Media Gets The Horn : New "Killer" Drug Scare Has Potential



Expect to see more headlines like that in 2009, centred around the drug DMT. It's the world's first "killer" hallucinogen, or so we will be told.

The whipped up hysteria begins here :

Police have made what is believed to be the first seizure in Western Australia of a potentially fatal hallucinogenic drug known as DMT.

Yes, it is potentially fatal. Someone will consume DMT and get behind the wheel of a car and the results will probably be tragic. If they can manage to make their legs work in order to get them to the vehicle, that is. DMT is not the kind of drug you want to take if you're planning on walking, anywhere.

Police yesterday seized two grams of the drug, known as dimethyltryptamine, and arrested three men after raiding two properties in Denmark and Walpole, in the south of the state.

Police were called into investigate after a patient was admitted to Denmark Hospital with a suspected drug overdose of the drug.

"We believe this may be the first seizure of DMT by police in WA . . . And we also believe it is the first arrest as a result of this drug," Sergeant Dave Dench told PerthNow.

"This is new (to WA). It's not new to the world. . . it's been used for 300 or 400 years overseas, but it's new to WA. We have never come across this in WA before.

"Even though we've only seized 2 grams, the fact that we've locked up three men, we believe we've put quite a dint in the potential for this drug to hit Denmark in large quantities."

The best way to ensure that there is a growing interest and demand for DMT is to have the tabloid media run 'Killer New Drug' sensations, that only make it sound more intriguing and particularly dangerous, and get out the details of how to take it :

DMT is usually smoked, sometimes by lacing cannabis with the drug, police say.

Well that's only going to go and give people ideas now, isn't it?

Like the police said, it's been around for 300 or 400 years overseas. Actually, it's more like a couple of thousand years. It's yet another naturally occurring hallucinogen that helped convince ancient man that there must be a God, or gods.

DMT is a uniquely strange hallucinogen that supposedly can produce, in pure concentrations, a 'breaking through' state where the user has hallucinations of being in an alien landscape, populated by shadowy creatures, but this hallucinated realm is very similar indeed to that experienced by most other users of the drug, even trippers back in the BC era. A set of standard hallucinations appear to imprinted in the 'memory' of the drug, or at least, we have some sort of genetic memory of this drug's effects, and how it interacts with the human mind. The research on what this all means is a bit thin right now, and the drug that will show up when the media hype really gets going will probably not be pure enough for most users to 'break through' into that other realm. But DMT is also produced naturally in the human body, and appears to influence our actual interpretation of the reality around us, and in part, how we make sense of the world.

Yeah, it's that weird.

So why have so few Australians heard of DMT that an arrest in WA of people holding 2 grams of it is "new to WA" and worthy of such a dramatic headline?

Because the thousands who are mostly likely to try it, still don't what it is. Because we haven't had DMT elevated to "Killer New Drug" status by most of the media that makes so many young people go, "Wow, so what's that drug do?"

2009 is the year all that changes.

It's not simply a case of the drug not being here because the market is not big enough to make smuggling profitable. DMT is not a foreign drug, it can be processed from plants and trees that crowd our national parks. If the mainstream media doesn't go and hysterically mine the drug and its users for stories and hype and senselessly generated controversies, and start branding it "The New Party Drug", most Australians will never hear of DMT.

The fact is if they don't know what the fuck DMT is, if they haven't had the "Danger" "Killer" drug hype stuffed into their minds, they are unlikely to even desire to try it.

But meth is so 2007. As a story, it's been well mined, worn out. A new Thing to freak out over, and to tell parents to hassle their kids about, is needed. DMT has great potential to become that new Thing.

The process of introducing and hyping the "Latest Danger Drug" is familiar and runs something like this : The new "killer drug" is named and branded after the first few arrests, a few stories show up about it being used in dance clubs, the latest "party drug" mythology is born, videos of teenagers on YouTube DMT-ing cause a little controversy, but still hardly anyone's using it yet people start hearing about DMT absolutely everywhere, have you had it? what's it like? can you get some? then a 19 year old P-plater on DMT may plough into a schoolbus, people may fall to their death trying to fly down entire staircases in one giant step, kids freaking out on the drug, excitedly trying to explain that the aliens they saw "over there" are actually the aliens who created the human race and we're still united across the galaxy, may start to show up amongst the alcoholically-binged and bloody in Friday night Casuality at city hospitals, and then utterly-enticing-to-already-troubled-youth anti-DMT 'shock' ads will begin to temptingly punctuate every TV show of minor interest to 16 year olds on every commercial and cable channel, just in time for DMT to become the New Drug Ruining Lives & Destroying Families, but by then most who tried it will have already lost interest and moved on, and the media will deliver the next "Drug Of Death", right on cue.