Montego Bay, on the northwestern edge of Jamaica, is, according to a popular tourist slogan, “the complete resort.” Snorkeling. ATV safaris. Catamaran cruises. An outpost of Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville. Golf. But I wasn’t here for any of that. I traveled to Jamaica, during a global pandemic, to experience, well, total nothingness.
I came in pursuit of the feeling of nonexistence, chemically catalyzed by a tryptamine called 5-MeO-DMT, aka 5-MeO or Five. It’s also called Toad because it occurs naturally in the pustulelike glands of Bufo alvarius, a toad native to the Sonoran Desert. Most fancifully, 5-MeO-DMT is called The God Molecule because it facilitates full-blown mystical experiences, including an alleged communion with some higher-order, divine consciousness. It is the most powerful psychedelic on the planet. (5-MeO-DMT is illegal in the US and its full effects on one’s health are not known.)
Freebased at low doses, it promises an extremely intense rejigging of waking consciousness. As the underground chemist Ken Nelson described the experience in a 1984 pamphlet: “You will be completely absorbed in a complex chemical event characterized by an overload of thoughts and perception, brief collapse of the EGO [sic], and loss of the space-time continuum.” Among users of psychedelics, this is referred to as “ego death,” which a team of researchers at the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins University say is marked by “a complete loss of subjective self-identity” and a feeling of “merging into the surrounding environment or the entire universe.” Alexander Shulgin, a chemist best known for first synthesizing MDMA, or ecstasy, described a more pointed reaction after smoking 30 milligrams of Five. “I was crawled up on my bed (in the fetal position) with my eyes closed,” he wrote, “squirming around, screaming (in my head) ‘Fuck! You killed yourself!’ I repeated this several times, very fearful of death.”
Psychedelic tourism was, at least pre-COVID, trending. Gwyneth Paltrow dispatched her staffers to a magic mushroom retreat for an episode of her Netflix series The Goop Lab. Megan Fox recently told Jimmy Kimmel about visiting a Costa Rican resort serving ayahuasca, a ceremonial brew used by pan-Amazonian Indigenous groups; Lindsay Lohan is also an evangelist. According to Cameron Wenaus, cofounder of Retreat Guru (which he describes as “an Airbnb for psychedelic, and yoga, and meditation retreats”), such vacations are becoming normalized. “I mean, heck,” Wenaus told me from his home in Nelson, British Columbia, “now you can invest in psychedelics, as these companies are growing.” Biotechnology companies are now researching and developing psychedelic pharmaceuticals, with generous estimates speculating that the psychedelic drug market could be worth $10 billion by 2027. And as Wenaus noted, several…