Stephen Szára and DMT: the Budapest experiments of 1956 and what came after

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Before Stephen Szára, DMT was a molecule in a chemistry journal. After him, it was a known hallucinogen with a literature of its own. His story is often told in one line, and the line leaves things out: the sources disagree on where his DMT came from, and his work was not only on willing colleagues. Here is what his papers, his memoir and his obituary record, including the parts that are uncomfortable to read today.

Who was Stephen Szára?

Stephen Szára was born in 1923 and died on 1 August 2021. He earned a doctorate in science and a medical degree from the Budapest University of Medicine and set up a research laboratory in a psychiatric hospital. In the 1950s he became interested in “model psychoses”, the idea that a drug could produce a temporary, study-able state resembling mental illness, and in the role of psychedelics in psychotherapy. His obituary describes him as the first to study the psychotropic effects of DMT (Wirz-Justice, 2021). Evidence: established.

Why did Szára use DMT instead of LSD?

In the early 1950s, LSD was the drug of interest for model-psychosis research, and it came from the Swiss company Sandoz. According to his obituary, Sandoz declined to send LSD behind the Iron Curtain, arguing that such a powerful drug might be dangerous if used unscrupulously. Szára turned to DMT as an alternative molecule; the obituary says he synthesized it (Wirz-Justice, 2021). In his 2007 memoir he describes the steps that led to the discovery of its hallucinogenic effects (Szára, 2007). Evidence: established, from his own account.

Sources disagree on how Szára obtained his DMT: his 2021 obituary in Neuropsychopharmacology says he synthesized it (Wirz-Justice, 2021), while a 2018 review says he extracted it from a plant (Barker, 2018). The abstract of his own 2007 memoir does not settle the point (Szára, 2007). Either way, the molecule was not new: the Canadian chemist Richard Manske had published a synthesis of the methyltryptamines in 1931, and in 1946 Oswaldo Gonçalves de Lima reported DMT in a plant. Nobody had tested DMT in people before Szára (Barker, 2018). Evidence: established that he was first to test it in people; how he obtained it is unresolved.

Did Szára test DMT on himself first?

Szára tested DMT on himself before giving it to anyone else. The review literature records that he administered it to himself by intramuscular injection, the route used in his early studies (Barker, 2018), and Rick Strassman’s summary of the history puts it simply: Szára injected DMT into himself and his physician colleagues in his Budapest laboratory (Strassman, chapter summaries). His first paper, published in Experientia in November 1956, connected DMT’s “psychotic effect” to serotonin metabolism in its title (Szára, 1956). Evidence: established.

Self-experimentation was a long tradition in pharmacology and was common in early psychedelic research. Its logic was that a researcher who had felt a drug could judge it, and should not ask others to take a risk they had not taken. Its limits are just as clear: one person, no blinding, and an experimenter who knows exactly what to expect. Evidence: this is context, not a finding.

Who took part in the Budapest volunteer studies?

After his own trial, Szára recruited 30 volunteers, mostly young physician colleagues (Wirz-Justice, 2021). The Budapest group published in quick succession: a 1957 Hungarian report titled “Dimethyltryptamine as a new psychotic agent” (Szára et al., 1957), a 1958 paper in a Swiss psychiatry journal describing DMT as a new psychoactive drug (Sai-Halász et al., 1958), and a 1959 study of the brain-wave (EEG) changes DMT caused in normal adults (Kajtor and Szára, 1959). We checked these as records; their full texts are not online. Evidence: established for the publications; their detailed findings are not described here.

Szára’s attitude to what volunteers reported is recorded in his own words. When experiences such as God or strange creatures appeared, he said, he and his colleagues did not philosophize about them but “simply classified them as hallucinations” (Wirz-Justice, 2021). That contrasts with how similar reports were framed four decades later in Rick Strassman’s book; see Rick Strassman’s DMT study. Evidence: a subjective report of his own approach.

Did Szára give DMT to psychiatric patients?

The Budapest work did not stop with healthy colleagues. In 1958, Zoltán Böszörményi and Szára published “Dimethyltryptamine Experiments with Psychotics” in the Journal of Mental Science (Böszörményi and Szára, 1958). The paper opens by placing itself in the then-fashionable field of experimental psychoses, and describes the hope of producing “miniature psychoses” with substances foreign to the body. In other words, the patients were given a drug believed to produce psychosis-like states. Evidence: established for the publication and its framing; we read its record and opening, not the full paper.

This needs to be read in its time and judged by ours. The World Medical Association’s Declaration of Helsinki, the main international code for research on people, was first adopted in June 1964, years after these studies (WMA, Declaration of Helsinki). Evidence: established.

Today the Declaration states that free and informed consent is an essential part of respecting individual autonomy, and that participation by people capable of consent must be voluntary (WMA, Declaration of Helsinki). We do not know from the sources we read how consent was handled in Budapest, or whether the patients could meaningfully give it. Giving a psychosis-mimicking drug to people already in psychiatric care, for research rather than treatment, would not be approved by an ethics board today. Evidence: unresolved for how consent was obtained.

How did Szára leave Hungary in 1956?

Three weeks after the Hungarian uprising of 1956, Szára left the country illegally. His obituary quotes his own list of what he carried: a change of clothes, sandwiches, his two doctoral diplomas, test tubes of DMT and two dictionaries. After time in refugee camps, he traded some DMT with professors at the University of Vienna clinic for a chance to take part in their LSD study, worked as a guest researcher at the Free University of Berlin, and attended the first international congress on psychotropic drugs in Milan in May 1957 (Wirz-Justice, 2021). Evidence: established, from his own account as quoted in the obituary.

What did Szára do in the United States?

Later in 1957 Szára joined the US National Institute of Mental Health, working at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, and then studied the metabolism of DMT and related compounds in healthy and schizophrenic volunteers in the laboratory of Julius Axelrod (Wirz-Justice, 2021). A 1959 paper with Axelrod describes two ways the body transforms DMT, hydroxylation and N-demethylation (Szára and Axelrod, 1959). That work fed the transmethylation era, when researchers searched for a body-made hallucinogen behind schizophrenia; more than 60 studies later, no clear, repeatable link had been found (Barker, 2018). Evidence: established.

He kept working on tryptamines and on the conditions around a drug experience. In 1966 his group published on the psychological effects and metabolism of DET, a close relative of DMT, in people (Szára et al., 1966). In 1967 he wrote “The hallucinogenic drugs: curse or blessing?” for the American Journal of Psychiatry (Szára, 1967), and in 1968 he co-wrote a paper on how mental set and setting influence hallucinogenic drug effects (Faillace and Szára, 1968). Evidence: established for the publications, checked as records.

His career then moved into research administration. In 1968 he became Chief of Clinical Studies at the Center for Studies of Narcotics and Drug Abuse, conducting research on cannabis and THC, and was asked to report on the hippie scenes of San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York. When the National Institute on Drug Abuse was created in 1974, he became Chief of its Biomedical Branch in the Division of Preclinical Research (Wirz-Justice, 2021). The man who first described DMT’s effects spent decades inside the US federal system that regulated it. Evidence: established.

What Szára came to think about DMT

Fifty years on, Szára wrote that DMT had a difficult first half-century in medical research, primarily for legal reasons, because authorities in the US and the World Health Organization classified it as a drug of abuse. It had not proved to be a “schizotoxin”, as he first suspected, but he thought the question of a higher-level role as a natural neuromodulator was still open, and that further clinical work might show a use as an adjunct to psychotherapy, perhaps in modified form (Szára, 2007). Evidence: these are his views; whether DMT has a role in the human body is unresolved.

Late in life he also offered a theory of how DMT works: that it might slow down reality testing and let the brain’s default mode network release stored images into perception, so that “it is the brain” that stores and releases the archetypal images people report (Wirz-Justice, 2021). That is a hypothesis in his own words, not a tested finding. For what imaging studies have since reported, see DMT and the default mode network. Evidence: unresolved.

Why Szára matters to DMT’s history

• He turned DMT from a chemistry-journal compound into a known hallucinogen, with the first report of its effects in people (established).
• He set the pattern of fast, short-acting effects that later researchers, including Rick Strassman in the 1990s, measured more precisely (established; see Rick Strassman’s DMT study).
• His work, and his patient experiments, belong to a 1950s research culture with weaker protections than today’s (established).
• He moved from discovery to regulation, spending decades in US federal drug-research leadership (established).

For how his work fits the longer story, from Andean archaeology to today’s clinical trials, see the history of DMT. Evidence: see that article’s sources.

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