- [Hamilton] I tore off my shirt, crawled into the kitchen,
and started vomiting, but I remember thinking, "Well, this is a lot more
than I bargained for." My name is Hamilton Morris. I'm the creator and director
of "Hamilton's Pharmacopia", and this is the time
that I took pharmahuasca. I first encountered ayahuasca when I was a freshman in college. I was friends with somebody who was also very
interested in psychedelics, and I went into his dorm room, and he was making a purple
brew on the stove in his dorm. I asked him what it was, and he said it was this Amazonian brew. If you drank it, you
would be able to enter this realm of fantasies where you could have sex with aliens. It sounded a little bit alarming, so I thought, "Okay, I'm gonna table this and come back to it at a later date." I was a teenager. I thought that I knew everything, and I thought, "Well,
these Amazonian shamans, they're doing it all wrong. This is a combination of an
enzyme inhibitor and DMT." Logically, you should take
the enzyme inhibitor first and then take the DMT later, but what I didn't
understand was the dosage, something that's very,
very difficult to do when you're working with plants, so I thought, "Okay, I'm going
to use synthetic DMT freebase and a pharmaceutical MAOI. Just to be extra safe, I'm going to divide the dose in half." I took the enzyme inhibitor, and then took the capsule
of synthetic DMT freebase. I was sitting with my friend in his car, nothing was happening, and then I started to feel a little bit of something happening. Okay, I'm gonna get out of the car, and I'm gonna go for a walk. We were on the shore. I go to the shore and I pick up a stone and started examining it. I realized, oh wow, it's actually made up of rapidly moving mosaic tiles. Instead of interpreting
this as a hallucination, it felt very real to me. I thought, "Wow, this is
a geological phenomenon that I have never observed previously. Are all stones like this?" And then I saw something
glimmering in the distance, so I walked into the water, reached into the glimmering
item, pulled it out, and it was a harmonica. Wow, a gift from Neptune. He wants me to play him a song, and I put the harmonica to my lips, and this horrendously
disgusting rusty brine poured into my mouth, and I started gagging, thinking, "Neptune, how could
you? This is terrible." I look up at my friend. He has transformed into the
Japanese demon of folklore, oni, and this is typically not
what a psychedelic is like. Usually, somebody takes a
psychedelic with their friends, they look at nature, maybe
a little bit of breathing, maybe a little bit of twinkling, maybe a little bit of this or that, but not overt, true hallucinations. That does not typically occur. So I looked at my friend
and he was a demon, and he was saying, "You
gotta get back in the car." We get in the car, he's
driving, thankfully. There's a phenomenon
called speaking in tongues. I wasn't speaking in tongues, I was screaming in tongues, and, outside the car, it was like a void. It was a milky white
expanse of nothingness, and I was screaming and
having these hallucinations. As it turned out, this was
the highest dose of DMT that I have ever consumed, and I would, I don't think,
ever consumed as much again. Eventually, we arrive at a house. It was a friend's house that
I'd never been to before. He gets out of the car and
he says, "Come inside," and he shuts the door,
and he leaves me alone, and one of the things that psychedelics do is they give every interaction this kind of metaphorical importance. So my friend leaves me alone
in the car and I think, "Well, he's gone, and I'm alone, and that's the nature of life." I can't stand, so I sort
of crumble out of the car onto my hands and knees. Each time I lift my hand and
touch it back to the ground, my fingers are sprouting roots that are fusing with the soil around me. Eventually, I make it into the door, and my friend is watching
"Seinfeld" on the couch. Psychedelics also have this ability to give you a sort of macroscopic vision, almost like the cartoon "Ren and Stimpy", and it's actually very disgusting. I look at this couch and I think, "This couch is literally poisoning me." I felt that my lungs had
ceased to oxygenate my blood. I tore off my shirt,
crawled into the kitchen, and started vomiting,
but I remember thinking, "Well, this is a lot more
than I bargained for. I need some kind of help." I remember calling out to Socrates. You are the wisest of all men. Surely you have some advice
in this particular situation. I started to feel a sort of unwinding of very basic components
of my consciousness, things you don't even think of as aspects of how you perceive reality, and I started to forget
who I was, where I was, I didn't know anything about anything. Then, almost as quickly as it
had started, it just ended, and I was sober, shirtless, on the ground, with a small amount of
vomit surrounding me, and so I stood up and I dusted myself off, and my friend was still watching "Seinfeld" in the other room, and I went in, and I sat
with him on the couch, and we watched a little bit of "Seinfeld".
