THE GOD OF DMT

With just a sprinkle of the drug, anything can happen: trips to other dimensions, sex with aliens, communion with your creator. Akasha Song made it by the kilo in secret labs, sold it for millions on the dark web, and—for a while—lived a literal dream.

- BY ANDY GREENBERG

FOR TWO DAYS, AKASHA SONG had been riding in the passenger seat of a dusty Fiat truck through the desert-like shrublands of northeastern Brazil. The region, known as the caatinga, gets so hot and dry during much of the year that Brazilians sometimes call it the portaria do inferno, or “gatehouse of hell.” At the wheel was a man Akasha had met just the previous morning who spoke almost no English.

Akasha, a well-built 43-year-old American dressed in Lululemon athletic wear with a shaved head, a wild Rick Rubin-white beard, and big blue eyes, was delighted by all of it. He'd spent most of the drive listening to Phil Collins, the Brazilian singer Zeca Baleiro, or whatever else the driver—let's call him José, though that's not his real name—put on the truck's sound system. Akasha loved watching the sandy hills and towns roll by and stopping to eat at roadside restaurants. He approached all travel with a kind of childlike glee, but this trip in April of 2021 had a special purpose: Akasha believed José was taking him to a farm where he grew a tree called jurema preta, whose inner root bark is known for its high concentrations of N,N-Dimethyltryptamine, or DMT.

DMT is a powerful psychedelic compound, capable of inducing brief, mind-blowing trips to otherwise inaccessible states of consciousness, or even, some of its users believe, other planes of reality. For Akasha, the substance was both his holy sacrament and his flagship product. He had spent half a decade setting up secret labs across the western US to turn imported jurema tree bark (which is legal) into DMT (which is not). Under his secret online handle, Shimshai, he'd sold tens of millions of doses to customers on the dark web in packaging emblazoned with his logo: a human with their eyes closed in bliss and a swirl of rainbow colors flowing out of their open cranium. Now Akasha had come to Brazil to find this mind-opening drug's ultimate source.