Tales of celebrity DMT smoking

The Stranger has an excerpt from "You'll Make Money in Your Sleep", by Emily White, the story of Dana Giacchetto, financial manager to the stars who embezzled millions and tried to flee the country incognito. Giacchetto got his leap up to the big time by helping Bruce Pavitt of SubPop cut a $20 million development deal with Warner Music Group. Included in the excerpt is the passage below about a visit to the Entheobotany conference, recounted by Pavitt's friend Rich Jensen (White's husband), who also managed to cash in on Nirvana's boom:

Around this same time, the middle of 1995, Rich and Bruce Pavitt were traveling to New York to talk to the Warner partners, and they stopped in San Francisco for a hallucinogenic conference. It was called the Entheobotany Visionary Botany Conference and it was a pseudoscientific convention for hardcore hippies, inspired by the god of mushrooms, Terence McKenna. McKenna was the author of creeds that talked about the "twilight of civilization" and the need for a rebirth of shamanism. He believed that only in an altered state could the twilight of civilization really be witnessed properly.

At the conference, drugs were abundant. Bruce and Rich bought DMT, a powdered substance that was known to insiders as the strongest hallucinogen anyone could take. When you took it, you were supposed to see the other side. Rich told me about it before he took it: "Shamans did it," he said. You were supposed to be able to see the end of the universe, little spots, something like that. It was a short, intense high, a form of flying too close to the sun, I suppose. Together, Bruce and Rich laid down in the bedroom of a friend's house and took the powder. "I saw a whole bunch of spots and I think I heard some alien voice," says Rich. "It was over in five minutes, but I will never forget it."

Ahh, 1995. I remember it like it was only twelve years ago...