Dennis McKenna

Dennis Jon McKenna (born December 17, 1950 in Paonia, Colorado) is an American ethnopharmacologist, research pharmacognosist, lecturer and author. He is the brother of well-known psychedelics proponent Terence McKenna and is a founding board member and the director of ethnopharmacology at the Heffter Research Institute, a non-profit organization concerned with the investigation of the potential therapeutic uses of psychedelic medicines.

DMT: The Spirit Molecule (2010)

 * One of the things besides what it does, one of the things about DMT that always fascinated me, was the fact that it's such a simple molecule. Biosynthetically, it's two steps from tryptophan, right? Two trivial enzymatic steps from tryptophan. Well, tryptophan is an amino acid, of course, and it's everywhere. So all organisms have tryptophan, and all organisms have the two key enzymes that lead to the synthesis of DMT. And these enzymes are very ancient enzymes, they're all over the place. They are, again, part of basic metabolism. So, theoretically, anything could synthesize DMT.


 * Terence was very … he was a good promoter. Basically, he said it's the ultimate metaphysical reality pill. Even though it's not a pill, but I thought that was a pretty good characterization after I took it. It would seem to be of a different order than LSD and mescaline and some of the other things that were around. DMT really did seem to be a whole other level of experience.


 * It just rips that filtering mechanism away for a few minutes, and for a few minutes, you're immersed in sort of this raw data sphere of input, of sensory input, of memories, of associations. I mean, it seems like the brain builds reality out of these things: what you're experiencing, what you have experienced, and how you associate and synthesize these things together to tell yourself a story, essentially, about what's going on, where you are in space and time.


 * What does it mean? Why is there a part of the brain that seems to be, for lack of a better word, a "God-detector", you know? What's the evolutionary advantage to having some part of the brain that seems to trigger and mediate experiences of the transcendent?


 * I think DMT is a forcible reminder that there's a lot more about reality, the universe, ourselves, the biosphere, whatever—there's a lot more to it than we imagine.

The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss: My Life with Terence McKenna (2012)

 * Psychedelics are not suppressed because they are dangerous to users; they're suppressed because they provoke unconventional thought, which threatens any number of elites and institutions that would rather do our thinking for us. Historically, those in power have always sought to suppress free thought, whether bluntly or subtly, because it poses an inherent challenge to their rule. That's no less true today, in an age when corporate, political, and religious interests form a global bloc whose interests threaten all earthly life, including human life.


 * Every culture has its own creation myth, its own cosmology. And in some respects every cosmology is true, even if I might flatter myself in assuming mine is somehow truer because it is scientific. But it seems to me that no culture, including scientific culture, has cornered the market on definitive answers when it comes to the ultimate questions. Science may couch its models in the language of mathematics and observational astronomy, while other cultures use poetry and sacrificial propitiations to defend theirs. But in the end, no one knows, at least not yet. The current flux in the state of scientific cosmology attests to this, as we watch physicists and astronomers argue over string theory and multiverses and the cosmic inflation hypothesis. Many of the postulates of modern cosmology lie beyond, or at least at the outer fringes, of what can be verified through observation. As a result, aesthetics—as reflected by the "elegance" of the mathematical models—has become as important as observation in assessing the validity of a cosmological theory. There is the assumption, sometimes explicit and sometimes not, that the universe is rationally constructed, that it has an inherent quality of beauty, and that any mathematical model that does not exemplify an underlying, unifying simplicity is to be considered dubious if not invalid on such criteria alone. This is really nothing more than an article of faith; and it is one of the few instances where science is faith-based, at least in its insistence that the universe can be understood, that it "makes sense". It is not entirely a faith-based position, in that we can invoke the history of science to support the proposition that, so far, science has been able to make sense, in a limited way, of much of what it has scrutinized. (The psychedelic experience may prove to be an exception.)


 * Terence's pivotal, existential crisis came abruptly, some time in '88 or '89. Everything that happened after that event was fallout. I don't know exactly when it happened, and I don't know exactly what happened; I am piecing it together from what Kat has told me, and she has volunteered few details, and I am reluctant to probe. It happened when they were living for a time on the big island, and it was a mushroom trip they shared that was absolutely terrifying for Terence. It was terrifying because, for some reason, the mushroom turned on him. The gentle, wise, humorous mushroom spirit that he had come to know and trust as an ally and teacher ripped back the facade to reveal an abyss of utter existential despair. Terence kept saying, so Kat told me, that it was "a lack of all meaning, a lack of all meaning." And this induced panic in Terence, and probably, I speculate, a feeling he was going mad. He couldn't deal with it. Kat's efforts to reassure him were fruitless. After that experience, he never again took mushrooms, and he took other psychedelics, such as DMT and ayahuasca, only on rare occasions and with great reluctance.  Whatever the specific content of the psychedelic experience might have been that triggered the cognitive collapse of Terence's worldview and precipitated his existential crisis, what was most remarkable was that he did not see it coming.
 * Unpublished manuscript