Entombed in the giant, white ring of a magnetic resonance imaging machine, Subject DMT-47 took a final look around at his environment. The rest of the cavernous, sterile room was empty save for two small computers in a corner, and the odd, thin director of the study.
“It was as weird as Altered States could’ve been,” Alfred Savinelli says, recalling his days as a volunteer in one of the earliest government-funded research studies of DMT1. “If you are claustrophobic this is not a place for you.”
Dr. Rick Strassman approached Savinelli on the imaging table and connected the syringe to the heparin lock that ran into his patient’s forehand. He pushed down on the plunger, sending .35mg/kg of dimethyltryptamine into Savinelli’s bloodstream. Among psychedelic enthusiasts, intravenous DMT is regarded as the holy grail of highs. Few can withstand its pain and intensity, even for a few minutes. It terrified the drug connoisseur William S. Burroughs.
“Here we go,” Strassman said, and left the room. A cold numbness rose up the Savinelli’s arm.
The giant machine whirred and began to supply all the space and motion Savinelli needed for his existence. Inside, Savinelli was registering and amplifying like the machine itself and he and the machine were co-creating the cosmos and simultaneously being annihilated.
“It’s like downloading the mainframe onto a PC—it’s too much to process consciously,” he says.
Savinelli floated there, discarnated, existing as the faintest shadow, then began recohering himself while rolling out of the machine. For him, the eternal lasted barely 15 minutes.
The awestruck Savinelli looked up and saw a young medical student named John Halpern gazing down at him.
“Are you okay?” Halpern asked.
Desert Alchemy
Native Scents operates out of a non-descript metal building that sits a few blocks away from the main strip in Taos. White flowering peganum harmala plants surround the building, and it’s so close to a large commercial cannabis greenhouse that you feel yourself getting a contact high from the aroma as you approach the building—but the high could just as easily be emanating from the occupant’s reputation.
When I arrived at Alfred Savinelli’s place of business, I pulled into the parking lot and stepped out of the car. My back was tight from the ten-hour drive to Taos from Tulsa, so I hobbled over to the warehouse and knocked on the side door. There was no answer. I texted him to let him know I had arrived and asked “are you inside?”
“No,” he texted back. “I left for nyc.”
We had talked and arranged the interview weeks before, so I was dumbfounded for a full minute before Savinelli finally poked his head through the warehouse door with a big grin.
Several people warned me about Savinelli before I had a chance to meet him in person, calling him a snake and a liar and a thief, which predisposed me to liking him right off the bat. In person, Savinelli has the rugged presence of a laborer with eyes that convey a disarming gentleness. He wears canvas work overalls and his cheeks are ruddy and flushed from a recent slug of niacin-laced water. He speaks in a soft, sandpapery tenor, just what you might imagine a voice shaped by decades in a mountain town might sound like.
One step into the building and you’re in Savinelli’s soul. Plants thrive around him, and he collects, packages and organizes their leaves and seeds for distribution (his kinnick-kinnick, a smokeable blend of herbs, is exceptionally sweet and bright in the mouth and calming in the mind). In between the boxes and crates and barrels, you can find a collection of well-worn chemical glassware, hoses, and distilling equipment. It’s a real workshop, the sort of place you’d expect to find a spagyrist. Savinelli pointed out the trailer he built and in which he lived during the seventies. It looked like a prop from Lord of the Rings.
Inside Savinelli’s private office is a cluttered desk and an acrylic phone. A few framed pictures on a shelf reveal his familiars. There’s a photo of Savinelli with celebrity musicians. Although he says nothing about them, Taoseños know Savinelli as a shaman to the stars. Another photo shows Savinelli and his son. Robert, Savinelli explains, was dating a young woman named Emily Ragan who ultimately ran off with Todd Skinner. Things only got worse between he and Skinner after that.
When I set my satchel on a nearby counter, Savinelli asks me not to record our conversation, but to take notes instead. I don’t begrudge him the paranoia; everyone should be suspicious of writers. But Savinelli’s leeriness runs beyond me. He’s a man familiar with the bludgeoning end of betrayal. Savinelli happens to be the man who introduced William Leonard Pickard to Gordon Todd Skinner—a mistake that pulled his name into a major LSD investigation years later.
Heed the Shaman!
Gordon Todd Skinner’s friendship with Alfred Savinelli began at the Telluride Mushroom Festival in 1994 , Skinner believes Savinelli is one of the few people he encountered in the psychocosmos prior to meeting in person2; some suspect the two have racked up centuries of psychedelic collusion.
Skinner began to make a habit of visiting Savinelli’s house overlooking the New Mexico desertscape and occasionally doing psychedelics there.
On one occasion, during hatch chile season, a shaman from Peru had warned Skinner to stay away from hot peppers, salt, and sex before, during and immediately after tripping. The salt restriction tip was a homerun, Skinner discovered, and he agreed to the sex hiatus. But he couldn’t pass on the hatch chiles, so Skinner figured he would take the pepper prohibition as a challenge. The day of the big trip, Skinner chomped on them and some habaneros with abandon.
Skinner and a group of friends took a prairiehuasca comprised of phalaris arundinacea, White Light DMT, and tetrahydroharmine. Skinner supplemented his dose with a molecular structure too dangerous to name here, with the hopes it would intensify and prolong his trip. Savinelli, a friend named Hugo de la Llave, Skinner, and a few others arranged themselves on the back deck of Savinelli’s place near a firepit. Early into the journey, Skinner could feel a tremendous load on his body along with serious nausea.
The trip was getting strong fast. Too fast. While the others remained outside, he crawled on all fours toward the bathroom inside, wondering if he was going to survive this experience. He sensed that something might be going wrong with his blood pressure or his blood sugar but he was too confused to work out the problems. Before the toilet, he began a series of unholy prostrations. Four-dimensional Mayan hieroglyphics spun across the lid. This might be it, he thought. He could see himself dying of a stroke or heart failure, and watched himself recurse in varying directions.
He managed to drag himself across the floor into a bedroom and lay on his side. He looked up and a bright tunnel of kaleidoscoping colors beamed down on him. He had never encountered the Tunnel of Light before in his trips, and had only read about it from reports of near death experiences. Uh-oh, he thought, this is The End.
From the focal point of the tunnel, a figure appeared, waddling its way toward him. As it drew closer, Skinner gazed incredulously at the animated chili pepper with red skin and a thin, oily mustache. It carried maracas and looked like the love child of Speedy Gonzalez and Frito Bandito.
Few have come the Way of the Chili Pepper, it announced, and added Now you know why!
In his death throes, Skinner laughed at himself. He was an experienced enough psychonaut to know that trips could get ridiculously goofy and took it as a sign that he had passed through a rough spot. Still, his muscles felt like like steel cables tightening and contorting his body. He gnawed on a gritty floor mat to help deal with the tightness in his mouth. When his wife Kelly Rothe came into the bedroom, she noticed his jaw clamped tight. She jammed her fingers into his mouth and worked his jaw loose, massaging the tension from the inside. As she helped him, Skinner x-ray visioned into his wife’s soul and encountered disconcerting voids—parts of her struck him as inaccessible.
Eventually, Skinner held himself together enough to walk back outside and settle in amongst the group. Just then, Savinelli took a handful of powder and threw it into the flame, sending out a large burst of light.
“I went to a whole other headspace, into my scientific, mathematical mode,” says Skinner. “That explosion of light started me thinking about photons.”
A paper about the quantum cascade laser surfaced in his mind, and with it, a moment of incredible clarity. He saw that the lasers could be taken far outside the range of their documented use, into wavelengths that could be used for optical chemistry.
“I realized I was no longer limited to that infrared spectrums,” he says. “I realized I was not stuck to their semiconductor material.”3
When chemists synthesize LSD, they create large amounts of two by-products that are essentially not active in man: iso-LSD and luma-LSD. Up until that moment, Skinner always considered those two molecules an unfortunate waste; now he saw a path to reconfigure them into active LSD through photoisomerization. Suddenly, the method snapped together in his mind. Skinner could take all that waste material and salvage it. All he needed now was a quantum cascade laser, the electrical power to operate it, an ample period of research, and any chemist who would give him the throwaway chemicals for free.
A cricket-munching carpenter, Hugo de la Llave4, sat across from Skinner in a cross-legged position with his palms pressed together as if in prayer. The two locked eyes. Skinner watched as myriad representations of de la Llave telescoped accordion-like behind him, extending out across the desert. To Skinner, de la Llave’s current incarnation was just one of thousands he recognized.
My High Lord, de la Llave telepathed5, I have built temples in all incarnations for you. Remember, High Lord, when we are tripping, we return to our eternal state. This human journey is just a momentary existence of ours. He began pointing out past-life instances throughout history where he had worked alongside Skinner.
Phonic utterances bubbled from Skinner’s lips. He began to chant and sing sounds as though he were performing a cosmic mantra.
Following the journey, de la Llave approached Skinner and they discussed their telepathic exchange. Skinner recalls de la Llave saying See, patrón, I told you I was for real.
Days later, as the revelations from the trip flashed across his mind, Skinner began to piece together a checklist for building a quantum cascade laser.
Before volunteering as a research subject in Rick Strassman’s DMT studies, Savinelli inadvertently found himself one of the early advocates for the legalization of ayahuasca. Savinelli was part of an early research excursion to the various “nucleos” of Brazil’s União do Vegetal (UDV) religion, which uses ayahuasca as its core sacrament.
Skinner explained that in his trips, Savinelli appeared as an ancient, withered medicine man with a completely different appearance. He remembers thinking why on earth would this shaman decide to incarnate in this guy?
Skinner went on to offer greater detail about what he realized in the moment: “I said to myself, ‘Ah, these guys have figured out how to do this at a much lower energy, but I can get more energy by creating a quantum well’, which is nothing but an energy potential, using a material that insulates better and aligns the electrons on a quasi-two-dimensional state instead of a three-dimensional state, and I can get higher energy potentials by altering the depth of the quantum well and the width of the quantum cascade… if I made wells that were better insulated and deeper, I could get higher-state energy photons cascading out of the electron cascade itself. I was walking around lattice structures and looking at things. It was incredible to see how all that stuff works.”
I’ve attempted to find de la Llave fruitlessly (or pepperlessly); Savinelli had heard that he had died but I could not find anything to confirm the rumor.
Skinner told me that in his early days of psychedelic experimentation with ketamine, he conducted a number of tests, none of which validated supernatural notions of telepathy. “There is a chance there is a synchronicity tree going on and people have overlapping thoughts,” Skinner commented, but dismissed any actual unspoken transmission of information. Telepathy may be an enhanced anticipation of probabilities–a subconscious function that determines what is likely to be spoken or acted.