DMT was also called “the businessman’s high,” because the drug’s effects were both short and extremely vivid. People could find a quiet place and float in the clouds during a lunch break, then come down in time for the second shift at work. During the sixties, the drug was still legal, but it was outlawed eventually and fell out of use. In the last few years, Amanda had seen its popularity increase again, and it scared her. A trip with 5-Meo-DMT (the sister drug, and up to ten times more powerful) was one of the most intense you could find, and the most frightening. Upon taking it, there was an increase in blood pressure, and then an almost immediate onset of auditory and visual hallucinations that ranged from high-pitched whines and simple designs and patterns (caused by blood vessels in the eye and movements of the muscles of the ear), to complex memory recall; hallucinations of anything and everything in the memory circuits of the brain. These images and figures were as real to the tripper as his own hands (which, incidentally, danced and sang and bled bright colors when held in front of the eyes). And the trip could turn ugly at any time. Some people never fully recovered from the memory of that.

The really interesting thing was, scientists had discovered that DMT was a naturally occurring substance in the brain. Nobody knew quite why this was so (perhaps, in moments of extreme trauma, the body decides to “trip out” instead of face reality—tests had shown that an increase of the drug was released to the brain during stressful situations), but the fact was that DMT and its naturally occurring counterpart could be the key to mental diseases. If, as so many psychologists assumed, psychotic patients had an excess of natural DMT in their cerebral fluid, might that not account for their strange behavior and delusions? Might that discovery not hold the cure for some of these patients, the answer simply to turn off this cerebral light switch?

Of course, it was not quite as simple as all that, Amanda reasoned, as she had many times before. If that turned out to be true, the question of why the excess was being produced still remained. It was a classic case of the chicken and the egg. Maybe the patients were hallucinating because of DMT, or maybe their thought processes were already screwed up in the first place, which led to increased chemical production. Or maybe the answer lay in some other part of the brain entirely, locked away until some brilliant scientist discovered it a year from now, or ten years, or fifty. Someone would find the answer, she knew—they always did, eventually.

But would they find the right one in time to help Jonathan?