difficult it was you know maybe a seven step synthesis there was no way to do that on a large scale now due to the globalization of the chemical trade you can get the precursors to make five mute 5mu dmt which are completely legal internationally it's you know 5-methoxytryptamine is a metabolite of melatonin for you know 30 cents a gram something like that and produce it very inexpensively synthetically on as large a scale as you want and that's that you know it doesn't have to doesn't have to involve toads at all so i wanted to actually present the synthesis here but legally it was very difficult to find a lab in mexico even though 5mu dmt is not an explicitly controlled compound a lot of people are sort of reluctant to let me demonstrate to present here yeah so but i will do it eventually um and it really boils down to this this question of what is a derivative um which is not a chemically meaningful term so it boils down to the biases of whoever the authority figure is is 5mo dmt a derivative of dmt well if you're going to say it's a derivative of anything it's a derivative of bufotenin but no one ever says that because they're just concerned with the name that it contains dmt in its name so it's a tricky situation but there is another way you know with something like ibogaine it's complicated you pretty much do need to get it from plants in order to provide it to people this is a lucky situation where it doesn't need to come from nature there's a way to do it sustainably and i think we should really seriously consider this and these are just a few other examples of you know what happens i think we're all aware of what happens when an animal becomes important in our medical practices it's almost always disastrous it never ends well whether it's milking hemocyanin from horseshoe crabs or i actually don't know exactly how damaging it's been to scrape the secretions of phyllo medusa bi-color but i can't imagine it's been good or a really tragic example would be this thing called the the scrotum frog that lives in lake titicaca that was just one of these things like rhinoceros horn where someone just decided that it has medicinal properties when it doesn't at all and people are using it in this drink called rana imaca and it's decimated the wild population so if that can happen with something that doesn't even do anything imagine what can happen with something that pretty reliably produces a religious experience and everybody that uses it okay so i gave you some of the early 20th century history which is not really relevant to this congress what's really important is the human history of five mu dmt so there was you know in the early 70s there was a little bit of use of synthetic 5-meo dmt but it remained pretty obscure until the publication of a very beautiful and influential pamphlet that was authored under the pseudonym albert most and this pamphlet it really told you everything that you would need to know to do this it came out of nowhere it told you how to milk the toad how best to administer it what dose was appropriate and it put this strange practice on the map in a way that it simply didn't exist previously i became obsessed with this pamphlet because i felt that it was really vital to understanding the history of five amio dmt whoever wrote this is the person that invented this practice as far as i'm concerned as far as the written history is concerned um and i dedicated a huge portion of my episode about 5mu dmt to figuring out who this person was but bizarrely there were a series of imposters who had taken on the albert most identity and were misrepresenting themselves as albert most so i had to weed through this series of toad venom imposters and still stumbled upon the wrong person so at first there was this guy named i believe robert burns who had sort of uh digitized the pamphlet put it online and had taken on this identity um but he wasn't the real one then there was this guy alfred savinelli who's an interesting figure because i'm sure there's a couple people here who know who he is he is actually like a a figure in the psychedelic community and his story was corroborated by two people that i trust and he had certain similarities with the real albert most he was a participant in rick strassman's famous dmt studies in new mexico so i thought what are the chances that someone whose story is corroborated by people i trust trout namely if anyone knows who that is who is also a participant in rick strassman studies who claims to have done it why would anyone lie about that so bizarre um but he did he lied about it just a really unbelievable coincidence so so i uh i made a documentary about how he was the first person to do this and i was completely wrong i made a mistake i didn't expect someone to lie about having done it but one of the really interesting things that came out of this is after it aired i got a very polite email from a lawyer who said you know i really like what you did and i'm not trying to give you a hard time but i have to inform you that you made a mistake that the person who identified himself as albert most is an imposter and i know this because i was friends with the real albert most and then she sends me a a number of original t-shirts and pamphlets um to prove that she knew him and i thought wow that's pretty interesting then another person came forward and said the same name said his name was ken that he lived in denton they were sure he was the real guy then ken himself wrote me a letter saying i'm the real guy then ken's friend who's here at this congress scott he's a very modest great guy um went further and provided airtight evidence that this is truly the real albert most so i made a mistake and identified the wrong person but i don't think i would have ever found him if i didn't make that mistake and i think that's true actually of a lot of these things relating to five miodmts we've all made these mistakes but it's been important to make them in order to learn the appropriate way to do things whether it's excessive harvesting of toad secretions which we now are beginning to realize is not a sustainable practice or charismatic traveling shamans who might manipulate participants in their ceremonies or do things that leave people traumatized or unhappy i mean nobody really knows what to do with this stuff and so we have to learn from the mistakes that we've made in the past i think that's one of the great difficulties with something that is new i think that's one reason that we are so eager to assign some sort of indigenous history to this stuff because it's uncomfortable to imagine that this is something that we brought into the world that we are the first people to do this and we have to construct our own culture surrounding it and a lot of it's been bad so far i mean a lot of it has not been good and it's only getting bigger so i think now is really a great time as celebrities become increasingly interested as more books are published as more documentaries are made to figure out how best to do this so that we can keep doing it into the future and i think that's pretty much everything depending on how much time i have left i can do some questions yeah time for questions okay okay cool um with regards to the sustainability like what do you think's really the breaking point for the toads as far as their population and the increasing demand and popularity the spreading of awareness and what do we do when we reach that point or are we already past that point and who will provide that synthetic is that something that could feasibly be made in home labs or you know like what what what are we going to do when the venom runs out um yeah i mean i think it's good to start thinking about these things before it's too late you know it's good to begin before it's a problem the issue is that there isn't a lot of formal study i mean imagine there's not even chemical analysis of the venom that has been published until this year and that's pretty easy to do when it comes to really labor-intensive things like monitoring population density of these toads there's nobody really doing that so it's going to require a lot of work to even evaluate how serious the habitat destruction is how the numbers are declining but i think that we should really seriously consider moving towards synthetic and if the idea is synthetic doesn't replicate the natural material then i would say well let's figure out what the difference is and synthesize that as well so i have a question about you briefly mentioned the legality of the word derivative or what derivative or analog means and in the different controlled substances acts of different countries talking about nndmt and their derivatives or analogs and in some controlled substances acts it'll say nnn dmt and they're salts so from a chemical perspective what's the difference between their salts or their derivatives or analogs right so that's salt is actually a pretty clear word salt is a nice word i have no objection to salt because uh you know dmt and many of these compounds have a basic nitrogen that nitrogen can be reacted with an acid and it produces what's called assault so this is a way of preventing people from saying oh you only made dmt illegal but this isn't dmt this is dmt fumarate this is the fumarate salt or this is the oxalate salt or something like that so that's that's pretty low level stuff and it has an explicit answer what bothers me is when you can't answer the question because the word is so ambiguous that it has no chemical meaning and that's the case for the word derivative so if the word derivative means derived from can you derive 5-meodmt from dmt it's never been done before is it possible maybe in some kind of elaborate synthetic scheme you could figure out a way to do it but it's never been done no one would ever want to do it it's not a derivative in that sense of the word and then if there's another sense of the word derivative which is just any relationship then who draws the lion so are you saying that the salt so 5 meodmt would be a salt of nndmt no definitely not got it thank you all right thank you um just a couple of things i just wanted to find are you saying that uh 5miodmt is not on schedule one it is in the united states yes as of 2011. so you're saying in mexico yeah it's not in mexico yeah so and a lot of the world and just a little thing on that uh just i don't know 1999 2000 mushroom millennial conference um those of you that don't know who sasha shulgin in i i know that you know who sasha shogun is and that's the first time that i did the synthetic 5-meo dmt and we all did 35 milligrams which uh you know nowadays because we treated it like nndmt which i did want to put an aside for here in this conference that everybody's been saying dmt and everybody in the psychonautical world knows that regular dmt is the nndmt so please say 5meo when you express this but um and to make things even more complicated five and meow dmt is also nmtm it's really tricky there and the reason that that 5meo became illegal in 2011 is because that's when people started putting their experiences on the internet and parents started showing their congress people and all of that so i also think we should be cautious about all the things that we put on the internet uh with what we're doing here at this time and as you guys know most of you anyway i've been researching all of this because uh i'm going for claiming our rights here but back to 1999 when we all did 35 and sasha shulgin was there and i after all of our experiences which is a whole another big story um we went to i went to um sasha and i said well sasha what is the proper dose of five muo dmt and he said well try five then do 10 and decide somewhere in the middle and the next year when i saw him i said i like 14. and um but then at that conference somebody asked him in 1999 why is 5meo illegal and then those of you that know what he looks like he goes well well god needed a loophole and 5mu dmt is that loophole that's the only way i can explain it god needed a loophole and 5miodmt is that loophole and uh and so we were using it quite a bit there was a number of us with the until the 2011 you could get it there and then the other thing on bringing this about the synthetic to make a kilogram of synthetic well yes he and i talked a little bit about this earlier so in uh with a with a kilogram that's 300 000 people and so in doing that so if what we need and as you and i spoke also with the melatonin our bodies make it from melatonin is my theory and that's the easiest way to make it yeah to make it there and so do we need to just develop uh um home ways of doing that that's basically what i was proposing i wish i could have uh i could have shown in a little bit more detail but that's that's basically the idea it's yeah okay yeah thank you so um earlier you were uh talking about other some of the other possible entourage elements i think uh let me see n-methyl serotonin buffogenin bufotilidin 5-methoxy tryptophal 5-hydroxy or sorry 5-miaa have there been many studies done on exactly what these substances do in isolation and what they might do in conjunction to produce an entourage no there have not been but you can make an educated guess about quite a few of them that based on everything that is currently known about the structure activity relationship of tryptamines that quite a few of them are extremely extremely unlikely to have any serotonergic psychedelic effect the indole acetic acid derivatives are probably biosynthetic precursors or something like that or maybe they're just there i mean they would probably have activity in plants but in humans i think there's no reason to believe that some of the other ones buffooting is active bufo viridian may be but i think it would depend on the sulfate group being metabolically cleaved it's very polar bufotenin is already so polar that it was traditionally considered something that couldn't even enter the brain and this is even more polar than that so uh i would say that there's not a lot of strong candidates um is there uh are there any uh particular substances out there that would be the most likely candidate for entourage elements um no i would i would say that it's most likely the case that this effect is a 5-meo dmt mediated effect for all intents and purposes that whatever contribution the bufo tuning makes if it's even there at all because the analysis is contradictory on that matter is minuscule back to the habanero pepper analogy that i made hi first of all i want to thank you for addressing this very important topic because i work with both synthetic and bufo 5mu dmt i had a sample of buffon analyzed by paul daly who inherited sasha's lab and he found trace amounts of bufo tonin and other tryptamines in there but the major peak was 5maodmt now i've looked at the acute effects on the eeg and compared them and they share a lot of similarities i wanted to check that the bufo produces the effects that the synthetic produces however there's a qualitative difference and i think there's people in this room that would agree with that smoking the toad is different than smoking the synthetic it has a different feel to it the toad seems to last a little longer take a little longer to come back so there's something else in there in the mix that distinguishes these two why i don't doubt have you had that experience yes actually i have had that experience but i wouldn't assign the experienced differences to chemical differences without a reason to do so so i think that it would be more likely if i had to guess that it's a dosage difference that because like i was showing earlier there can be a tremendous degree of variation in the potency between different batches of buffalo various venom it could be the case that 15 milligrams of synthetic 5mm dmt is not comparable to 100 milligrams of the venom with the assumption that it's 15 yeah i in in my work i've hooked up a subject that wanted to take very strong doses and we went as high as 100 milligrams of bufo and added a pinch of synthetic to that uh he survived it fine he's pretty strong guy and what it does is it it just magnifies the effect it doesn't produce any additional effect so um you know i work with medium doses of bufo because i've seen what strong doses can do to people and typically 30 40 milligrams is my sample and the effects are very very consistent from person to person i've done about 29 subjects now and some of this is written up and i'm working on a major paper to publish young cool yes hi hamilton my name is scott and i've actually known ken for 35 years the guy who wrote the book under albert most and when i heard you were speaking i would had a whole list of questions for you and i was going to like do you still believe salvador he don't and all i have to say is thank you for setting the record straight i truly appreciate it yes and give it up for scott because because he's a very modest man but he really helped me understand all of this and i couldn't have done it without him and also can the person who really did this is going through some serious health problems right now so i hope in the future to maybe figure out a way to raise a little bit of money for him maybe by selling you know the t-shirts that he designed with his friends when he first published his pamphlet and using the money to help pay for his medical bills because uh you know he did a really great thing for everybody and it's sad that it never took any credit for it and then other two other people took credit for it who weren't him i was just curious to know with all the research going into the science and what i'm listening to about your chemical versus from the frog are we considering that the difference here may be a spirit of a toad that's actually at play here and if that is the case is it possible to ever actually synthesize that in the first place right uh yeah i mean i'm just for whatever reason i'm totally 100 non-spiritual so um i do believe that there is no difference between synthetically produced 5-meo dmt and 5-meodmt isolated from the secretions of bufo alvarius and er spammer himself came to the same conclusion you compare to synthetic reference to the isolated five meow dmt there's they're physically identical the same melting point the same boiling point the same behavior in terms of chromatography they're the same chemical but i think that we often underestimate our own contribution to these experiences so we we tend to assign it to the drug but not to ourselves and there's something important and interesting and valuable about something coming from a toad it's very strange and that maybe not in a spiritual sense for me at least but just in a good old-fashioned psychological sense will change things to know that this came from a living organism that was you know a defensive material that they created as opposed to something that was made in a laboratory in china or wherever it changes things without any kind of necessarily supernatural overlay okay thanks everybody

Channel: Hamilton Morris

Views: 197,700

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Id: O_VYXcdTReQ

Length: 41min 32sec (2492 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 20 2021