Death by Astonishment: Confronting the Mystery of the World's Strangest Drug

DMT is the world’s strangest and most mysterious drug, inducing one of the most remarkable and yet least understood of all states of consciousness. This common plant molecule has, from ancient times to the modern day, been used as a tool to gain access to a bizarre alien reality of inordinate complexity and unimaginable strangeness, populated by a panoply of highly advanced, intelligent, and communicative beings entirely not of this world.

In a story that begins in the Amazonian rainforests and ends somewhere beyond the stars, Andrew Gallimore presents the first detailed account of the discovery of DMT and science’s continuing struggle to explain how such a simple and common plant molecule can have such astonishing effects on the human mind. The history of the drug involves many fascinating characters from the scientific and literary worlds — including legendary ethnobotanist Dr. Richard Schultes; renegade beat writer and drug aficionado William S. Burroughs; philosopher and raconteur Terence McKenna; and the high priest of the 1960s psychedelic revolution, Dr. Timothy Leary. In the end, the story of DMT forces us to reconsider our most basic assumptions about the nature of reality and our place within it.