So... i was having a little debate w/ a colleague at work (of all places) on whether dmt is truly endogenous to the human brain.

Now... when strassman was doing his experiments in the mid nineties it was not proven to be an endogenous molecule but the implications were very strong and it was theory.

I saw somewhere on this forum that since strassmans study, it has infact been proven to be endogenous to the human brain (excreted by the pineal land).

Does anyone know who,where and when it was actually proven?

Does anyone know where to find the literature or essay that explains it as fact?

I believe it to be true 100%... but i have a colleage that doesnt believe it is true and i need the evidence to prove him wrong.

I know Scientists have identified endogenous DMT in human blood, urine, and cerebrospinal fluid....I just cant find anything showing the concrete evidence.

Does anyone have anything giving further info on the dr.'s and test's that were done to prove endogenous dmt?

I dont have any extrainfo on the strassman study, BUT i have had some experiences while completely sober which would coincide with an endogenous release of some kind of acitve neurotransmitter. About 2 years ago i was lying on my bed and the next thing i knew i was flying down some sort of technocolour tube following in the trails of this pixie type entity. Actually the fist time I saw the nexus homepage the graphics and colours reminded me of the tone of experience. I had never smoked DMT at this point but had been using psilocybin pretty regularily(up to 3 times per week), and had fully brocken through with the mushrooms.

I have since gone through a trial of bioassays on myself with melatonin and B vitamines, with diets high in natural in tryptamines for days at a time, and results varied but I found about 1/3 of the time on 1mg or less melatonin I will sort of become concious durring my dreams and they will be VERY DIFFERENT from usual rem state sleep. Mandalic patturns seem to flow aroundmy room and inside my head and once I became lucid to find a male entity holding a lotus type energy thing in his hand and doing some sort of work on me. I was thanking him for it and seemed to feel as if we had arranged this to take place. When I fully awoke i felt like so much more was going on but i just couldnt access the memory.

I also seem to have a very low tolerance to psychedelic tryptamines and had strange experiences when I was a child that went on for YEARS of a green luminous being coming to visit me at night and we would leave out my window. I would always awake the next morning with no recollection of where we had gone, but i was never afraid of this entity and actually waited in anticipation of its arrival every night.

Now this was over 20 years ago, however I have this feeling that the man encountered when taking melatonin (and a few other obscure times while sleeping) may be this same being. I used to tell my mother about this being and she told me I was probabily having night terrors, but ther was never any terror! Interestingly my mother told me that my aunt had an imaginary friend when she was a young child that she would communicate with inside of the mirror, which is kinda creepy! so who knows..

So, In my experience, i think that it is def possible that DMT or a mix of psychoactive tryptamines is synthesized by the pineal and released durring certain times. Note that these experiences are very different from my usual dreams so i dont really have any other explainations for how these experiences could come about. I would be very interested to read some others ideas on this as well and any studys yall are aware of.

There basically no evidence for dmt being synthesized and/or secreted from the pineal gland. A search in Pubmed (the most complete repository of scientific publications in medical, biomedical and biological sciences) for "pineal AND dmt" yields no results. So, the jury is still out there.

There are references of course that the pineal gland expresses the enzymes that can potentially synthesize dmt but this is NOT a proof that it actually synthesizes it. The biological systems tend to be somewhat conservative and in many cases and they may use the very same enzymes in somewhat similar pathways to synthesize different compounds. By that I mean that the enzymes that are present and could possibly be synthesizing dmt (given tryptamine as a substrate) in the pineal might be very well used for synthesizing something else (for instance, mono-methyl tryptamine, which has yet not very well investigated activities).

But then, if pineal is synthesizing and excreting dmt at special times how can we detect it? Which are those special times? How can we know before butchering some human brains and check their pineals? Mind you, plenty of folk will find it a bit unethical.

As an analogy of the above scenario, women secrete the hormone hCG in their blood and urine only when they are pregnant (this is what the pregnancy test detects) or post-menopausal. The woman carries most of the enzymes for synthesizing hCG, but it is in pregnancy (or after menopause) that she actually produces it.

So, if anyone tells you that dmt is synthesized and secreted by the pineal gland feel free to answer:

"We do not have any scientific proof yet. It may or it may not. And there is no more or less evidence in favor of either case."

I have a number of papers that describe how DMT was detected in human fluid etc. But yes there is no evidence that it is happening in the pineal gland that was an idea because melatonin which is closely related gets made there.

I recommend checking out this paper:

Endogenous psychoactive tryptamines reconsidered: an anxiolytic role for Dimethyltryptamine

authors: Jacob and Presti 2004

I will summarize some of the latest findings (sorry dont have all the papers on hand). The trace amines as DMT tryptamine and phenethylamine that are all found in the human body are now known to interact with a receptor system called the trace amine system and these compounds may be the natural endogenous ligands of this receptor system but the precise role of this system is not known yet.

what people many times get confused with is rick strassman's pineal hypothesis, and the fact that dmt is endogenously produce..

strassman had a theory of where and why it was produced.. this is disputed.. but it is an accepted fact with quite a few papers out there that dmt is found as a natural part of human metabolism.

After reading the Spirit Molecule it was absolutely clear to me that the whole pineal thing is a wild speculation, a hypothesis, a proposal. But most of the non-scientific stuff are easily misled and confuse the terms hypothesis and fact.

The thing that these hypotheses are coming from a credible and authoritative person like Dr. Strassman makes things more confusing to non-scientific folk; after all, he's trained and experienced enough to make good hypotheses and good guesses to further our current understanding, right?

But not everything that scientists hypothesise turns out to be correct or true. Pretty much the opposite in most of the cases as they often admit. Dr. Strassman should have definitely made more clear that his speculations are purely hypothetical, that's why many people nowadays believe in the "dmt from the pineal" craze.

Yeah i agree i dont necesarily think that DMT itself is the culprit of people endogenous experiences, but perhaps a combination of other tryptmines, perhaps pinoline is a main one? I think reports on erowid have ruled out adrenochrome...

It has been found in red blood-cells and in the liver, though. Correct?

Yeah DMT and Bufotenine i believe both have been found to be present as metabolic waste products of the human body. Some say 5meoDMT is a more plausable as endogenous entheogen, then again many more seem to point out some problems in the biosynthesis of it as well.

In "Inner paths to outer space", strassmans newest book, he talks about this.

"At this point, the pineal gland-DMT connection must remain speculative. Yet there are planty of other organs that do produce DMT-including brain, blood cells, and lungs- and its endogenicity remains a fact we must contend with. It raises the obvious and compelling question: Why do we possess DMT in our bodies?"
This is the last 2 sentences of a section titled "A DMT-PINEAL GLAND CONNECTION?"


One interesting thing about the brain and DMT though he states in a section titled "What is DMT?"
He explains:
"Another unique feature of DMT is its active transport into the brain across the blood-brain barrier. Cells that are tightly glued together line the brain's blood vessels, preventing movement of most blood-borne chemicals into the brain's confines, yet the brain sometimes expends energy to acquire some crucial molecules via active transport across this barrier. Examples of such molecules are glucose, the brain's fuel source, and certain amino acids... DMT is one of these select compounds, though why the brain expends energy to bring DMT into its confines remains a secret. It is tempting to postulate, however, that just as glucose is necessary for the brain's function, so in some mysterious way is DMT."

This is a very interesting to point to bring up to people who question about DMT and the brain or who don't know much about DMT and you can impress them with this fact about it lol

Not very interesting in my opinion. If it sounds interesting it is because people hear and/or are experienced about the effects of dmt in the somewhat non-canonical situation where one person is administered an admittedly massive (or non-physiological, beyond the endogenous levels) dose.

Even though dmt freely passes the blood-bran barrier it does not provide any information about dmt's spectacular effects when smoked or IV'ed. It could just the same case as with many hormones in the body, vis:

They get to the brain and "report" the status of many body organs. As an example testosterone from the testis, travels to the brain, crosses the blood brain barrier and reaches the pituitary gland and hypothalamus to give the message: "Oh, we are producing too much sperm, we need to slow down a bit" or "we do not produce that much sperm, we need to boost the situation a bit"

In a similar manner, dmt produced peripherally may cross the blood-brain barrier just to report on physiological processes. Its actual role in the body may not have anything to do with "reality", "conciousness" and the rest of the lot.

How about this theory:

DMT is used in the wake/sleep regulation of the whole body. Processes like blood flow, blood production, breathing, liver metabolism operate differently when we are asleep. And they have to operate differently, simply to orchestrate the whole "sleeping state" that the body has assumed. DMT is produced by the peripheeral organs, telling the brain: "yeah, the organs are behaving the way they should during this sleeping process"

The body treats radium as calcium, that doesn't mean that we need radium in our bones. The body's just a very complicated machine whose mechanisms are only purposeful in ideal conditions.

Introducing higher than normal quantities of any psychoactive compounds is essentially poisoning one's system, though not necessarily in a toxic manner. The body can adapt to these conditions, but I doubt that it necessarily seeks out these conditions without pre-existent and long-term favorable exposure to such conditions written into its genetic makeup.

Infundibulum I don't think you understood what i meant....
The point is that not many things are let passed the blood-brain barrier so it is interesting why DMT is one of the few things that are allowed
so you are correct that it "does not provide any information about dmt's spectacular effects when smoked or IV'ed."

But still, there are plenty of things that can pass through the blood brain barrier. What I am trying to say is that if a substance can cross the BBB it simply means that it has the potential of interacting with the brain somehow.

There is such a diverse type of molecules that can cross BBB that it is not very surprising that DMT can do so as well.

What I would actually find really interesting would be comparative data among BBB crossing potential of a vast array of different molecules. If DMT was scoring among, say the 50 fastest/more actively/better transported molecules then I would truly find it pretty amazing.

But I am not aware of such data...

what about salvinorin A, it seems to pass the bbb very easily and quickly, and isnt endogenous.. so i guess it isnt all that rare. I am however convinced that there is some mechanism that allows for endogenous entheogenic experiences. It is proven that pinoline in synthesized by the pineal is it not? anyone have any experience with pure pinoline?

A whole lot of substances, from methanol, ethanol, ether, solvents, naphtha to very complex designed synthetic drugs can cross the blood brain barrier. Almost every substance that can target your brain to produce some effect can cross BBB. Nobody ever considered psilocin or LSD special because they could cross the BBB. In that respect, Strassman's argument about the BBB and DMT is really poor.

As far as pinoline is concerned, yes, it is synthesized in the pineal. The pinoline has a beta carboline-like structure (it is a tryptoline strictly speaking) and it has been demonstrated to act both as an MAO- and SSR- inhibitor (at least in rats). Its structure is also very nice; it looks like 5-MeO-monomethyl tryptamine in which the ethanamine arm has cyclised back to the indole group to form the pyridol ring characteristic of beta-carbolines.

WOW !!
Thanx for all the response and info!!

It's amazing how little is known about this molecule (atleast it's function within the human body).

I hear it all the time and people speak as if it's an absolute (that it's secreted from the pineal),even though it was clear to me that strassman was just theorizing.

Such a mysterious molecule on so many different levels.

DMT, Bufotenine, and 5-MeO-DMT have all been shown to be present within the human body, including blood, cerebral spinal fluid, and urine. The amounts vary significantly between tissue and individuals. Other factors such as MAO isozymes amoung individuals and even time of day, certainly may influence plasma concentrations. While no one doubts their prescense the exact role of these compounds in the body is unknown. Check out these articles for proposed roles of the endogenous hallucinogens. Additionally these articles give references to known articles that show the prescense of these compounds in the human body.
Wallach JV.
“Endogenous hallucinogens as ligands of the trace amine receptors: A possible role in sensory perception”.
Med Hypotheses. 2008;.
http://www.erowid.org/re...es/refs_view.php?ID=7404
and
Jacob MS, Presti DE.
“Endogenous psychoactive tryptamines reconsidered: an anxiolytic role for dimethyltryptamine”.
Med Hypotheses. 2005;64(5):930-7.
http://www.erowid.org/re...es/refs_view.php?ID=7064

Trouts notes on simple tryptamines also has an incredible reference for articles on all of these compounds in plants and animals as well as tons of other useful information. Anyone who is legitimately interested in DMT and other tryptamines for any reason, that does not own trouts notes is seriously missing out.

Yup, it occurs naturally in the human body.