People think I'm a freemason, and I'm not. People think I believe the end of the world is coming on 21 December 2012, and I don't.

Science has often resisted new ideas and fought bitterly to prevent them coming on board.

Our society values alert, problem-solving consciousness, and it devalues all other states of consciousness. Any kind of consciousness that is not related to the production or consumption of material goods is stigmatized in our society today. Of course we accept drunkenness. We allow people some brief respite from the material grind. A society that subscribes to that model is a society that is going to condemn the states of consciousness that have nothing to do with the alert problem-solving mentality.

I see myself as a journalist reporting neglected stories about our past and trying to bring rigor, reason and intuition to the quest.

Just plain logic says that the war on drugs does not work. It absolutely does not work. We have this highly addictive legal drug called tobacco which has never resulted in people being sent to prison, but there has been a massive reduction in its consumption simply because responsible adults looking at their own bodies have said they don't want to do that to themselves.

It may be that DMT makes us able to perceive what the physicist call "dark matter" - the 95 per cent of the universe's mass that is known to exist but that at present remains invisible to our senses and instruments.

People think I'm a freemason, and I'm not. People think I believe the end of the world is coming on 21 December 2012, and I don't.