From Afru:

Psychedelic privilege: are DMT entities racist?

DMT users often come across strange beings called machine elves, dispensing advice and adventure. They were thought to be benevolent—but we can no longer ignore the Black DMT experience.

BY AFRU MAGAZINE

… But there’s one drug that’s unquestionably and uniquely shrouded in whiteness — a “white drug,” if you will. We’re not talking about cocaine: it’s DMT.

Everywhere you look, you can find the whitest cishet men singing the praises of DMT or related psychedelics, from Joe Rogan to Post Malone. …

You see, DMT may be shrouded in whiteness nowadays, but like everything else that you think is white, the drug actually has Latinx origins. … To understand the Latinx history of DMT, you first need to understand ayahuasca. …

For some reason, Black folks around the world have experienced a similar racist phenomenon when taking DMT. …

One common phenomenon across DMT experiences, or “trips,” is coming across DMT entities called machine elves. There are walking, talking creatures that one encounters when taking DMT.

The term machine elf was coined by ethnobotanist Terence McKenna for the entities he encountered in DMT “hyperspace”, also using terms like fractal elves, or self-transforming machine elves, McKenna first encountered the “machine elves” after smoking DMT in Berkeley in 1965.

Sometimes the creatures are friendly and reveal deeper truths about the universe, or they might even take your hand and bring you on a journey.

But unfortunately, that’s not the experience many Black folks have reported. Black folks can’t even escape the scourge of systemic racism in the DMT realm. …

The most chilling experience reported so far invokes the powerful imagery of the slain Emmet Till. “I was surrounded by the elves, and they all started chanting ‘Emmett Till,’” the trip report began. “I later learned that Emmett Till was a Black man accused of harassing a white girl in the 1950s. I had never heard of this story before, being a Black man who grew up in a white school district. Then, the elves started to rush me and they all picked me up and started chanting the n-word while carrying me. The elves threw me down a black hole and I continued to fall for around 10 minutes until my trip ended.”