The Epic Rise and Fall of a Dark-Web Psychedelics Kingpin
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.
两天来，阿卡莎·宋一直坐在一辆满是灰尘的菲亚特卡车的副驾驶座上，穿过巴西东北部沙漠般的灌木丛。
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.
该地区被称为卡廷加，一年中的大部分时间都非常炎热和干燥，巴西人有时称其为“地狱门”或“地狱门楼”。开车的是阿卡莎前一天早上刚认识的一个人，他几乎不会说英语。
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.
阿卡莎 (Akasha) 是一位身材健美的 43 岁美国人，穿着 Lululemon 运动服，剃着光头，留着狂野的里克·鲁宾 (Rick Rubin) 式白胡子，一双蓝色的大眼睛，她对这一切感到非常高兴。
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.
开车的大部分时间里，他都在听菲尔·柯林斯 (Phil Collins)、巴西歌手泽卡·巴莱罗 (Zeca Baleiro) 的音乐，或者司机（让我们叫他何塞，尽管这不是他的真名）安装在卡车音响系统上的其他任何东西。
Akasha loved watching the sandy hills and towns roll by and stopping to eat at roadside restaurants.
阿卡莎喜欢看着绵延不绝的沙丘和城镇，也喜欢停下来在路边的餐馆吃饭。
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.
他带着一种孩子般的欢乐对待所有旅行，但 2021 年 4 月的这次旅行有一个特殊目的：阿卡莎相信何塞要带他去一个农场，在那里他种植了一棵名为 jurema preta 的树，这棵树的内根皮因其高浓度的 N,N-二甲基色胺（DMT）而闻名。
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.
DMT 是一种强大的迷幻化合物，能够引发短暂的、令人兴奋的旅行，进入其他无法进入的意识状态，甚至，它的一些使用者认为，进入其他现实层面。
For Akasha, the substance was both his holy sacrament and his flagship product.
对于阿卡莎来说，这种物质既是他的圣礼，也是他的旗舰产品。
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).
他花了五年时间在美国西部建立了秘密实验室，将进口的 Jurema 树皮（合法）转化为 DMT（非法）。
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.
在他的秘密网络账号“Shimshai”下，他在暗网上向顾客出售了数千万剂疫苗，包装上印有他的标志：一个人幸福地闭着眼睛，一圈彩虹色的漩涡从他们敞开的头盖骨中流出。
Now Akasha had come to Brazil to find this mind-opening drug’s ultimate source.
现在，阿卡莎来到巴西寻找这种令人大开眼界的药物的最终来源。
As the two men drove on, the landscape slowly changed from desert to subtropical forest.
两人一路前行，景色慢慢从沙漠变成了亚热带森林。
Late in the afternoon, José finally pulled over.
下午晚些时候，何塞终于把车停在了路边。
He announced that they had arrived.
他宣布他们已经到达。
The two men got out of the truck, and Akasha followed José off the road, over a wire fence, and into the woods.
两人下了卡车，阿卡莎跟着何塞下了马路，越过铁丝网，走进了树林。
José stopped and gestured.
何塞停下来，做了个手势。
“Jurema,” he said.
“尤雷马，”他说。
Akasha, confused, asked José which tree he meant.
阿卡莎很困惑，问何塞他指的是哪棵树。
Where was the farm they had driven 14 hours to reach?
他们开车14个小时到达的农场在哪里？
Only then did Akasha realize: Every single one of the trees that filled the endless wild forest around him—with their short, gnarled trunks and fernlike leaves—held his key ingredient.
直到那时，阿卡莎才意识到：他周围无边无际的野生森林中的每一棵树——它们短而多节的树干和蕨类植物的叶子——都含有他的关键成分。
From every pound of bark, his labs could produce hundreds of doses of DMT.
他的实验室可以从每一磅树皮中生产出数百剂 DMT。
The inner root bark of jurema preta trees contains especially high concentrations of DMT.
jurema preta 树的内根皮含有特别高浓度的 DMT。
In that moment, Akasha says, he felt like he had just become the Pablo Escobar of psychedelics.
阿卡莎说，在那一刻，他感觉自己刚刚成为迷幻药界的巴勃罗·埃斯科巴。
“Holy shit,” he thought.
“天哪，”他想。
“That is a lot of DMT.”
“这是大量的 DMT。”
Today, thinking back to that turning point in his rise and fall as a hallucinogens kingpin, Akasha wishes he could say that he saw in that Brazilian forest the potential to heal the trauma of entire human populations or build a network of psychic touchpoints with other dimensions.
今天，回想起他作为致幻剂头目的兴衰转折点，阿卡莎希望他能说，他在巴西森林中看到了治愈整个人类创伤或与其他维度建立心灵接触点网络的潜力。
The first time you smoke, vape, or intravenously inject a few dozen milligrams of DMT—sometimes called “dreams,” “deems,” or “spice” (yes, that’s a Dune reference)—you can expect the next few minutes of your life to be unlike any you have experienced.
当你第一次吸烟、电子烟或静脉注射几十毫克 DMT（有时被称为“梦想”、“认为”或“香料”（是的，这是沙丘参考））时，你可以预期你生命中接下来的几分钟将与你经历过的任何一次都不一样。
In his book The Spirit Molecule , about the first modern study that administered DMT to humans, the psychiatrist Rick Strassman uses a TV metaphor to distinguish the drug’s effects from those of other psychoactive substances.
精神科医生里克·斯特拉斯曼（Rick Strassman）在他的著作《精神分子》（The Spirit Molecule）中讲述了第一个对人类进行 DMT 的现代研究，他使用电视隐喻来区分该药物的作用与其他精神活性物质的作用。
“Rather than merely adjusting the brightness, contrast, and color of the previous program,” he writes, “we have changed the channel.”
“我们不仅仅是调整前一个节目的亮度、对比度和颜色，”他写道，“我们还改变了频道。”
In online forum dispatches and descriptions to medical researchers, DMT users describe three fundamental levels of trip, depending on the size of your dose and how completely your mind is prepared to embrace its effects.
在在线论坛向医学研究人员发送的信息和描述中，DMT 用户描述了旅行的三个基本级别，具体取决于您的剂量大小以及您的大脑准备接受其影响的程度。
First comes what some DMT adherents call the “waiting room”: A wall of interlacing fractal images fills your vision, even when you close your eyes.
首先是一些 DMT 追随者所说的“等候室”：一堵交错的分形图像墙充满了你的视野，即使你闭上眼睛也是如此。
You may hear things that aren’t there or be filled with inexplicable euphoria or fear.
你可能会听到一些不存在的东西，或者充满莫名的欣喜或恐惧。
At the next level, this geometry folds out into three-dimensional space, and you might find yourself transported to the moon, a castle, a beach, inside a pyramid, or into a pulsating Russian bathhouse roughly the size of a womb, to name a few examples.
在下一个层次，这种几何形状折叠成三维空间，你可能会发现自己被传送到月球、城堡、海滩、金字塔内，或者进入一个大约子宫大小的脉动的俄罗斯浴室，仅举几个例子。
You may “be” in this place and in your physical location at the same time, or inhabit this new destination so fully that you leave your body behind altogether.
你可能同时“在”这个地方和你的物理位置，或者完全居住在这个新的目的地，以至于你完全把你的身体抛在了后面。
In this other place—which many DMT users describe as another dimension—you’re likely to encounter “entities.” Elves, insectoids, reptilians, aliens, gods, and clowns are all common.
在另一个地方——许多 DMT 用户将其描述为另一个维度——你可能会遇到“实体”。精灵、类昆虫、爬行动物、外星人、神和小丑都很常见。
One DMT test subject reported being attended to by a hyperintelligent 3-foot-tall Gumby.
一名 DMT 测试对象报告说，他受到了一位 3 英尺高的超聪明的冈比的照顾。
These beings may shun you, communicate with you, eviscerate and eat you, perform live surgical experiments on you, envelop you in love and sexual pleasure, or any combination of the above.
这些生物可能会避开你，与你交流，取出内脏并吃掉你，对你进行现场外科实验，让你陷入爱和性快感，或者以上的任何组合。
DMT web forums are filled with debates about whether these entities are mere mental representations or objectively exist as nonhuman life forms.
DMT 网络论坛充满了关于这些实体是否仅仅是心理表征或作为非人类生命形式客观存在的争论。
At least one Reddit thread raises the question of whether having sex with entities counts as cheating on one’s partner.
至少有一个 Reddit 帖子提出了这样的问题：与实体发生性关系是否算作对伴侣的欺骗。
(Another Reddit post complains that the entities won’t stop masturbating while the user is trying to have a conversation with God.)
（另一篇 Reddit 帖子抱怨说，当用户试图与上帝对话时，这些实体不会停止自慰。）
At the third, rarer level of trip, DMT psychonauts describe transcendent conditions like oneness with the universe, becoming God, embracing death, or an infinite void.
在第三个、更罕见的旅行层次上，DMT 精神飞行员描述了超然的条件，比如与宇宙合一、成为上帝、拥抱死亡或无限的虚空。
In some cases, people report passing entire lifetimes in these other realms or states of being.
在某些情况下，人们报告说他们一生都在这些其他领域或存在状态中度过。
Back here on Earth, though, it’s all over in less than 20 minutes.
然而回到地球后，不到 20 分钟一切就结束了。
Some DMT fans call it “the businessman’s trip,” because the drug’s most dramatic psychedelic effects fit easily within a lunch break.
一些 DMT 粉丝将其称为“商人之旅”，因为这种药物最戏剧性的迷幻效果很容易在午休时间发挥出来。
DMT is in fact the active ingredient in ayahuasca, the better-known psychoactive brew used in South American spiritual ceremonies, whose effects last as long as eight hours.
事实上，DMT 是死藤水的活性成分，死藤水是南美精神仪式中使用的一种更为著名的精神活性饮料，其效果可持续长达八小时。
Without the compounds in ayahuasca that slow the breakdown of DMT in your body—or the ones that notoriously make ayahuasca drinkers vomit—the substance flashes through the brain at turbo speed.
死藤水中没有减缓体内 DMT 分解的化合物，也没有那些臭名昭著的导致死藤水饮用者呕吐的化合物，这种物质会以极快的速度穿过大脑。
In spite of that brevity, some preliminary research suggests DMT can have long-lasting psychological and even therapeutic effects.
尽管时间很短，但一些初步研究表明 DMT 可以产生持久的心理甚至治疗效果。
While some medical experts warn that DMT can exacerbate certain mental health conditions, one 25-person drug company study from 2022 showed that 40 percent of clinically depressed test subjects given DMT were fully in remission six months after one or two doses.
尽管一些医学专家警告称，DMT 可能会加剧某些心理健康状况，但 2022 年一项 25 人参与的制药公司研究显示，接受 DMT 治疗的临床抑郁症受试者中，40% 在服用一两次 DMT 后六个月内完全得到缓解。
And though some users report terrifying, even traumatizing experiences, others say their quick, ultra-intense trips help them reconsider emotional problems, work through past trauma, or experience glimpses of the divine or moments of self-annihilation that reduce their fear of death.
尽管一些用户报告了可怕的、甚至是创伤性的经历，但另一些用户则表示，快速、超强度的旅行有助于他们重新考虑情感问题，克服过去的创伤，或者体验神灵的一瞥或自我毁灭的时刻，从而减少他们对死亡的恐惧。
For all those otherworldly effects, finding DMT in the everyday world is surprisingly easy.
尽管有这些超凡脱俗的影响，但在日常生活中找到 DMT 却出奇地容易。
It exists in small quantities in every human nervous system, where its purpose isn’t fully understood.
它少量存在于每个人类神经系统中，其用途尚不完全清楚。
(Some studies suggest it may play a role in dreaming.) It grows naturally not just in jurema preta, the organism from which it’s most easily extracted, but also in plenty of other species, from the leaves of citrus plants to the internal organs of rabbits.
（一些研究表明它可能在梦中发挥作用。）它不仅在最容易提取的有机体 jurema preta 中自然生长，而且在许多其他物种中自然生长，从柑橘类植物的叶子到兔子的内脏。
One of the most psychoactive substances humans have ever ingested, in other words, is already everywhere around and inside us.
换句话说，人类摄入的最具精神活性的物质之一已经遍布在我们周围和体内。
All it takes to unlock DMT’s full, transcendental potential is someone willing to carry out a simple chemical extraction—and violate Title 21, section 841 of the US legal code.
要释放 DMT 的全部超凡潜力，只需有人愿意进行简单的化学提取，并违反美国法典第 21 章第 841 条。
For about seven years, for a very large number of Americans, that someone was Shimshai.
大约七年来，对于很多美国人来说，这个人就是 Shimshai。
To his friends, he was Akasha Song.
对于他的朋友来说，他就是阿卡莎·宋。
To the federal agents hunting him, he was ultimately better known by his legal name, Joseph Clements.
对于追捕他的联邦特工来说，他最终更广为人知的是他的法定名字约瑟夫·克莱门茨。
Of his first time smoking DMT, Akasha Song says, “I can just remember falling in love immediately.”
当谈到第一次吸食 DMT 时，阿卡莎·宋 (Akasha Song) 说道：“我只记得立刻坠入爱河。”
Before Akasha Song discovered DMT, Joseph Clements discovered LSD.
在阿卡莎·宋 (Akasha Song) 发现 DMT 之前，约瑟夫·克莱门茨 (Joseph Clements) 发现了 LSD。
In 1992, when he was 14, a friend gave him a tab of acid at their high school near Houston, Texas.
1992 年，他 14 岁，在德克萨斯州休斯顿附近的高中，一位朋友给了他一片迷幻药。
He took it, went home, and had the most profound conversation of his life to that point with his father, who he says somehow didn’t detect that his teenage son was on drugs .
他接过它，回家了，并与他的父亲进行了一生中最深刻的对话，他说他的父亲不知何故没有发现他十几岁的儿子正在吸毒。
“Who am I?
“我是谁？
Why am I here?” he remembers asking his dad and himself.
我为什么在这里？他记得问过他的父亲和他自己。
“It was the first time these fundamental questions had ever hit me.”
“这是我第一次遇到这些基本问题。”
For much of the rest of his teens, Clements would drop acid about once a month.
在他十几岁的其余时间里，克莱门茨大约每月一次滴酸。
He’d go out with his friends, talk, listen to music, and watch them get drunk.
他会和朋友出去聊天、听音乐，看着他们喝醉。
Often he was the only one tripping.
通常他是唯一一个绊倒的人。
He loved the depth—the sense of telepathy, even—that LSD brought to his otherwise mundane teen social life.
他喜欢LSD给他原本平凡的青少年社交生活带来的深度，甚至是心灵感应的感觉。
“All that square, normal stuff, I would do that on acid,” he says.
“所有那些方形的、普通的东西，我都会用酸来做，”他说。
“And I did that just my whole damn childhood.” He kept a small, blank business card and drew a mark on it every time he tripped.
“我整个该死的童年都是这么做的。”他保留了一张空白的小名片，每次绊倒时都会在上面做一个记号。
By the time he lost the card, he says, it was full on both sides.
他说，当他丢失卡片时，卡片两面都满了。
If not for acid, Clements would have had a typical Texas upbringing.
如果没有迷幻药，克莱门茨可能会在典型的德克萨斯州长大。
He loved BMX biking and going to church.
他喜欢骑小轮车和去教堂。
He was named after his father, Joseph Carmichael Clements, who had been an engineer at Texas Instruments and was a Catholic.
他以父亲约瑟夫·卡迈克尔·克莱门茨 (Joseph Carmichael Clements) 的名字命名，父亲约瑟夫·卡迈克尔·克莱门茨 (Joseph Carmichael Clements) 曾是德州仪器 (TI) 的工程师，也是一名天主教徒。
His mother, who worked in the oil and gas industry, was a Baptist.
他的母亲在石油和天然气行业工作，是一名浸信会教徒。
They divorced when he was 6.
他们在他六岁时离婚。
He went to Sunday services at both churches and joined Methodist and Lutheran youth groups, too.
他去两个教堂参加周日礼拜，还加入了卫理公会和路德教会的青年团体。
He thought, from his limited view of the world, that he was exploring the full multiplicity of religious experience.
他认为，从他有限的世界观来看，他正在探索宗教体验的全部多样性。
Around 10th grade, Clements stopped caring about school.
十年级左右，克莱门茨不再关心学校。
He was also diagnosed with ADHD before anyone else he knew.
他还比他认识的任何人都被诊断出患有多动症。
When he got in trouble for disrupting class or ignoring his homework assignments, his father would unfailingly defend him, often blaming his disorder.
当他因扰乱课堂或忽视家庭作业而惹上麻烦时，他的父亲会毫不犹豫地为他辩护，并经常指责他的精神错乱。
Eventually, Clements remembers, the school’s teachers and administrators were so scared of his father’s interventions that he felt almost immune from consequences—a sense of invincibility that would stay with him, to some degree, for the rest of his life.
克莱门茨回忆道，最终，学校的老师和管理人员非常害怕他父亲的干预，以至于他觉得几乎不受后果影响——一种无敌的感觉在某种程度上将伴随他一生。
Indeed, it stuck with Clements even as the years that followed became far more difficult.
事实上，尽管接下来的几年变得更加困难，但克莱门茨仍然坚持着这一点。
In his late teens, he says, he began to realize that his father had sexually abused him when he was younger.
他说，在他十几岁的时候，他开始意识到他的父亲在他年轻时对他进行了性虐待。
The memories had always been there, he says, but he had never allowed himself to confront the resentment he felt.
他说，记忆一直都在那里，但他从未允许自己面对自己所感受到的怨恨。
He broke ties with his dad, choosing to live with his mother instead, and wouldn’t speak with his father again until the elder Joseph Clements was dying of liver failure decades later.
他与父亲断绝关系，选择与母亲住在一起，直到几十年后老约瑟夫·克莱门茨因肝功能衰竭去世为止，他才再次与父亲交谈。
After high school, he found a job in a restaurant and got married to a woman working as a waitress there, and they had a son.
高中毕业后，他在一家餐馆找到了一份工作，并与一名在那里做服务员的女子结婚，并育有一子。
Soon, he says, he discovered that his wife was addicted to opioids and was selling their belongings to pay for her habit.
他说，很快，他发现他的妻子对阿片类药物上瘾，并且正在卖掉他们的物品来支付她的习惯。
They split up.
他们分手了。
A natural salesman with “the gift of gab,” as his mother puts it, Clements found work selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door, building websites, and making deals for billboard advertising in malls.
正如他母亲所说，克莱门茨是一位天生的推销员，拥有“能说会道的天赋”，他找到了挨家挨户推销吸尘器、建立网站以及为商场广告牌做广告的工作。
He was also charged with multiple incidents of marijuana possession and two DUIs, one of which happened while he was on probation, leading to a six-month sentence in prison.
他还被指控多次持有大麻和两次酒后驾车，其中一次发生在缓刑期间，导致他被判入狱六个月。
While he was there, his estranged wife died of a drug overdose.
当他在那里时，他分居的妻子因吸毒过量而死亡。
Their son, 6 years old at the time, was the one who found her body.
他们的儿子当时 6 岁，是发现她尸体的人。
Clements moved on and straightened out his life.
克莱门茨继续前进并理顺了他的生活。
His son, who had been living with relatives until he was out of prison, moved back in with him.
他的儿子在他出狱之前一直和亲戚住在一起，现在又搬回来和他住在一起。
He remarried, had a daughter, and stopped using drugs other than marijuana, which he and his second wife were careful to budget for.
他再婚，生了一个女儿，并停止使用大麻以外的药物，他和他的第二任妻子小心翼翼地为大麻做好预算。
He built a successful career running marketing for multiple local businesses, or in some cases consulting for entrepreneurs.
他为多家当地企业经营营销，有时还为企业家提供咨询服务，建立了成功的职业生涯。
He preached Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad, Poor Dad wealth gospel, which involves creating businesses that run themselves to attain financial independence.
他宣扬罗伯特·清崎的《富爸爸，穷爸爸》财富福音，其中涉及创建自行经营的企业以实现财务独立。
He settled into the mainstream Texas culture of, as he describes it, “drinking and getting fat and working and cussing.”
他融入了德克萨斯州的主流文化，正如他所描述的那样，“喝酒、发胖、工作、咒骂”。
Then on New Year’s Eve of 2012, when he was 34, Clements went to a concert by the String Cheese Incident, and his life truly began.
然后在2012年的除夕夜，34岁的克莱门茨去听了奶酪串事件的一场音乐会，他的人生才真正开始。
That night, at a performance by the jam band that one of his wife’s friends had invited him to attend near Denver, Colorado, Clements dropped acid for the first time in well over a decade.
那天晚上，在他妻子的一位朋友邀请他参加科罗拉多州丹佛附近的即兴乐队表演时，克莱门茨十多年来第一次喝下了迷幻药。
He found himself in a crowd of thousands of like-minded people of all ages, dancing, wearing strange clothes, looking beautiful, singing, several of them twirling balls of fire, many also clearly tripping.
他发现自己置身于数千个不同年龄段、志同道合的人群中，他们跳舞，穿着奇怪的衣服，看起来很漂亮，唱歌，其中有几个人旋转着火球，许多人显然还绊倒了。
He immediately felt that these were “my people”—that he had found the community he had been seeking since his first hit of LSD 20 years earlier.
他立刻觉得这些人就是“我的人”——自 20 年前第一次吸食 LSD 以来，他找到了自己一直在寻找的社区。
His life back in Texas seemed tragically empty by comparison.
相比之下，他在德克萨斯州的生活显得悲惨地空虚。
When he got home to Houston, he told his wife he wanted to quit his job, sell everything they owned, and move to Colorado.
当他回到休斯敦的家中时，他告诉妻子他想辞掉工作，卖掉他们拥有的一切，搬到科罗拉多州。
She responded to this apparent midlife crisis by leaving him and taking their daughter.
为了应对这种明显的中年危机，她离开了他并带走了他们的女儿。
He would fight for custody, unsuccessfully, for years to come.
在接下来的几年里，他一直在争取监护权，但没有成功。
Clements grieved the breakdown of his family.
克莱门茨对家庭的破裂感到悲痛。
But his String Cheese Incident rebirth was not a passing whim.
但他的“奶酪串事件”重生并不是一时兴起。
He began to prepare to move to Colorado with his son and to seek out a similar community—hippies, for lack of a better term—in Houston.
他开始准备带着儿子搬到科罗拉多州，并在休斯顿寻找一个类似的社区——嬉皮士，因为没有更好的术语了。
He walked away from his career and began traveling nonstop to music festivals from Michigan to Costa Rica, occasionally with his son in tow, taking LSD, mushrooms, and any other psychedelic on offer.
他放弃了自己的职业生涯，开始不停地前往从密歇根到哥斯达黎加的音乐节，偶尔还带着儿子，吸食LSD、蘑菇和其他迷幻药物。
As Clements reinvented himself, he says he could no longer stand to share his father’s name.
当克莱门茨重塑自己时，他说他再也无法忍受与父亲同姓。
So he picked a new one, inspired by the Akashic records, a supposed ethereal compendium of all life experiences, past and present, that clairvoyants in 19th-century Europe said they could tap into.
因此，他受到阿卡西记录的启发，选择了一个新的记录，这是一本被认为是过去和现在所有生活经历的空灵概要，19世纪欧洲的透视者说他们可以利用它。
It was also around this time that Akasha Song discovered DMT.
也正是在这个时候，Akasha Song 发现了 DMT。
A friend from the festival scene gave him a small capsule of what he called “dreams.” Akasha looked up the drug online and read that a single dose was equivalent to 300 hits of acid—an exaggeration, but one that got his attention.
一位来自节日现场的朋友给了他一个小胶囊，里面装着他所谓的“梦想”。阿卡莎在网上查到了这种药物，发现一剂相当于注射 300 次酸——虽然有些夸张，但引起了他的注意。
Sitting on the floor of his home in Houston one evening, Akasha placed a pinch of the pale yellow crystals, which gave off a kind of perfumed new-shoe smell, onto the ash left behind in his weed pipe.
一天晚上，阿卡莎坐在休斯敦家中的地板上，将一小撮淡黄色晶体放在他的烟斗里留下的灰烬上，这种晶体散发出一种新鞋的香味。
He lit it and took his first hit.
他点燃了它并受到了第一击。
Akasha’s vision dissolved into “platonic shapes,” as he puts it, the geometric waiting room that initially beckons to DMT users.
正如阿卡莎所说，他的愿景融入了“柏拉图式的形状”，即最初吸引 DMT 用户的几何候诊室。
That was the extent of his first trip.
这就是他第一次旅行的范围。
As alien as DMT’s effects were, he says he felt like he was entering a comfortable, natural mental state, exactly where he was supposed to be.
尽管 DMT 的效果很奇怪，但他说他感觉自己正在进入一种舒适、自然的精神状态，正是他应该处于的状态。
“I just remember falling in love immediately,” he says.
“我只记得立刻坠入爱河，”他说。
Over the next months, Akasha smoked DMT dozens of times.
在接下来的几个月里，阿卡莎吸食了数十次 DMT。
Describing the details of those escalating trips, for Akasha, is difficult.
对于阿卡莎来说，描述这些不断升级的旅行的细节是很困难的。
As its nickname suggests, DMT’s effects are a bit like a dream: As vivid as its reality feels in the moment, for many users its sensations fade upon returning to the material world.
正如它的绰号所暗示的，DMT 的效果有点像一场梦：尽管它的现实感觉很生动，但对于许多用户来说，当回到物质世界时，它的感觉就会消失。
But he retains a strong memory of one DMT journey in particular, the one he considers the pinnacle of all his psychedelic travels.
但他对其中一次 DMT 之旅记忆犹新，他认为那次旅程是他所有迷幻之旅的巅峰之作。
That one climactic trip, Akasha says, began with a feeling that he had fallen and hit his head.
阿卡莎说，那次旅行的高潮是从他摔倒并撞到头的感觉开始的。
When he came to, he was lying on his back in an endless void and seven humanoids made of light were gathered around him.
当他回过神来的时候，他仰面躺在无尽的虚空中，七个光之人形聚集在他的周围。
He realized, as he looked up at them, that they were somehow everyone he had ever known.
当他抬头看着他们时，他意识到他们是他所认识的每个人。
One of them lifted him into a sitting position and gestured out at the void, which Akasha now saw was filled with infinite other groups of light-entities encircling infinite other people, each of them either waking or falling asleep.
其中一个把他扶起来，对着虚空做了个手势，阿卡莎现在看到虚空里充满了无数的其他光实体群，包围着无数的其他人，每个人要么醒着，要么睡着了。
The differences in their states of awareness created a sine wave that Akasha could feel stretching out trillions of miles.
他们意识状态的差异产生了一种正弦波，阿卡莎可以感觉到它延伸了数万亿英里。
The exclamations of those waking up combined into a resonant “music of epiphany,” as Akasha heard it.
正如阿卡莎所听到的，那些醒来的人的惊呼声组合成一首响亮的“顿悟音乐”。
At that point, Akasha says, he began to understand that his physical life on Earth was a dream and that it was fading.
阿卡莎说，从那时起，他开始明白，他在地球上的物质生活只是一场梦，而且它正在消失。
He felt a pang of sadness that he would soon forget his mother, his children, and everyone he had ever loved.
他感到一阵悲伤，因为他很快就会忘记他的母亲、他的孩子以及他曾经爱过的每一个人。
The entities seemed to sense his wish to keep dreaming.
这些实体似乎感觉到了他继续做梦的愿望。
They laid him back down and, as the trip subsided, he returned to his body.
他们把他放回床上，随着旅程的平息，他又回到了自己的身体。
For days afterward, Akasha was reluctant to speak to anyone, still convinced that the people around him were characters being performed by the entities he had met—that he’d seen the reality underlying human experience and his entire waking life was a dream.
此后的几天里，阿卡莎不愿与任何人说话，仍然坚信他周围的人是他所遇到的实体所扮演的角色——他看到了人类经验背后的现实，而他的整个清醒生活都是一场梦。
On some level, he says, he has never stopped believing it.
他说，在某种程度上，他从未停止相信这一点。
Akasha had heard that it was possible—relatively easy, even—to make DMT, a notion that struck him as almost miraculous.
阿卡莎听说制造 DMT 是可能的，甚至相对容易，这个想法让他觉得几乎是奇迹。
A friend told him that a woman they knew who sold tie-dyed T-shirts at music festivals was familiar with the process.
一位朋友告诉他，他们认识的一位在音乐节上销售扎染 T 恤的女士熟悉这个过程。
When Akasha asked her, she invited him to her house on the outskirts of Houston the next day.
当阿卡莎提出要求时，她第二天邀请他去她位于休斯顿郊区的家。
The moment he arrived, she sat him down on her living-room couch, handed him a pipe, and told him to smoke a dose—perhaps to make sure he wasn’t a cop.
他一到，她就让他坐在客厅的沙发上，递给他一根烟斗，并告诉他吸一剂——也许是为了确保他不是警察。
As he returned to reality, he saw that she had already set out the precursor ingredients of DMT in front of him: lye, the solvent naphtha, and powdered jurema bark.
当他回过神来的时候，他发现她已经把DMT的前体原料摆在了他的面前：碱液、溶剂石脑油和粉末状的jurema树皮。
A mason jar filled with the precursors for DMT that Akasha Song was making in a tent at a music festival.
一个装有 DMT 前体的玻璃瓶，是阿卡莎·宋 (Akasha Song) 在音乐节的帐篷里制作的。
She walked Akasha through the process of DMT extraction, which he carefully wrote down in his journal: Mix lye with hot water in a mason jar.
她带领阿卡莎完成了 DMT 的提取过程，他在日记中仔细地写下了这一过程：将碱液与热水在玻璃瓶中混合。
Add the bark powder, which turns into DMT-laden sludge.
添加树皮粉，它会变成富含 DMT 的污泥。
Pour in the naphtha and stir.
倒入石脑油并搅拌。
When a yellow-tinged solution separates from the jurema sludge below, draw it off with a turkey baster, squirt it into a baking pan, then put it in the freezer.
当黄色溶液从下面的 Jurema 污泥中分离出来时，用火鸡涂油器将其吸走，将其喷入烤盘中，然后放入冰箱中。
The crystals that form at the bottom, ready to smoke as soon as the last solvent evaporates, will be DMT.
底部形成的晶体就是 DMT，一旦最后的溶剂蒸发，就可以冒烟。
Akasha’s tutor gifted him a kilo of bark to get him started.
阿卡莎的导师送给他一公斤树皮，让他开始学习。
He and a friend immediately drove to Ace Hardware, bought naphtha and lye, and followed the process Akasha had just been taught.
他和一个朋友立即开车去了 Ace Hardware，购买了石脑油和碱液，然后按照阿卡莎刚刚教的流程进行操作。
They smoked the results the next day, reveling in the magic of DIY psychedelic alchemy.
第二天，他们吸食了结果，陶醉在 DIY 迷幻炼金术的魔力中。
Then they drove around town, selling their DMT to friends, instantly making back the money they’d spent at the hardware store as well as a small profit.
然后他们开车绕城转一圈，把 DMT 卖给朋友，立刻就赚回了在五金店花的钱以及微薄的利润。
“It was the most amazing thing,” says Akasha.
“这是最令人惊奇的事情，”阿卡莎说。
“I had figured out how to make my most valued possession in the world.”
“我已经弄清楚如何拥有世界上最有价值的财产。”
By December of 2013, Akasha had followed through on his plan to sell everything he owned and move to Colorado.
到 2013 年 12 月，阿卡莎完成了他的计划，出售他拥有的一切并搬到科罗拉多州。
He couch surfed for a while, briefly joined a cult on a ranch, then moved in with a group that lived in a geodesic dome in the mountains.
他在沙发上冲浪了一段时间，短暂地加入了一个牧场上的邪教，然后搬到了一群住在山上测地圆顶里的人那里。
His son was with him at times or else lived with Akasha’s mother.
他的儿子有时和他在一起，有时则和阿卡莎的母亲住在一起。
Throughout, Akasha made DMT in mason jars and sold it to meditation circles and at music festivals, using whatever freezer was at hand to crystallize his solutions and sourcing bark from a website in the Netherlands that his DMT tutor had told him about.
自始至终，阿卡莎都在玻璃瓶中制造 DMT，并将其出售给冥想界和音乐节，使用手头的任何冰箱来结晶他的解决方案，并从他的 DMT 导师告诉他的荷兰网站上采购树皮。
(The bark itself wasn’t illegal to buy or ship, he learned, because it can be used in non-psychedelic products like cosmetics.) No one in Akasha’s circles ever referred to DMT as a “drug.” It was “medicine”—and he was the medicine man.
（他了解到，购买或运输树皮本身并不违法，因为它可以用于化妆品等非迷幻产品。）阿卡莎的圈子里没有人将 DMT 称为“药物”。这是“药”——而他就是药师。
At times, Akasha’s new vocation could also make him tens of thousands of dollars in a week.
有时，阿卡莎的新职业也能让他在一周内赚到数万美元。
In 2015, Akasha moved in with a group of friends in a house beside a reservoir in Nederland, a small town half an hour’s drive from Boulder through a winding mountain pass.
2015 年，阿卡莎和一群朋友搬进了尼德兰 (Nederland) 水库旁的一所房子。尼德兰是一个小镇，距离博尔德 (Boulder) 需要半小时车程，需要穿过蜿蜒的山口。
He acquired a ring-tailed lemur as a “service animal.” The little black and white primate, whom Akasha named Oliver, would swing through the rafters of the house, play with Akasha and his friends in the snow-covered aspen trees in their front yard, or sit on his shoulder when he went into town or to parties in Boulder, boosting Akasha’s local celebrity.
他养了一只环尾狐猴作为“服务动物”。这只黑白相间的小灵长类动物，阿卡莎给它起名叫奥利弗，它会在房子的椽子上荡来荡去，和阿卡莎和他的朋友们在前院白雪覆盖的白杨树上玩耍，或者当他进城或参加博尔德的聚会时坐在他的肩膀上，从而提高了阿卡莎在当地的知名度。
“He was this big, shiny person with a lot of energy,” says one friend who asked me to call him Coinflip, because he’d decided based on a coin flip to partner with Akasha and sell DMT at music festivals.
“他是一个身材高大、闪亮、精力充沛的人，”一位朋友说，他让我称呼他为 Coinflip，因为他根据抛硬币决定与 Akasha 合作，在音乐节上销售 DMT。
“He was just very inspired, with his big-ass eyes wide open.”
“他非常受启发，睁大着大眼睛。”
Akasha, like his customers, strongly believed in the mind-opening value of DMT.
阿卡莎和他的客户一样，坚信 DMT 具有开拓思维的价值。
He also understood on some level that he was a drug dealer and that continuing this new career entailed serious legal risk.
他在某种程度上也明白自己是一名毒贩，继续这一新职业会带来严重的法律风险。
A conviction for DMT possession or sale in the US carries years in prison for the amounts he was extracting, as much as decades for higher weights.
在美国，如果因持有或出售 DMT 而被定罪，他所提取的金额将被判处数年监禁，而更高的重量将被判处数十年监禁。
But would cops, or even the feds, actually know what this sand-colored substance was if they saw it?
但警察，甚至联邦政府，如果看到这种沙色物质，他们真的知道它是什么吗？
Would they actually care about his seemingly benign hallucinogen?
他们真的会关心他看似良性的致幻剂吗？
Within Akasha’s community, there was a mantra that he heard again and again: “The medicine is protecting you.” Higher powers, he came to feel, would safeguard him in his spiritual mission.
在阿卡莎的社区里，有一句他反复听到的口头禅：“药物在保护你。”他开始感到，更高的力量会保护他完成精神使命。
That same sense of invincibility he’d felt since childhood, despite all evidence to the contrary, now echoed in his mind—and pushed him to scale his ambitions ever larger.
尽管所有证据表明事实并非如此，但他从小就感受到的那种不可战胜的感觉现在在他的脑海中回响，并促使他不断扩大自己的野心。
Selling DMT at music festivals provided a decent living, but it was kind of a drag.
在音乐节上出售 DMT 可以让他们过上体面的生活，但这也有点拖累。
Most people still didn’t know what this three-letter substance was, so Akasha would often have to enter vacuum-cleaner salesman mode to make a deal: He’d offer a prospective customer a sample, they’d smoke it in front of him, and he’d wait 15 or 20 minutes for them to return from their trip and become conscious enough to actually buy a gram for $100.
大多数人仍然不知道这种三个字母的物质是什么，所以阿卡莎经常不得不进入真空吸尘器推销员模式才能达成交易：他会向潜在客户提供样品，他们会在他面前吸食，然后他会等待 15 或 20 分钟，让他们从旅行中回来，并有足够的意识以 100 美元的价格购买一克。
By 2015, Akasha had heard about a better venue for drug sales: the dark web.
到 2015 年，阿卡莎听说了一个更好的毒品销售场所：暗网。
He checked out a site called AlphaBay , which had become one of the top markets, and found that there didn’t seem to be much competition to sell DMT.
他查看了一个名为 AlphaBay 的网站，该网站已成为顶级市场之一，发现销售 DMT 的竞争似乎并不激烈。
With very little thought, he opened a vendor account for himself with the handle “Shimshai,” the name of an ayahuascarian he’d met in Costa Rica.
他几乎没有多想，就为自己开设了一个供应商账户，账户名为“Shimshai”，这是他在哥斯达黎加遇到的死藤水者的名字。
He initially listed a few different quantities for sale on the market, just to see if anyone would bite.
他最初在市场上列出了几种不同数量的出售，只是为了看看是否有人会咬。
The next day, he was surprised to see he had made three sales, despite having no reviews or reputation of any kind as an online vendor.
第二天，他惊讶地发现自己已经完成了三笔销售，尽管作为在线供应商没有任何评论或声誉。
He scrambled to find mylar bags, bubble wrap, envelopes, and postage, then shipped off his product using a fake return address.
他急忙找到聚酯薄膜袋、气泡包装纸、信封和邮资，然后使用虚假的退货地址寄出他的产品。
The next day he had six orders.
第二天他收到了六份订单。
The day after that, 10, then 15.
第二天，10 点，然后是 15 点。
“And it just kept growing,” Akasha says.
“而且它一直在增长，”阿卡莎说。
Within three weeks, to Akasha’s amazement, Shimshai was up to 40 orders a day.
让阿卡莎惊讶的是，三周之内，Shimshai 每天的订单量就达到了 40 个。
Though most were for a single gram of DMT priced at $70 in crypto , the sales added up to thousands of dollars in daily revenue, nearly equaling what he had made selling in person.
尽管大多数是一克 DMT 的加密货币售价为 70 美元，但每天的销售额加起来高达数千美元，几乎相当于他亲自销售的收入。
“This is a lot of money, and this is easy ,” Akasha thought.
“这是很多钱，而且很容易，”阿卡莎想。
“So let’s do it proper.”
“所以我们就好好做吧。”
One of Shimshai’s vendor profiles on a dark-web drug market.
Shimshai 在暗网毒品市场上的供应商资料之一。
He was done with mason jars.
他已经用完了梅森罐子。
Akasha bought four 35-gallon plastic barrels and put them in the garage of the shared house in Nederland.
阿卡莎买了四个35加仑的塑料桶，放在荷兰合租房屋的车库里。
Around each one, he affixed an electric drum heater—a device that fits around a barrel like a corset.
在每个桶周围，他都安装了一个电动滚筒加热器——一种像紧身胸衣一样安装在桶周围的装置。
To mix his ingredients, he used an electric drill with a paint stirrer attachment.
为了混合他的成分，他使用了带有油漆搅拌器附件的电钻。
He’d pour the yellowish top solution into 5-gallon buckets and put them in a freezer he’d bought at Walmart.
他将淡黄色的顶部溶液倒入 5 加仑的桶中，然后将其放入他从沃尔玛购买的冰箱中。
In about 10 days, he could produce more than a kilogram of DMT—tens of thousands of doses—which he stored in a Tupperware container.
在大约 10 天的时间里，他可以生产出超过一公斤的 DMT（数万剂），并将其储存在特百惠容器中。
Producing DMT as a cottage industry had its complications.
作为家庭手工业生产 DMT 有其复杂性。
Akasha’s process produced gallons of waste—used solvent and highly alkaline, lye-infused bark sludge.
阿卡莎的工艺产生了数加仑的废弃溶剂和高碱性、注入碱液的树皮污泥。
At times he’d return the naphtha to the paint shop or hardware store where he’d bought it, but other times he’d dispose of it at a sewage plant.
有时他会将石脑油退回他购买石脑油的油漆店或五金店，但有时他会将其丢弃在污水处理厂。
The sludge he’d dump in the woods, trying not to think about it too much.
他把污泥倾倒在树林里，尽量不去想太多。
“Like a vegan who does cocaine,” Akasha says, “I just didn’t check in with myself about it.”
“就像吸食可卡因的素食主义者一样，”阿卡莎说，“我只是没有反省自己而已。”
Akasha knew that his money, too, was toxic.
阿卡莎知道他的钱也是有毒的。
He had read about dark-web moguls whose crypto profits had been traced back to them on the bitcoin blockchain.
他读到过有关暗网大亨的加密货币利润可以在比特币区块链上追溯到他们的信息。
So Akasha created a convoluted laundering setup designed to get around US laws requiring crypto exchanges to know the identities of their customers.
因此，阿卡莎创建了一个复杂的洗钱设置，旨在绕过美国法律，要求加密货币交易所了解其客户的身份。
He had a Canadian friend sign up on his behalf for an exchange that didn’t require personal information from non-US citizens.
他让一位加拿大朋友代表他注册了一项不需要非美国公民提供个人信息的交易。
Plenty of other friends were interested in getting into crypto, too, and Akasha would offer to sell them his coins for cash.
许多其他朋友也有兴趣进入加密货币领域，阿卡莎愿意向他们出售他的硬币以换取现金。
“They had no idea they were buying tens of thousands of dollars of bitcoin that came straight from the darknet,” Akasha says.
“他们不知道自己正在购买直接来自暗网的数万美元的比特币，”阿卡莎说。
By this time, Akasha had found a contact willing to sell him jurema bark in bulk.
这时，阿卡莎找到了一个愿意向他批量出售朱雷玛树皮的联系人。
But when he asked for a thousand pounds of it, his source suddenly tried to raise the price.
但当他要价一千英镑时，他的消息来源突然试图提高价格。
So Akasha performed a reverse image search on a product shot of the powdered bark that his source had sent him.
因此，阿卡莎对他的消息来源发给他的树皮粉产品照片进行了反向图像搜索。
He immediately found the website of a seller in Mexico that the friend had been buying from.
他立即找到了这位朋友一直在购买的墨西哥卖家的网站。
Soon Akasha had cut out the middleman and was having the shipments sent to friends under fake names.
很快，阿卡莎就切断了中间商，并以假名将货物发送给朋友。
As online orders climbed toward 100 a day, Akasha turned a guest bedroom of his house into a shipping-and-receiving hub and started hiring his housemates to do the endless work of preparing packages, measuring out DMT, sealing it, bagging it, and putting it in the mail.
随着每天的在线订单数量攀升至 100 份，阿卡莎将自家的一间客房变成了发货和收货中心，并开始雇用室友做无休止的工作，准备包裹、测量 DMT、密封、装袋并邮寄。
Postage became a serious headache: Akasha was afraid that a single person buying too many priority stamps from a single post office would raise suspicions.
邮资成为一个令人严重头痛的问题：阿卡莎担心一个人从一家邮局购买太多优先邮票会引起怀疑。
So he paid a rotating crew of housemates to make a circuit of local towns, buying stamps from each one and dropping off a few packages at different mailboxes.
于是，他雇了一群轮流的室友，让他们绕着当地城镇转一圈，从每个人那里买邮票，然后把几个包裹投到不同的邮箱里。
Some dark-web drug vendors selling more recognizable wares would triple-vacuum-seal their products to conceal their smell or hide them in disguised packaging, like putting a bag of psychedelic mushrooms into a box of beef stroganoff Hamburger Helper so that it looked like an ingredient.
一些销售更知名商品的暗网毒贩会对他们的产品进行三重真空密封，以隐藏其气味或将其隐藏在伪装的包装中，例如将一袋迷幻蘑菇放入一盒牛肉沙拉汉堡助手中，使其看起来像一种成分。
Shimshai didn’t bother with any of that: Given DMT’s relative obscurity, he figured bubble wrap and a mailer envelope was enough to avoid law enforcement’s attention.
Shimshai 并没有理会这些：鉴于 DMT 相对默默无闻，他认为泡沫包装和邮寄信封足以避免执法部门的注意。
Inside those layers, Akasha would put his product in a mylar bag marked with the rainbow-mind logo he designed himself.
在这些层内，阿卡莎会将他的产品放入聚酯薄膜袋中，袋子上标有他自己设计的彩虹思维标志。
Positive reviews flowed in, bolstering Shimshai’s reputation.
正面评价纷至沓来，提升了 Shimshai 的声誉。
“Out of the park,” one customer would later write.
“走出公园，”一位顾客后来写道。
“Always the best, don’t look elsewhere, A++ in every category !” “Perfect transaction, thanks Shimshai!” “Literally sent by the gods.”
“永远是最好的，不要寻找其他地方，每个类别都是 A++！” “完美的交易，谢谢 Shimshai！” “确实是诸神派来的。”
By now Akasha had recruited his entire household to keep up with the grind.
到现在为止，阿卡莎已经召集了他的整个家庭来跟上这项工作。
But ultimately he would trust only one associate to share in managing the online Shimshai persona: his old DMT-selling festival partner Coinflip.
但最终他只信任一位同事来分担管理 Shimshai 在线角色：他以前的 DMT 销售节日合作伙伴 Coinflip。
As the business boomed, Akasha and Coinflip would eventually do the daily work together of copying sales from the dark web into spreadsheets, responding to customers’ questions, and resolving their complaints—though it was still always Akasha who controlled the keys to the bitcoin funds flowing into the Shimshai wallet and paid everyone else, including Coinflip.
随着业务的蓬勃发展，Akasha 和 Coinflip 最终会一起完成日常工作，将暗网上的销售情况复制到电子表格中、回答客户的问题并解决他们的投诉——尽管始终是 Akasha 控制着流入 Shimshai 钱包的比特币资金的密钥，并向包括 Coinflip 在内的其他所有人付款。
As the months went by and Shimshai’s profile grew on the dark web, so too did the secrecy of that name in Akasha’s everyday life.
几个月过去了，Shimshai 的个人资料在暗网上越来越多，阿卡莎日常生活中这个名字的保密性也随之增加。
“Even my closest friends didn’t know it,” Akasha says.
“即使是我最亲密的朋友也不知道，”阿卡莎说。
Only Coinflip did.
只有 Coinflip 做到了。
Soon, the two men came to see the pseudonym as almost taboo.
很快，这两个人就认为化名几乎是一种禁忌。
They stopped saying it out loud, even to one another, even when they were alone.
他们不再大声说出来，即使是对彼此，甚至是在独处时。
Left: A suitcase full of orders ready to ship.
左：装满订单准备发货的手提箱。
Right: One of Akasha Song’s branded DMT mylar bags in an evidence photo.
右：证据照片中的 Akasha Song 品牌的 DMT 聚酯薄膜袋之一。
In early 2017, Akasha was waiting in line at a music venue in Boulder when the doorman struck up a conversation with him.
2017 年初，阿卡莎在博尔德的一个音乐场所排队等候时，门卫与他搭上了话。
He told Akasha he’d have let him in for free—that what Akasha was doing “up in the mountains” was “changing the world for the better.” Akasha immediately left the venue, went home, and started making plans to leave Colorado.
他告诉阿卡莎，他会免费让他进去——阿卡莎“在山上”所做的事情是“让世界变得更美好”。阿卡莎立即离开会场，回家，并开始计划离开科罗拉多州。
This was not the aura of local celebrity he was looking for.
这并不是他所寻找的当地名人的光环。
Over the next few days, he told his housemates they were done.
在接下来的几天里，他告诉室友他们已经完成了。
He packed his DMT-making equipment into a trailer, hitched it to his Land Rover, and drove to Austin.
他将 DMT 制造设备装入一辆拖车，挂在他的路虎上，然后开车前往奥斯汀。
His son, now a young teenager, came with him.
他的儿子现在已经是一个十几岁的孩子了，和他一起来的。
(His lemur, Oliver, did not: As Akasha tells it, a small child had approached the prosimian in a parking lot and got a paw to the face.
（他的狐猴奥利弗没有这么做：正如阿卡莎所说，一个小孩在停车场接近原猿，一只爪子拍到了它的脸。
The local news reported it instead as a bite.
当地新闻将其报道为咬伤。
Oliver was taken by the local police and ended up at a refuge in Florida.)
奥利弗被当地警察带走，最终来到佛罗里达州的避难所。）
From Craigslist, Akasha rented a huge, three-story house on South Austin’s Convict Hill with giant oak trees in the back yard, a view of the city from his bedroom’s balcony, the sun streaming into its windows from three directions, and gallery lighting for his growing art collection.
阿卡莎从克雷格列表 (Craigslist) 租了一座位于南奥斯汀罪犯山 (Convict Hill) 的巨大三层房子，后院种着巨大的橡树，从卧室的阳台上可以看到城市的景色，阳光从三个方向射入窗户，画廊为他不断增加的艺术收藏提供照明。
He spent another $50,000 refurbishing his Land Rover.
他又花了 50,000 美元翻新他的路虎。
Akasha Song, once a homeless hippie, had come up in the world.
阿卡莎·宋（Akasha Song）曾经是一个无家可归的嬉皮士，现在已经闯入了这个世界。
Or as he puts it, “I went bougie as hell.”
或者正如他所说，“我疯了。”
The Austin house had a two-car garage with plenty of space for Akasha’s DMT setup.
奥斯汀的房子有一个两车位的车库，有足够的空间容纳阿卡莎的 DMT 设置。
Shimshai was now receiving as many as 200 orders a day, often adding up to $15,000 in daily sales, more money than Akasha had seen before in his life.
Shimshai 现在每天收到多达 200 个订单，日销售额通常高达 15,000 美元，这比阿卡莎一生中见过的钱还要多。
(The podcaster Joe Rogan would also singlehandedly spike Shimshai’s sales by the hundreds every time he mentioned DMT on his show.) But Akasha was now working alone.
（播客乔·罗根（Joe Rogan）每次在节目中提到 DMT 时，都会一手将 Shimshai 的销量提高数百倍。）但阿卡莎现在只能独自工作。
By the time he had production in his garage going again, he had a backlog of more than a thousand orders.
当他的车库再次开始生产时，他已经积压了一千多份订单。
He was working 12-hour days to stir, decant, freeze, scrape, buy stamps, package, ship, and manage his online profile.
他每天工作 12 个小时，负责搅拌、倒出、冷冻、刮擦、购买邮票、包装、运输和管理他的在线个人资料。
“I was running and gunning,” Akasha says.
“我边跑边开枪，”阿卡莎说。
“I could not make enough.”
“我赚得不够。”
Akasha began hiring friends from the local music scene to take on the work.
阿卡莎开始聘请当地音乐界的朋友来承担这项工作。
As soon as anyone heard what he did, he says, they wanted in.
他说，一旦有人听到他所做的事情，他们就会想加入。
“They’d feel honored,” Akasha says.
“他们会感到荣幸，”阿卡莎说。
“They had never even seen that much DMT, and they were just so captivated by the idea of it.” But he rarely kept employees long.
“他们甚至从未见过那么多的 DMT，但他们只是被它的想法所吸引。”但他很少让员工长期留任。
As soon as he could see that someone was doing the math of how much money he was making, he would unceremoniously let them go.
只要看到有人算计他赚了多少钱，他就会毫不客气地放人。
Almost without noticing, Akasha had let go of his “medicine man” role and its spiritual motivations.
几乎在没有注意到的情况下，阿卡莎已经放弃了他的“药师”角色及其精神动机。
“All of a sudden I could have everything that I wanted, whenever I wanted, wherever I wanted,” he says.
“突然之间，我可以随时随地拥有我想要的一切，”他说。
But Shimshai’s reviews kept calling his product life-changing.
但 Shimshai 的评论一直称他的产品改变了生活。
Friends still told him he was “doing God’s work.”
朋友们仍然告诉他，他正在“做上帝的工作”。
Then, in early July of 2017, Akasha found that AlphaBay was mysteriously offline for more than a week.
然后，2017年7月上旬，阿卡莎发现AlphaBay神秘下线了一周多。
The Wall Street Journal soon broke the news that the site had been taken down by an international law enforcement operation and that its creator and administrator, a French-Canadian man named Alexandre Cazes, had been found dead in a Bangkok jail cell .
《华尔街日报》很快爆料称，该网站已被国际执法行动关闭，其创建者和管理员、一位名叫亚历山大·卡兹 (Alexandre Cazes) 的法裔加拿大人被发现死在曼谷的牢房中。
Akasha saw his business evaporate before his eyes—including $32,000 he had stored in his AlphaBay account—just as he was growing accustomed to the wealth it was creating.
阿卡莎眼睁睁地看着自己的生意在他眼前蒸发——包括他在 AlphaBay 账户中存储的 32,000 美元——正当他越来越习惯它所创造的财富时。
“I’m not a hippie anymore,” he thought.
“我不再是嬉皮士了，”他想。
“I’m used to this lifestyle.
“我已经习惯了这种生活方式。
I need money.”
我需要钱。”
For a moment, he panicked.
一时之间，他惊慌失措。
Then his fear subsided, and he got to work launching Shimshai accounts on all of the remaining dark-web markets, sites with names like Hansa, Wall Street Market, and Dream Market.
然后他的恐惧消退了，他开始在所有剩余的暗网市场上启动 Shimshai 帐户，这些网站的名称包括 Hansa、Wall Street Market 和 Dream Market。
AlphaBay’s refugee customers, too, began to flow to these new drug-buying havens, and Akasha found that his orders crept up again in the days that followed.
AlphaBay 的难民客户也开始涌向这些新的毒品购买天堂，阿卡莎发现他的订单在接下来的几天里再次悄然增加。
By the middle of July, Hansa too was down: It had been the target of an operation by Dutch law enforcement .
到 7 月中旬，汉莎航空也陷入瘫痪：它已成为荷兰执法部门行动的目标。
By all appearances, though, Akasha’s luck had held, and he escaped the dragnet.
但从各方面来看，阿卡莎的运气还是不错，他逃脱了天罗地网。
Through the dark-web tumult, demand for DMT never waned.
尽管暗网骚乱，对 DMT 的需求从未减弱。
Within a few weeks, Shimshai’s orders had returned to their previous record.
几周之内，Shimshai 的订单量就恢复到之前的记录。
And Akasha was already thinking about how to level up again.
而阿卡莎已经在思考如何再次升级了。
Chunks of Akasha Song’s DMT crystals, each one equivalent to hundreds or even thousands of doses.
阿卡莎·宋的DMT晶体大块，每一块相当于数百甚至数千剂。
After the string of market busts, Akasha was restless and paranoid about keeping his DMT production in one place for too long.
经过一连串的市场萧条后，阿卡莎焦躁不安，对将 DMT 生产放在一个地方太久感到疑虑。
After years in Colorado, summer back in Texas, too, had felt unbearably hot.
在科罗拉多州呆了几年之后，回到德克萨斯州的夏天也感到酷热难耐。
So he and his son began scrolling around Google Earth for a new home, and settled on Lake Tahoe.
因此，他和儿子开始在 Google 地球上滚动寻找新家，并最终定居在太浩湖。
They rented a house on the north shore of the lake with a backyard patio surrounded by redwood trees stretching into Tahoe National Forest.
他们在湖北岸租了一栋房子，后院有一个庭院，周围环绕着一直延伸到太浩国家森林的红杉树。
The landlord let Akasha pay the rent in bitcoin.
房东让阿卡莎用比特币支付房租。
This time he brought Coinflip and another friend with him to live and work in the house from the start.
这次他从一开始就带着 Coinflip 和另一位朋友一起在房子里生活和工作。
They set up DMT production in the garage at more than twice the scale of the lab in Colorado, ultimately expanding to 10 of the same 35-gallon barrels.
他们在车库中建立了 DMT 生产规模，其规模是科罗拉多州实验室的两倍以上，最终扩大到 10 个相同的 35 加仑桶。
Two competent lieutenants were now taking much of the work off Akasha’s hands, and he could settle into a lifestyle befitting the crypto millions rolling in.
两名称职的中尉现在正在接手阿卡莎手中的大部分工作，他可以适应一种适合数以百万计的加密货币涌入的生活方式。
Akasha and his son spent their days hiking, rock climbing, slacklining, and water-skiing in the ultra-clear lake, riding his new $150,000 G-Wagon to any of three ski resorts within a 20-minute drive, or partying with the locals—who all seemed to be rich, retired, and not very interested in how anyone had made their money.
阿卡莎和他的儿子整天在超清澈的湖里徒步旅行、攀岩、走扁带和滑水，骑着他价值 15 万美元的新款 G-Wagon 前往 20 分钟车程内的三个滑雪胜地中的任何一个，或者与当地人一起聚会——他们似乎都很富有，退休了，对别人如何赚钱不太感兴趣。
When someone did ask, Akasha would simply answer “bitcoin,” which was enough to end the conversation (and which, he points out, was technically true).
当有人问时，阿卡莎只会简单地回答“比特币”，这足以结束对话（他指出，这在技术上是正确的）。
Akasha spent his millions as fast as they arrived.
阿卡莎一到就花掉了数百万美元。
His new chemistry setup could manufacture enough product fast enough that sometimes, between batches, he left his friends to ship out the group’s stock of DMT while he traveled the world for weeks at a time.
他的新化学装置可以足够快地制造足够的产品，有时，在批次之间，他会离开他的朋友来运送集团的 DMT 库存，而他则一次环游世界数周。
He flew to Vietnam and Thailand, where he ran through Shimshai’s orders on his laptop while getting a massage in the Phi Phi Islands.
他飞往越南和泰国，在皮皮岛做按摩时，他在笔记本电脑上查看了 Shimshai 的订单。
He took his son snowboarding in Switzerland and scuba diving in Maui.
他带着儿子去瑞士滑雪，去毛伊岛潜水。
An image posted to one of Shimshai’s dark-web sales pages, captured in an evidence screenshot.
Shimshai 的一个暗网销售页面上发布的一张图片，以证据截图形式捕获。
On another trip to the Hawaiian Islands, Akasha was showering in a waterfall, exhausted after hiking a 13-mile trail through a jungle valley on Kauai, when a young, naked woman with brown hair and dark green eyes emerged from the trees and handed him a tamarind.
在另一次去夏威夷群岛的旅行中，阿卡莎在徒步穿越考艾岛丛林山谷 13 英里的小径后精疲力尽，正在瀑布里洗澡，这时一名棕色头发、深绿色眼睛的年轻裸体女子从树上出现，递给他一颗罗望子。
The woman was named Joules—“like the energy unit”—and she invited Akasha to a communal dinner she was serving on the beach.
这位女士被命名为焦耳——“就像能量单位”——她邀请阿卡莎参加她在海滩上举办的公共晚宴。
He learned that she lived with a group of hippies in the woods, grew her own food, hunted and killed wild pigs and goats with snare traps and rocks, and mostly hadn’t worn clothes for the last year.
他了解到，她和一群嬉皮士住在树林里，自己种植食物，用陷阱和石头猎杀野猪和山羊，去年几乎没有穿衣服。
From then on, Akasha’s new long-term goal was to move to Hawaii.
从那时起，阿卡莎新的长期目标就是搬到夏威夷。
During this new jet-set phase, Akasha says, he was at one point stopped by Customs and Border Protection agents in the San Francisco airport on his way home from the Philippines.
阿卡莎说，在这个新的喷气式飞机阶段，他在从菲律宾回家的途中曾一度在旧金山机场被海关和边境保护局人员拦截。
They confiscated his electronics without explanation.
他们没有解释就没收了他的电子产品。
Akasha was terrified that his charmed life was over.
阿卡莎害怕他的美好生活就此结束。
But he had enabled full-disk encryption on his laptop, and his phone offered it by default.
但他在笔记本电脑上启用了全盘加密，并且他的手机默认也提供了该功能。
The agents let him go, and he never got any hint that they had found anything incriminating on his devices.
特工们放了他，但他从未得到任何暗示他们在他的设备上发现了任何有罪的东西。
His sense of invincibility intact, he and his friends got back to work.
他的无敌感完好无损，他和他的朋友们又开始工作了。
Akasha now began to imagine a future in which he could remove himself entirely from the production and sale of DMT and run his operation from afar like a true kingpin.
阿卡莎现在开始想象一个未来，在这个未来中，他可以完全脱离 DMT 的生产和销售，并像真正的头目一样远程经营他的业务。
Tahoe was lovely, but inconspicuously obtaining large volumes of naphtha and priority stamps was tough so far from a city.
塔霍很可爱，但在远离城市的地方想要不引人注目地获得大量石脑油和优先邮票是很困难的。
So he started periodically returning to Colorado to build the perfect DMT lab that would allow him to enact his exit strategy and realize his new dream of living in Hawaii.
因此，他开始定期返回科罗拉多州建立完美的 DMT 实验室，这将使他能够制定退出策略并实现他在夏威夷生活的新梦想。
He started renting a house in Jamestown, just northwest of Boulder, with an enormous garage fitted with more electric power, water, and drainage than he’d ever found before—he assumed it was from a previous cannabis-growing operation.
他开始在博尔德西北部的詹姆斯敦租了一套房子，里面有一个巨大的车库，配备了比他以前发现的更多的电力、水和排水系统——他认为这是以前的大麻种植园的产物。
At a festival in Idaho a few years earlier, Akasha had met a chemist who recrystallized minerals and made Eastern medicine tinctures in his own lab.
几年前，在爱达荷州的一个节日上，阿卡莎遇到了一位化学家，他在自己的实验室中重结晶矿物质并制作东方药物酊剂。
Now Akasha paid him a five-figure fee for advice on his DMT operation.
现在，阿卡莎向他支付了五位数的费用，请他就 DMT 操作提供建议。
Why, the chemist immediately asked, was Akasha siphoning off solvent and throwing it away when he could simply use a distiller to vaporize the naphtha and recondense it in another vat, ready to use again?
化学家立即问道，当阿卡莎可以简单地使用蒸馏器蒸发石脑油并将其在另一个桶中重新凝结以准备再次使用时，为什么阿卡莎要吸走溶剂并将其扔掉呢？
Akasha’s days of hunting for hundreds of gallons of solvent and then searching again for places to dump it were over.
阿卡莎寻找数百加仑溶剂，然后再次寻找倾倒地点的日子结束了。
He bought an industrial-grade distiller with a glass window on the condenser and delighted in watching the clean naphtha rain down inside it, ready to use again.
他买了一台工业级蒸馏器，冷凝器上有一个玻璃窗，很高兴看到干净的石脑油落在里面，准备再次使用。
That distillation process would leave behind a cake of DMT at the bottom of the distiller with only a small residue of solvent.
该蒸馏过程会在蒸馏器底部留下 DMT 饼，仅残留少量溶剂。
The chemist introduced Akasha to a method for shortcutting hours of further drying with a piece of lab equipment called a Büchner funnel—a kind of tapered cup with a micron filter at the bottom over a glass flask.
这位化学家向阿卡莎介绍了一种缩短进一步干燥时间的方法，即使用一种称为布氏漏斗的实验室设备，这种设备是一种锥形杯，底部在玻璃烧瓶上方带有微米过滤器。
With some suction applied to a side hole in the flask, Akasha could pull most of the remaining solvent out through the filter, leaving the crystals behind.
通过对烧瓶的侧孔施加一些吸力，阿卡莎可以通过过滤器将大部分剩余溶剂吸出，留下晶体。
Akasha eventually spent around $150,000 implementing the chemist’s recommendations and also upgrading his lab with his own innovations, like an automated stirring system that switched on electric drills to stir all the mixing tanks simultaneously.
阿卡莎最终花费了大约 15 万美元实施化学家的建议，并用自己的创新升级了他的实验室，例如自动搅拌系统，可以打开电钻同时搅拌所有混合罐。
When the chemist visited, he would give Akasha detailed specifications about pressure and temperature settings and suggest Akasha write them down.
当化学家来访时，他会给阿卡莎提供有关压力和温度设置的详细规格，并建议阿卡莎把它们写下来。
“Grab a notebook,” he’d tell Akasha.
“拿一个笔记本，”他告诉阿卡莎。
“I’m not going to answer your questions on the phone later.”
“稍后我不会在电话里回答你的问题。”
But Akasha somehow remembered it all, he says.
但他说，阿卡莎不知何故记住了这一切。
“No one ever does that,” the chemist, who asked not to be identified, remembers thinking, impressed by Akasha’s rare combination of an engineer’s intelligence and a drug dealer’s appetite for risk.
这位不愿透露姓名的化学家回忆道，“从来没有人这样做过”，他对阿卡莎罕见地将工程师的智慧与毒贩的风险偏好结合起来印象深刻。
“He’s really smart, and he has the balls to do this shit.
“他真的很聪明，他有胆量做这件事。
This dude is something else.”
这家伙是另外一回事。”
A distiller filled with DMT solution inside of one of Akasha Song’s labs.
Akasha Song 的一个实验室内装有 DMT 溶液的蒸馏器。
At its peak, Akasha’s new and improved lab would produce a 5-kilo glass carboy of DMT every three days—as much as a million doses a month.
在鼎盛时期，阿卡莎经过改进的新实验室每三天就会生产一瓶重达 5 公斤的 DMT，每月可生产一百万剂。
By 2018, too, he had found a source for jurema bark who would deliver thousands of pounds of it to him in person—Akasha never figured out who he got it from—avoiding the risk of having it shipped through the mail.
到 2018 年，他也找到了 Jurema 树皮的来源，他会亲自向他运送数千磅的树皮——阿卡莎从来不知道他从谁那里得到的——避免了通过邮件运送的风险。
Around the same time, a friend of Akasha’s with a marijuana growing business asked if he could buy in to the DMT operation.
大约在同一时间，阿卡莎的一位从事大麻种植业务的朋友询问他是否可以入股 DMT 业务。
Akasha worked out a deal in which this new partner would fully take over production and sales, and they would move the entire lab into a barn the partner owned on a 40-acre ranch in Evergreen, Colorado.
阿卡莎达成了一项协议，新合作伙伴将完全接管生产和销售，并将整个实验室搬到合作伙伴在科罗拉多州长青市拥有的 40 英亩牧场上的谷仓中。
Akasha believed he had fulfilled the Rich Dad, Poor Dad ideal: He could now fully extract himself from the daily grind of his own businesses while still pulling in profits.
阿卡莎相信他已经实现了富爸爸，穷爸爸的理想：他现在可以完全摆脱自己企业的日常工作，同时仍然可以获得利润。
It was time to move to Hawaii.
是时候搬到夏威夷了。
Akasha and Coinflip rented a house on a bluff in Maui, three doors down from the home of the actor Owen Wilson.
阿卡莎和 Coinflip 在毛伊岛的悬崖上租了一套房子，距离演员欧文·威尔逊 (Owen Wilson) 的家只有三扇门。
Akasha and his son would swim with dolphins and sea turtles and catch lobster in the warm water just beyond their front yard.
阿卡莎和他的儿子会与海豚和海龟一起游泳，并在前院外的温水中捕捉龙虾。
Looking for a clean source of income, they had the idea of starting a motorcycle rental company.
为了寻找干净的收入来源，他们萌生了创办摩托车租赁公司的想法。
They never got it off the ground but nonetheless filled the driveway with seven motorcycles, along with Akasha’s G-Wagon, shipped from the mainland.
他们从未将其开工，但尽管如此，车道上还是停满了从大陆运来的七辆摩托车，以及阿卡莎的 G-Wagon。
Akasha himself bought a gleaming white Harley-Davidson Road King.
阿卡莎本人买了一辆闪闪发光的白色哈雷戴维森公路王。
While Coinflip handled the Shimshai account, Akasha did little other than collect bitcoin and pay everyone their share.
当 Coinflip 处理 Shimshai 账户时，Akasha 除了收集比特币并向每个人支付他们的份额之外几乎没有做任何事情。
For once, there was no DMT production at this new house, so Akasha felt free for the first time to host massive parties, inviting the entire neighborhood over for taco Tuesdays and spending tens of thousands of dollars on sound systems and DJ equipment.
这一次，这座新房子里没有 DMT 制作，所以阿卡莎第一次感到可以自由地举办大型派对，邀请整个社区每周二来吃炸玉米饼，并花费数万美元购买音响系统和 DJ 设备。
He felt he had finally obtained the life he wanted: the money and the total freedom of a hands-off psychedelics kingpin in paradise.
他觉得自己终于获得了自己想要的生活：金钱和天堂里不干涉的迷幻药大亨的完全自由。
Then one afternoon Akasha saw that his phone had six missed calls from his partner back in Colorado, the one now running his DMT production.
然后一天下午，阿卡莎发现他的手机上有六个未接来电，是他在科罗拉多州的搭档打来的，他现在正在运行他的 DMT 制作。
Annoyed at the interruption, he didn’t call back.
他对打扰感到恼火，没有再打电话。
Then came a text message with a link to what appeared to be a local news story.
然后收到一条短信，其中包含似乎是当地新闻报道的链接。
Akasha tapped the link and found a live video of a huge barn fire in Evergreen .
阿卡莎点击了链接，发现了长青谷谷仓大火的现场视频。
Shot from a circling helicopter, the videostream showed 25 firefighters working to extinguish flames rising into the sky from the burning building, surrounded by pines and snow.
视频从一架盘旋的直升机上拍摄，显示 25 名消防员正在努力扑灭从被松树和雪包围的燃烧建筑中升起的火焰。
“Oh fuck,” Akasha said slowly to himself.
“哦操，”阿卡莎慢慢地自言自语。
His lab had just exploded.
他的实验室刚刚爆炸了。
Naphtha fumes are flammable.
石脑油烟雾是易燃的。
When Akasha was running his own lab, he’d cover his mixing barrels with lids that had a hole in the center, just big enough to accommodate the stirring end of a drill, but not the drill itself.
当阿卡莎经营自己的实验室时，他会用盖子盖住混合桶，盖子的中心有一个孔，大小刚好足以容纳钻头的搅拌端，但不能容纳钻头本身。
In their postmortem of the catastrophe, Akasha and Coinflip determined that their partner in Evergreen had instead created a new setup with plastic tarps cinched down over the mixing vats—and the automated stirring drills inside.
在对这场灾难进行事后剖析时，Akasha 和 Coinflip 确定，他们在 Evergreen 的合作伙伴创建了一个新装置，将塑料防水布绑在混合桶上，并在里面安装了自动搅拌钻。
When those drills had activated on the day of the blast, one of their motors had created a spark.
当这些钻机在爆炸当天启动时，其中一台电机产生了火花。
The lab tech running production at the time had been just a few feet away from the vat that ignited.
当时负责生产的实验室技术人员距离着火的大桶只有几英尺远。
He saw a 14-foot-tall pillar of flame shoot up, slamming the tarp into the ceiling with a crack .
他看到一根十四英尺高的火柱冲天而起，将防水布撞在了天花板上，发出一声裂纹。
As he looked for a fire extinguisher, the wood rafters of the barn were already alight.
当他寻找灭火器时，谷仓的木椽子已经着火了。
He realized the blaze was out of control, scrambled to pull propane tanks out of the barn that he feared would explode and kill firefighters, then fled.
他意识到火势已经失控，赶紧从谷仓中取出丙烷罐，他担心丙烷罐会爆炸并杀死消防员，然后逃离。
The ensuing inferno was hot enough that any evidence of the lab’s purpose seemed to have burned away.
接下来的大火足够热，以至于任何证明实验室用途的证据似乎都被烧毁了。
Police searched the house on the same property the next day, but the lab tech had managed to move their stockpile of jurema bark.
第二天，警方搜查了同一处房产的房子，但实验室技术人员成功转移了他们储存的 Jurema 树皮。
No one was immediately charged.
没有人立即受到指控。
For months to come, Akasha and Coinflip came to believe that perhaps the cops had hit a dead end.
在接下来的几个月里，阿卡莎和科因弗利普开始相信警察也许已经走进了死胡同。
Akasha gave his Evergreen partner $10,000 to get a lawyer, then cut ties with him.
阿卡莎给了他的 Evergreen 合作伙伴 10,000 美元聘请律师，然后与他断绝了关系。
Still, Akasha’s days as a hands-off drug boss in Hawaii were over.
尽管如此，阿卡莎在夏威夷作为一个不干涉毒枭的日子已经结束了。
He knew he needed to either retire from the business altogether or double down.
他知道他需要要么完全退出这个行业，要么加倍努力。
There was never really any question.
从来没有真正的任何问题。
He made plans with Coinflip to rebuild Shimshai’s DMT production pipeline from a new lab near Portland, across the Washington border, an area far from Evergreen where they had friends.
他与 Coinflip 制定了计划，从波特兰附近的一个新实验室重建 Shimshai 的 DMT 生产管道，该实验室跨越华盛顿边境，远离他们有朋友的 Evergreen 地区。
For the next months, Coinflip ran the new Washington lab while Akasha continued his dream life on Maui.
在接下来的几个月里，Coinflip 负责运营新的华盛顿实验室，而阿卡莎则在毛伊岛继续他的梦想生活。
At one party there, he ran into Joules, the woman he’d met under a waterfall in Kauai a couple of years earlier.
在一次派对上，他遇到了焦耳，她是几年前他在考艾岛瀑布下认识的女人。
She had left behind her hippie community in the jungle—and was now wearing clothes.
她已经离开了丛林中的嬉皮社区，现在穿上了衣服。
He invited her to his house the next day and later took her for a ride on his motorcycle.
第二天，他邀请她去他家，然后带她骑摩托车兜风。
“That was the moment I fell in love with him,” she says.
“那就是我爱上他的那一刻，”她说。
“Just holding on to him, riding through the most beautiful landscape in our country, and him just tilting his head and talking to me over his shoulder and telling me all about his life.” But not his life as Shimshai.
“只要扶着他，骑行穿过我们国家最美丽的风景，他就会歪着头，越过肩膀跟我说话，告诉我他的生活。”但他作为 Shimshai 的生活却并非如此。
Joules never went home.
焦耳从未回家。
She was fascinated by Akasha’s preternatural confidence, his wealth, and his wide-eyed appetite for adventure.
她对阿卡莎超乎寻常的自信、他的财富和他对冒险的好奇心着迷。
“He lives in a way I had never experienced with anyone else,” she says.
“他的生活方式是我从未与其他人一起经历过的，”她说。
“He just wanted everything, now.
“他现在只想拥有一切。
The biggest, the best, the wildest, the craziest.”
最大、最好、最狂野、最疯狂。”
Around the same time, an old contact had reached out to ask Akasha if he could buy DMT from him wholesale.
大约在同一时间，一位老联系人联系阿卡莎，询问是否可以从他那里批发购买 DMT。
To Akasha’s amazement, this buyer wanted entire kilograms of DMT at a time.
令阿卡莎惊讶的是，这位买家一次想要一整公斤的 DMT。
To help Coinflip manage that level of production, he’d need to fly back to Portland.
为了帮助 Coinflip 管理这种生产水平，他需要飞回波特兰。
It had only been days since he and Joules reconnected.
他和焦尔斯重新联系才几天。
They weren’t yet officially a couple and had yet to kiss or even hold hands.
他们还没有正式成为情侣，还没有接吻，甚至没有牵手。
But he decided to invite her to come along.
但他决定邀请她一起去。
Sitting in his Maui house, he turned to her and asked, “Do you know what I do for a living?”
坐在毛伊岛的房子里，他转向她问道：“你知道我以什么为生吗？”
Akasha Song and his then-girlfriend, Joules, in Kalalau Valley, Kauai.
阿卡莎·宋 (Akasha Song) 和他当时的女友焦耳 (Joules) 在考艾岛卡拉劳谷。
Joules joined Akasha on the mainland, unconcerned about—or even intrigued by—what she was learning of his dark-web business.
焦尔斯在大陆加入了阿卡莎，她对他的暗网业务了解的情况并不关心，甚至感兴趣。
“The way that he said it so confidently, as if he had nothing to fear, was kind of calming,” she remembers.
“他说话的方式如此自信，就好像他没有什么可害怕的，有点平静，”她回忆道。
“He has a very playful way of talking about serious things that’s very disarming.”
“他以一种非常有趣的方式谈论严肃的事情，这非常令人放松。”
In reality, Akasha’s business was barreling into another crisis.
事实上，阿卡莎的业务正陷入另一场危机。
Not long after the wholesale DMT operation got started, law enforcement seized a 3-kilo shipment in the mail.
DMT 批发业务开始后不久，执法部门在邮件中查获了一批 3 公斤重的货物。
Akasha and Coinflip now not only owed their wholesale customer close to $60,000 but had to reckon with the possibility that the feds could tie them to a shipment of serious weight.
Akasha 和 Coinflip 现在不仅欠批发客户近 60,000 美元，而且还必须考虑联邦政府可能将他们与一批重量严重的货物捆绑在一起的可能性。
For Akasha, it was time for a strategic pause.
对于阿卡莎来说，是时候进行战略性的暂停了。
For Coinflip, it was time to get out.
对于 Coinflip 来说，是时候退出了。
In fact, since the lab explosion, he’d become spooked enough by Akasha’s taste for risk that he decided to walk away entirely.
事实上，自从实验室爆炸以来，他对阿卡莎的冒险品味感到非常害怕，以至于他决定完全离开。
“It was really great, and then it was really not OK anymore,” Coinflip says.
“这真的很棒，但之后就真的不行了，”Coinflip 说。
“Bad things started happening, the greed took over, and I had to cut him off.”
“糟糕的事情开始发生，贪婪占据了上风，我不得不切断他的联系。”
Joules helped Akasha pack up his Washington lab equipment and put it into storage, then move out of his Maui house.
焦尔斯帮助阿卡莎收拾好他在华盛顿的实验室设备并将其存放起来，然后搬出了他在毛伊岛的房子。
He temporarily shut down his Shimshai accounts.
他暂时关闭了自己的 Shimshai 账户。
For the months to come, Akasha told Joules, they’d voyage across Europe in what he described to her as a grand tour.
阿卡莎告诉焦尔斯，在接下来的几个月里，他们将穿越欧洲，他向她描述这是一次盛大的旅行。
In fact, he was trying to disappear.
事实上，他正试图消失。
They flew to Istanbul, then traveled to Vienna, then Barcelona, crossing borders by land whenever possible to lessen their paper trail.
他们飞往伊斯坦布尔，然后前往维也纳，然后巴塞罗那，尽可能通过陆路跨越边境，以减少书面记录。
Along the way, they stayed in five-star hotels and ate in Michelin-starred restaurants.
一路上，他们住的是五星级酒店，吃的是米其林星级餐厅。
After nearly two months, though, Akasha had gotten no hint that international law enforcement was tracking him.
然而，近两个月后，阿卡莎没有收到国际执法部门正在追踪他的任何暗示。
So he decided to get back to work.
于是他决定回去工作。
He and Joules flew to the US, took his lab equipment out of storage, and drove with it in a trailer to Colorado.
他和焦尔斯飞往美国，将实验室设备从仓库中取出，并用拖车开往科罗拉多州。
He reopened his Shimshai accounts, then reconnected with his wholesale customer, apologized for ghosting him, and rebuilt his lab in the basement of a house in the town of Morrison.
他重新开设了 Shimshai 账户，然后重新与他的批发客户取得联系，为自己的鬼影道歉，并在莫里森镇一栋房子的地下室重建了他的实验室。
With the help of old friends, he spent the next months making enough DMT to cover the kilos lost in the seizure.
在老朋友的帮助下，他在接下来的几个月里制作了足够的 DMT，以弥补癫痫发作时减掉的体重。
Akasha was surprised, not long after, to get an invitation to meet contacts of his wholesale buyer in person.
不久之后，阿卡莎惊讶地收到了与他的批发买家的联系人见面的邀请。
He declined to describe the details of that meeting or who exactly was there.
他拒绝透露那次会议的细节或到底有谁参加了会议。
But he came to believe that the actual customers of the DMT he’d been producing wholesale had been a group he calls “the Family,” an LSD cartel whose history stretches back to the original experiments with acid that first introduced psychedelics to America in the 1950s.
但他开始相信，他批发生产的 DMT 的实际客户是一个被他称为“家族”的团体，这是一个 LSD 卡特尔，其历史可以追溯到 20 世纪 50 年代首次将迷幻剂引入美国的迷幻药最初实验。
Akasha says that in his meeting with these mysterious new associates, they offered to buy as much DMT as he could produce for the foreseeable future at a rate of $20,000 a kilo.
阿卡莎说，在他与这些神秘的新同事会面时，他们提出以每公斤 20,000 美元的价格购买他在可预见的将来生产的尽可能多的 DMT。
“Any amount?
“有多少吗？
Fuck,” he says he responded.
他妈的，”他说他回答道。
“I can make a lot.”
“我可以赚很多。”
“Every time I go to the grocery store, the front parking spot’s empty,” Akasha Song says.
“每次我去杂货店，前面的停车位都是空的，”阿卡莎·宋说。
“And that happens to me in every situation.”
“这种情况在任何情况下都会发生在我身上。”
Soon Akasha was selling 10 kilos a month to his wholesale buyer in addition to all his dark-web sales—far more total DMT than he ever put into the world before.
很快，除了他所有的暗网销售量外，阿卡莎每月还向他的批发买家出售 10 公斤——远远多于他以前向世界投入的 DMT 总量。
He and Joules moved to a house on a 26-acre ranch back in Evergreen, with a creek flowing through it, elk and bears that would wander across the property, and a cavernous garage where he could set up a new lab.
他和焦尔斯搬到了长青市一座占地 26 英亩的牧场上的一所房子，那里有一条小溪流过，麋鹿和熊会在这片土地上漫步，还有一个巨大的车库，他可以在那里建立一个新的实验室。
Joules helped him with production for a time.
焦尔斯曾一度帮助他进行生产。
When the toxic chemicals got to her, she switched to shipping work.
当有毒化学物质接触到她时，她转而从事运输工作。
He hired more staff and added another lab in Texas in an attempt to decentralize production and shipping and make his operations harder to track.
他雇用了更多员工，并在德克萨斯州增加了另一个实验室，试图分散生产和运输，并使他的业务更难以追踪。
But he was never again as hands-off as he’d been in Hawaii.
但他再也没有像在夏威夷那样放手不管了。
In 2019, Dream Market shut down and German police seized the servers of Wall Street Market , which had been operating out of a Cold War–era bunker near the border with Luxembourg.
2019 年，梦想市场关闭，德国警方查封了华尔街市场的服务器，该服务器一直在靠近卢森堡边境的冷战时期的掩体中运行。
Now Akasha no longer panicked about market takedowns.
现在，阿卡莎不再对市场下跌感到恐慌。
Instead, he set up Shimshai accounts on more than a dozen smaller markets across the dark web, a collection of sites that together produced as many sales as ever but were far harder for law enforcement to track.
相反，他在暗网上的十几个较小市场上建立了 Shimshai 帐户，这些网站的销售额与以往一样多，但执法部门更难追踪。
In early 2020, Akasha heard through friends about more troubling news: His partner with the burned-down barn had been criminally charged.
2020 年初，阿卡莎从朋友那里听到了更令人不安的消息：他与被烧毁的谷仓的合伙人被刑事指控。
The rumor, at least, was that police had learned Akasha’s name, too—whether from clues at the crime scene or from his partner in Evergreen.
至少有传言称，警方也知道了阿卡莎的名字——无论是从犯罪现场的线索还是从他在常青树的搭档那里。
Coinflip reached out to Akasha, to whom he had otherwise stopped speaking, and they met at a restaurant.
Coinflip 联系了阿卡莎，否则他就不再和阿卡莎说话了，他们在一家餐厅见面。
Coinflip warned Akasha to “just stop, bro”—to give up his DMT operation and go legit before the feds caught up with him.
Coinflip 警告阿卡莎“停下来，兄弟”——在联邦政府追上他之前放弃他的 DMT 行动并走上合法道路。
But nothing Akasha’s old friend said could persuade Akasha to relinquish his empire.
但无论阿卡莎的老朋友说什么，都无法说服阿卡莎放弃他的帝国。
“I was drunk on money,” he says.
“我沉迷于金钱，”他说。
When Covid lockdowns hit, Akasha’s wholesale arrangement abruptly ended.
当新冠疫情封锁来袭时，阿卡莎的批发安排突然结束。
Whatever venues the people he called the Family had used to move his DMT had been shut down, they told him.
他们告诉他，那些被他称为“家族”的人用来转移他的 DMT 的场所都已被关闭。
Their sales had dried up.
他们的销售已经枯竭。
Akasha lost a major source of revenue, but he preferred the dark web’s far higher margins anyway.
阿卡莎失去了一个主要收入来源，但无论如何他更喜欢暗网更高的利润。
By this time, DMT powder and DMT vape pens were still Shimshai’s biggest products, but he also sold changa—herbs laced with DMT—LSD, MDMA, and mushrooms.
此时，DMT 粉末和 DMT 电子烟笔仍然是 Shimshai 最大的产品，但他还出售 changa（添加 DMT 的草药）、LSD、MDMA 和蘑菇。
Then in 2021 came another problem, one that threatened Shimshai’s operation at a more fundamental level: His bark source texted Akasha without explanation to say he was out of the business.
然后在 2021 年出现了另一个问题，这个问题在更根本的层面上威胁到 Shimshai 的运营：他的消息来源给 Akasha 发短信，但没有做出任何解释，表示他要退出该业务。
Then he disappeared.
然后他就消失了。
Without this key ingredient, Shimshai’s production was paralyzed.
没有这种关键成分，Shimshai 的生产就会陷入瘫痪。
Akasha began frantically searching for a new source.
阿卡莎开始疯狂地寻找新的来源。
At one point, he simply googled “jurema.” The results showed a town in the northeast of Brazil with that very name.
有一次，他只是在谷歌上搜索了“jurema”。结果显示巴西东北部有一个小镇同名。
A bit more reading confirmed his guess: This was indeed a place where DMT literally grew on trees.
进一步阅读证实了他的猜测：这确实是 DMT 真正生长在树上的地方。
He knew no one in Brazil and spoke no Portuguese.
他在巴西不认识任何人，也不会说葡萄牙语。
On a wild impulse, he bought a plane ticket to Rio De Janeiro.
一时冲动，他买了一张去里约热内卢的机票。
When Akasha arrived in Brazil, he struck up a conversation with the Russian owner of the hostel he was staying at, asking him who might sell jurema preta.
当阿卡沙抵达巴西时，他与所住旅馆的俄罗斯老板攀谈起来，询问他谁可能出售 jurema preta。
The hostel owner showed him an app called Mercado Libre, a kind of Brazilian eBay, where vendors were offering the bark to domestic customers.
旅馆老板向他展示了一款名为 Mercado Libre 的应用程序，类似于巴西 eBay，供应商可以向国内顾客提供树皮。
Akasha asked him to put in an order on one of those vendor pages, then used his account to message the seller and ask to meet.
阿卡莎要求他在其中一个供应商页面下订单，然后使用他的帐户向卖家发送消息并要求见面。
A few days later, he and a new associate, José, stepped out of a Fiat truck and into a forest of gnarled jurema.
几天后，他和一位新同事何塞走出一辆菲亚特卡车，走进了一片粗糙的朱雷马森林。
José walked with him through the trees to a shack where pounds and pounds of jurema inner root bark were laid out to dry on tarps the size of a living room floor.
何塞和他一起穿过树林来到一间小屋，那里放着一磅又一磅的胡雷马内根皮，放在客厅地板大小的防水布上晾干。
Some workers were feeding strips of it into a grinder.
一些工人正在将其条状送入研磨机。
Elsewhere, workers were bagging the powder up for José to take back to the coastal city of Salvador.
在其他地方，工人们正在将粉末装袋，供何塞带回沿海城市萨尔瓦多。
Akasha and José negotiated a price of $26 per kilo, including shipping, compared to the $100 per kilo Akasha had been paying his source in Colorado.
阿卡莎和何塞协商的价格为每公斤 26 美元（包括运费），而阿卡莎向科罗拉多州的货源支付的价格为每公斤 100 美元。
Then he shocked José by ordering a thousand kilos on the spot.
然后他当场订购了一千公斤，这让何塞大吃一惊。
Before his flight home, he saw the full haul, ready to be shipped: 40 boxes of powdered bark, weighing more than a ton in total.
在乘飞机回家之前，他看到了整批货物，准备装运：40箱树皮粉，总重超过一吨。
He had only been in Brazil for 10 days, and he now had a direct connection to all the DMT-producing plant life he could ever need.
他在巴西只待了 10 天，现在他可以直接接触到他可能需要的所有产生 DMT 的植物。
For the next year, as Shimshai sold DMT at a new, fatter profit margin, Akasha and Joules lived larger than ever.
接下来的一年，随着 Shimshai 以新的、更高的利润率出售 DMT，阿卡莎和焦耳的生活比以往任何时候都更加美好。
They moved again and again, always to bigger, nicer houses, eventually ending up in a multimillion-dollar home near the main street of Boulder, right at the foothills of the Flatiron mountains.
他们一次又一次搬家，总是搬到更大、更好的房子，最终在博尔德主要街道附近、熨斗山山麓的一座价值数百万美元的房子里住了下来。
Joules got used to demanding granite countertops and walk-in closets.
焦耳习惯了要求严格的花岗岩台面和步入式衣柜。
“I went through a crazy metamorphosis,” she says, “from dirty hippie to well-kept queen.”
“我经历了一次疯狂的转变，”她说，“从肮脏的嬉皮士变成了井然有序的女王。”
Akasha picked out dresses for Joules and Louis Vuitton jackets for himself.
阿卡莎为自己挑选了 Joules 连衣裙和 Louis Vuitton 夹克。
In spite of pandemic restrictions, they traveled almost nonstop.
尽管有大流行限制，他们几乎不间断地出行。
At one point she told him she had never eaten actual Mexican tacos, and he booked them next-day flights to Puerto Vallarta so she could try the tacos al pastor at his favorite taco stand.
有一次，她告诉他，她从来没有吃过真正的墨西哥炸玉米饼，他为他们预订了第二天飞往巴亚尔塔港的航班，这样她就可以在他最喜欢的炸玉米饼摊位上品尝墨西哥炸玉米饼。
They paid bands to play at their home and threw enormous parties, sometimes so out of control that they resorted to hiring security to man the door.
他们花钱请乐队在家里演奏，举办盛大的派对，有时甚至会失控，以至于不得不雇佣保安把守门口。
Just as Akasha was hitting the zenith of his DMT production and profits—he now had so much access to jurema bark that he even resold it online at a markup—he was also restlessly looking for his next hustle.
正当阿卡莎 (Akasha) 的 DMT 产量和利润达到顶峰时（他现在可以大量获取 Jurema 树皮，甚至在网上加价转售），他也在不安地寻找下一个工作。
He dreamed of moving production to Peru or Brazil, countries where jurema was ubiquitous and he could legally set up giant labs.
他梦想将生产转移到秘鲁或巴西，在这些国家，jurema 无处不在，他可以合法地建立巨型实验室。
Pallets of jurema bark, powdered and shredded, in a storage room at one of Akasha Song’s production facilities.
阿卡莎·宋 (Akasha Song) 生产设施之一的储藏室里存放着一盘托盘的 Jurema 树皮，这些树皮已磨成粉末并切碎。
Yet he’d begun to fear, at the same time, that the dark web’s days were numbered as a venue for drug sales.
但与此同时，他开始担心，暗网作为毒品销售场所的日子已经屈指可数了。
A collection of federal agents known as Joint Criminal Opioid and Darknet Enforcement, or JCODE, had announced sweeping arrests of dozens of dark-web vendors in 2019 and 2020 without ever spelling out how their targets were identified.
被称为阿片类药物和暗网联合刑事执法机构 (JCODE) 的联邦特工组织宣布在 2019 年和 2020 年全面逮捕数十名暗网供应商，但没有详细说明如何识别他们的目标。
Akasha didn’t sell opioids.
阿卡莎不出售阿片类药物。
But he was haunted by a mental image of these agents in a room somewhere working feverishly to track down people like him.
但他脑海中一直萦绕着这样的画面：这些特工在某个房间里疯狂地追捕像他这样的人。
Somehow, all of this led Akasha to adopt his most brazen business model yet.
不知何故，所有这一切导致阿卡莎采用了他迄今为止最厚颜无耻的商业模式。
If he was going to smuggle DMT into the US from a lab in Peru or Brazil, he began to think, why not just become an outright drug smuggler?
如果他打算从秘鲁或巴西的实验室将 DMT 走私到美国，他开始思考，为什么不直接成为一名毒品走私犯呢？
He had made connections in Amsterdam and began to query them about buying drugs wholesale there, in person.
他在阿姆斯特丹建立了联系，并开始亲自询问他们在那里批发药品的情况。
Soon he and some friends were simply flying back and forth to the Netherlands to buy kilos of ketamine, making around $100,000 with every trip.
很快，他和一些朋友就只是往返于荷兰购买数公斤氯胺酮，每次旅行都能赚到大约 10 万美元。
The first visit happened to coincide with a wine festival, so Akasha came up with the idea of dissolving the ketamine he purchased in water, hiding it in wine bottles, then decanting and dehydrating it once he’d got it across US borders.
第一次访问恰逢葡萄酒节，因此阿卡莎想出了一个主意，将他购买的氯胺酮溶解在水中，藏在酒瓶中，然后在跨越美国边境后将其倒出并脱水。
He says he and his friends successfully pulled off more than a half dozen of these runs to Europe and back and were never caught.
他说，他和他的朋友们成功完成了六次往返欧洲的此类跑步活动，而且从未被抓到。
Any vestige of Akasha’s original mission to become the Johnny Appleseed of DMT had disappeared.
阿卡莎最初的使命——成为 DMT 的约翰尼·阿普尔西德（Johnny Appleseed）——的痕迹已经消失。
Now he was, instead, a fully diversified drug dealer.
现在他是一个完全多元化的毒贩。
Joules could sense that Akasha was feeling the risks of his profession more than ever: She says he sometimes seemed uncharacteristically anxious or slept badly, and they began to lose friends who could feel the danger Akasha was courting.
焦尔斯可以感觉到阿卡莎比以往任何时候都更感受到自己职业的风险：她说，他有时似乎异常焦虑或睡不好，他们开始失去能够感受到阿卡莎正在追求的危险的朋友。
“I think everyone could see the roller coaster coming to an end,” Joules says.
“我认为每个人都可以看到过山车即将结束，”焦尔斯说。
“He was just living this untouchable lifestyle.
“他只是过着这种贱民的生活方式。
To be fair, he is one of the luckiest people I’ve ever met.
公平地说，他是我见过的最幸运的人之一。
But luck runs out.”
但运气已经耗尽了。”
One day in April of 2022, not long after Akasha and Joules had returned to Boulder from a trip to Europe, he got a text message from his cousin who lived just outside Houston.
2022 年 4 月的一天，阿卡莎和焦尔斯从欧洲旅行回到博尔德后不久，他收到了一条来自住在休斯顿郊外的表弟的短信。
“Hey!
“嘿！
FedEx just left a bunch of boxes outside,” she wrote.
联邦快递刚刚在外面留下了一堆盒子，”她写道。
“From Brazil.”
“来自巴西。”
The shipment contained nearly 200 kilos of jurema tree bark from José—nine heavy boxes sitting at his cousin’s front door.
这批货物包含来自 José 的近 200 公斤 Jurema 树皮——九个沉重的箱子放在他表弟的前门。
She and Akasha had an arrangement: He paid her to serve as a shipping point for the bark, which would then be picked up by another person and taken to a sprawling production lab in a garage across the city.
她和阿卡莎做了一个安排：他付钱给她，让她作为树皮的运输点，然后由另一个人接走，并带到整个城市车库里的一个庞大的生产实验室。
But this particular shipment was unexpected.
但这批货物却出乎意料。
José had sent it as a freebie after Akasha complained about sloppy packaging on previous bark orders and threatened to switch to a new source in Peru.
在阿卡莎抱怨之前的树皮订单包装不严，并威胁要转向秘鲁的新来源后，何塞将其作为免费赠品发送。
Usually he had José ship to a fake name.
通常他让何塞船用假名字。
But this unsolicited package was addressed to “Akasha, Raw Brazil Cosmetics.”
但这个主动提供的包裹是寄给“Akasha，Raw Brazil Cosmetics”的。
An evidence photo of the phone of Akasha Song’s cousin, showing a picture of bags of powdered jurema bark that had been delivered to her doorstep.
阿卡莎·宋（Akasha Song）表弟的手机证据照片，显示了一张被送到她家门口的袋装朱雷玛树皮粉的照片。
He called his “cook” in Houston, a man who goes by the name Blake Puzzles—the same friend who had first taken him to the String Cheese Incident concert near Denver that had changed the course of his life a decade earlier, now a member of the Shimshai operation.
他称自己在休斯敦的“厨师”为布莱克·普兹尔斯（Blake Puzzles），正是这位朋友第一次带他去参加丹佛附近的“奶酪串事件”音乐会，十年前改变了他的人生轨迹，他现在是 Shimshai 组织的成员。
Puzzles got in his van, a Japanese-import Nissan Homy, and drove over to make the pickup.
拼图坐上他的面包车，一辆日本进口的日产Homy，开过去接皮卡。
When he arrived at the cousin’s house, Puzzles noticed that a black Dodge Caravan was parked on the street nearby with one wheel up on the curb, which struck him as a bit strange.
当他到达表弟家时，拼图注意到附近的街道上停着一辆黑色的道奇大篷车，一个轮子停在路边，这让他觉得有点奇怪。
Feeling nervous, he moved quickly to pack the bark boxes into his van and drove off, heading for the lab.
他感到紧张，赶紧把树皮盒子装进货车，然后开车前往实验室。
A few minutes later, Puzzles noticed not one but two Chevy Tahoes in the rearview mirror.
几分钟后，普兹尔斯注意到后视镜中不是一辆而是两辆雪佛兰 Tahoe。
They seemed to be following him.
他们似乎在跟踪他。
Spooked, he pulled into the parking lot of a grocery store.
他吓坏了，把车开进一家杂货店的停车场。
His van was immediately surrounded by at least a dozen vehicles, out of which emerged local police and an even more alarming badge: Department of Homeland Security.
他的货车立即被至少十几辆车包围，其中出现了当地警察和一个更令人震惊的徽章：国土安全部。
They cuffed Puzzles, took his phone, drove him to an unmarked building, and left him in a cinder-block room with a two-way mirror.
他们给拼图戴上了手铐，拿走了他的手机，开车送他到一栋没有标记的建筑物，然后把他留在一个带有双向镜子的煤渣砖房间里。
The entire delivery and pickup, Puzzles and Akasha would later learn, had been a sting.
谜题和阿卡莎后来得知，整个送货和取货过程都是一次刺痛。
Federal investigators had intercepted the jurema bark boxes on their way from Brazil, delivered them to Akasha’s cousin, and then paid her a visit in which they strongly suggested she cooperate with them to avoid prosecution.
联邦调查人员在从巴西运来的途中截获了 Jurema 树皮箱，将它们交给了阿卡莎的表弟，然后拜访了她，并强烈建议她与他们合作以避免受到起诉。
All but one of the boxes Puzzles had picked up were in fact full of sand they’d swapped out for the bark.
事实上，除了一个谜题捡起的盒子外，所有盒子里都装满了他们用树皮换掉的沙子。
He’d been watched since he left his home.
自从他离开家以来，他就一直受到监视。
In that cinder-block room, Puzzles was questioned by a Homeland Security agent.
在那间煤渣砖房里，国土安全部特工对拼图进行了盘问。
When the agent asked Puzzles if he knew who “Akasha” was, he answered that Akasha was a blonde girl who’d flashed him after a show he played with his band at a music venue a few days prior.
当经纪人问 Puzzles 是否知道“阿卡莎”是谁时，他回答说阿卡莎是一个金发女孩，几天前他在音乐场所与乐队一起演出后，她向他展示了她的身影。
As Puzzles told it, Akasha had then texted him to ask that he pick up some boxes for her.
正如谜题所说，阿卡莎随后给他发短信，要求他为她取一些盒子。
He’d agreed, naturally, in the hopes of getting laid.
他自然同意了，希望能上床。
The agent suggested to him that this story was, in fact, bullshit.
经纪人向他暗示，这个故事实际上是一派胡言。
He offered Puzzles a chance to cooperate.
他向 Puzzles 提供了合作的机会。
Puzzles responded that he didn’t know what the agent was talking about.
Puzzles 回应称，他不知道经纪人在说什么。
After what felt like an hour, he was released.
大约一个小时后，他被释放了。
He ran several miles back to his van in the midst of a rainstorm and drove to a friend’s house.
他在暴风雨中跑了几英里回到自己的货车，然后开车去了朋友家。
As Puzzles’ arrest and interrogation unfolded, meanwhile, Akasha had gotten a phone call from his cousin.
与此同时，拼图的逮捕和审讯展开，阿卡莎接到了他表弟的电话。
She asked him why cops had swarmed her home.
她问他为什么警察涌入她家。
Akasha, rattled, insisted that the bark he’d shipped to her was legal.
阿卡莎惊慌失措，坚称他运给她的树皮是合法的。
It was just what he did with it that was illegal.
他用它所做的事情才是非法的。
“What the hell you think I’ve been doing for my whole life, the last, like, 10 years?” he told her on the phone.
“你以为我这辈子，比如过去十年，都在做什么？”他在电话里告诉她。
“You know what I do.”
“你知道我做什么。”
In fact, agents were still there, in his cousin’s home, listening in on the call, which she had made at their instruction.
事实上，特工们仍在他表弟的家里，监听着她按照他们的指示拨打的电话。
Akasha told his cousin not to talk to the cops—not knowing she already had—and promised to pay for her lawyer.
阿卡莎告诉他的表弟不要跟警察说话——不知道她已经这么做了——并承诺支付她的律师费用。
He advised her to delete every communication they had ever had.
他建议她删除他们曾经有过的所有通讯。
Then he hurriedly put Shimshai into “vacation mode” across all the dark web markets.
然后他赶紧让 Shimshai 在所有暗网市场上进入“休假模式”。
“We are closed,” he later wrote on the profile pages.
“我们已经关门了，”他后来在个人资料页面上写道。
“Hurry and leave before the AI gets you.”
“在人工智能抓到你之前赶紧离开。”
Soon after, he got a call from Puzzles, who had ridden his bicycle to a Verizon store to get a new phone and to have the phone carrier remotely wipe the one seized by the feds.
不久之后，他接到了 Puzzles 的电话，Puzzles 骑着自行车去 Verizon 商店买一部新手机，并让电话运营商远程擦除联邦调查局扣押的手机。
Both men were deeply anxious, in damage control mode.
两人都非常焦虑，处于损害控制模式。
But it was just bark, after all, wasn’t it?
但这毕竟只是吠叫，不是吗？
Not actual DMT.
不是真正的 DMT。
And maybe, they told each other, the agents had bought Puzzles’ story.
他们互相告诉对方，也许特工们已经相信了拼图的故事。
They had not bought it.
他们没有买它。
In reality, they had been closing in on Akasha for years.
事实上，他们多年来一直在逼近阿卡莎。
Homeland Security, court documents would later show, had first learned the name Shimshai in a tip shared with the agency in 2017.
法庭文件后来显示，国土安全部在 2017 年向该机构分享的一份线报中首次得知 Shimshai 这个名字。
The source, who has never been revealed, went as far as linking that secret handle to a PO Box in Nederland, Colorado, which was connected to the address where Akasha, his housemates, and Oliver the ring-tailed lemur had lived.
从未透露的消息来源甚至将这个秘密手柄与科罗拉多州尼德兰的一个邮政信箱联系起来，该邮政信箱与阿卡莎、他的室友和环尾狐猴奥利弗居住的地址相连。
For the department, an upstart DMT dealer was less of a priority than the dark web’s purveyors of cocaine, fentanyl, and heroin.
对于该部门来说，新兴的 DMT 经销商不如暗网的可卡因、芬太尼和海洛因供应商更重要。
But after that tip, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) created an alert for the name Akasha Song.
但在收到该消息后，国土安全调查局 (HSI) 针对阿卡莎·宋 (Akasha Song) 这个名字创建了警报。
Four years later, in the fall of 2021, when José mistakenly shipped a kilogram of bark from Brazil to a customer in Brooklyn with Akasha’s phone number on it, the alert was triggered—just as it would be again six months later when José sent the shipment to Akasha’s cousin.
四年后，即 2021 年秋天，当何塞错误地将一公斤树皮从巴西运送给布鲁克林的一位客户（上面有阿卡莎的电话号码）时，警报被触发——就像六个月后何塞将货物寄给阿卡莎的表弟时再次触发的那样。
Those alerts were enough to persuade Kevin Vassighi, an investigator who had joined HSI’s Denver field office in 2020, to check out Shimshai’s accounts on the dark web.
这些警报足以说服 2020 年加入 HSI 丹佛办事处的调查员凯文·瓦西吉 (Kevin Vassighi) 检查 Shimshai 在暗网上的账户。
Vassighi, a central-casting federal agent with a square jaw, square shoulders, and a high-and-tight haircut, was surprised by the variety and scale of Shimshai’s psychedelic sales.
瓦西吉 (Vassighi) 是一位中央选角的联邦特工，有着方下巴、方肩、留着又高又紧的发型，他对希姆赛迷幻剂销售的多样性和规模感到惊讶。
He noted that the dealer sometimes used the avatar of Rafiki, the monkey from The Lion King , and connected that image with local news articles about Akasha’s lemur.
他指出，经销商有时会使用《狮子王》中的猴子拉菲基的化身，并将该图像与当地有关阿卡莎狐猴的新闻报道联系起来。
Vassighi was particularly disturbed to see Shimshai offering DMT vape pens.
瓦西吉尤其不安地看到 Shimshai 提供 DMT 电子烟笔。
Vapes, in Vassighi’s mind, were for teenagers.
在瓦西吉看来，电子烟是为青少年设计的。
“That indicated to me that he was selling to a more youthful audience,” Vassighi says.
“这向我表明，他正在向更年轻的受众推销产品，”瓦西吉说。
“We’re trying to protect kids.”
“我们正在努力保护孩子。”
A cryptocurrency tracing chart used as evidence to support Akasha Song’s criminal charges.
用作支持 Akasha Song 刑事指控的证据的加密货币追踪图表。
By the spring of 2022, HSI was tracking the location of Akasha’s phone, following him as he drove his new Tesla around Boulder, and watching his home from a camera on a nearby telephone pole.
到 2022 年春天，HSI 开始追踪阿卡莎手机的位置，跟踪他驾驶着他的新特斯拉在博尔德周围行驶，并通过附近电线杆上的摄像头监视他的家。
Agents had dug through Akasha’s trash and found Shimshai’s trademark DMT packaging, the logo of a head with a rainbow pouring out of it.
特工们翻遍了阿卡莎的垃圾，发现了 Shimshai 的 DMT 包装商标，这是一个带有彩虹的头像标志。
And despite Akasha’s alleged attempts at money laundering, they had traced his cryptocurrency to show what they believed to be transactions indirectly flowing into Akasha’s account on the crypto payment service BitPay from half a dozen dark-web markets.
尽管阿卡莎涉嫌企图洗钱，但他们还是追踪到了他的加密货币，显示他们认为是从六个暗网市场间接流入阿卡莎在加密支付服务 BitPay 上的账户的交易。
“He has a crunchy vibe.
“他有一种脆脆的氛围。
He has a lot of money.
他有很多钱。
He doesn’t seem to go to work,” Vassighi recalls thinking.
他似乎没有去上班，”瓦西吉回忆道。
“A lot of stuff was pointing us in the direction of Joseph Clements”—enough that by June of that year they’d obtained a warrant to search his home.
“很多东西都在为我们指明约瑟夫·克莱门茨的方向”——到了当年六月，他们就获得了搜查他家的搜查令。
When Akasha heard the banging on the door, he was just sitting down in his bedroom to eat some pad thai and watch Netflix.
当阿卡莎听到敲门声时，他正坐在卧室里一边吃泰式炒河粉一边看 Netflix。
He and Joules had been fighting, so she was decompressing alone upstairs.
他和焦耳一直在吵架，所以她一个人在楼上减压。
She ran down to the first floor to see who was making such a commotion.
她跑到一楼，想看看到底是谁闹得这么大。
By then, Akasha had a sense of exactly who had come knocking.
这时，阿卡莎已经知道是谁来敲门了。
He looked over to the couch and considered the two long, flat safes under it: One was full of money.
他看向沙发，看了看下面的两个又长又平的保险箱：其中一个装满了钱。
The other was full of drugs.
另一个装满了毒品。
He grabbed the one full of drugs and quickly ran into the unfinished space over the garage.
他抓起装满毒品的那张，飞快地跑进了车库上方未完工的空间。
He hurriedly hid the safe under the insulation there.
他赶紧把保险箱藏到了那里的保温层下面。
Inside was changa, DMT powder and vape pens, ketamine, LSD, MDMA, and mushrooms.
里面有changa、DMT粉末和电子烟笔、氯胺酮、LSD、MDMA和蘑菇。
Then he went back to his bedroom, picked up his takeout container of pad thai, and began to slowly walk down the stairs, trying to affect the attitude of a fully unbothered, innocent person.
然后他回到自己的卧室，拿起外卖的泰式炒河粉，开始慢慢走下楼梯，试图表现出一种完全无忧无虑、天真的态度。
On some level, he felt, his invincibility might still be intact.
他觉得，在某种程度上，他的无敌可能仍然完好无损。
Maybe, even now, the medicine was protecting him.
也许，即使是现在，药物也在保护他。
He came to the front door and found several rifles pointed at him by men in masks and camouflage.
他来到前门，发现戴着面具和迷彩服的男子用几把步枪指着他。
They cuffed him, dragged him outside, and put him in the grass.
他们给他戴上手铐，把他拖到外面，然后把他放在草地上。
Joules and a housemate who sometimes worked in Akasha’s DMT operation were already laid out on the other side of the yard.
焦耳和一位有时在阿卡莎 DMT 部门工作的室友已经躺在院子的另一边。
Akasha says he caught Joules’ eyes from across the lawn, trying to silently signal to her with his expression not to talk to the agents.
阿卡莎说，他从草坪对面看到了焦尔斯的目光，试图用他的表情默默地向她发出信号，不要与特工交谈。
The agents and police searched the house for hours.
特工和警察搜查了房子几个小时。
Once the initial entry team had swept the building for anyone still hiding, Vassighi came in to join the search, looking over the interior of Akasha’s home appraisingly.
当最初的进入小组清扫了整栋大楼，寻找仍然藏匿的人后，瓦西吉也加入了搜索行列，评价地审视着阿卡莎家的内部。
“It was definitely on the nicer end of narcotics houses I’ve entered,” Vassighi says, before adding disdainfully that it “smelled like hippies lived there.”
瓦西吉说：“这绝对是我去过的毒品屋中最好的一端。”然后轻蔑地补充道，“闻起来就像嬉皮士住在那里一样”。
After scouring the home and seizing all of Akasha’s electronic devices—somehow, amazingly, agents never found the stash of drugs Akasha had hidden—Vassighi took each member of the household into a bedroom for questioning, one by one.
在搜查了家里并没收了阿卡莎的所有电子设备后——令人惊讶的是，特工们从未发现阿卡莎藏匿的毒品——瓦西吉把家里的每一位成员都带到一间卧室接受讯问，一一询问。
Joules refused to talk without a lawyer present and was released.
焦尔斯拒绝在没有律师在场的情况下说话并被释放。
Akasha’s housemate, on the other hand, spent around 30 minutes in the room with the interrogators.
另一方面，阿卡莎的室友与审讯者在房间里呆了大约 30 分钟。
Joules and Akasha would later learn he had told them virtually everything he knew.
焦尔斯和阿卡莎后来得知他几乎告诉了他们他所知道的一切。
Akasha, when it was his turn, also demanded a lawyer.
轮到阿卡莎时，他也要求请律师。
So Vassighi and his fellow agents piled their suspect into an SUV, with Vassighi up front.
于是瓦西吉和他的特工同事们把嫌疑人塞进了一辆SUV，瓦西吉在前面。
Throughout, Akasha had maintained a serene calm and was now even ready to joke with his captors.
自始至终，阿卡莎都保持着平静，现在甚至准备与绑架者开玩笑。
“How about you guys let me out,” he told Vassighi with his usual wide-eyed grin, “and you’ll never hear from me again.”
“你们让我出去怎么样？”他带着一如既往的睁大眼睛笑着对瓦西吉说，“这样你们就再也不会收到我的消息了。”
“You’re not getting out of this car,” Vassighi says he responded.
“你不能离开这辆车，”瓦西吉说他回答道。
As they drove toward the jail, though, Vassighi says he felt he should keep Akasha talking.
然而，当他们驱车前往监狱时，瓦西吉说他觉得他应该让阿卡莎继续说话。
He knew he couldn’t ask Akasha about anything illegal after he had invoked his Miranda rights.
他知道在援引米兰达权利后，他不能向阿卡莎询问任何违法的事情。
But he still tried to make conversation.
但他仍然试图交谈。
“Hey man,” he asked, thinking of a genuine question that had been in his head since he first entered Akasha’s house.
“嘿，伙计，”他问，想到了自从他第一次进入阿卡莎家以来一直在他脑海中思考的一个真正的问题。
“Where’s the lemur?”
“狐猴在哪儿？”
Akasha was denied bail.
阿卡莎被拒绝保释。
Prosecutors pointed out that he’d traveled to 15 countries in just the last five years and was sure to flee the US if he wasn’t held in custody.
检察官指出，他在过去五年内去过 15 个国家，如果不被拘留，他肯定会逃离美国。
They were right.
他们是对的。
“If they had given me a bond,” Akasha says, “I would have definitely left.”
“如果他们给我保证金，”阿卡莎说，“我肯定会离开。”
He settled into life behind bars.
他开始了监狱生活。
He says his cellmate, for a time, was a biker gang leader named Havoc who had, on the outside, enjoyed mixing DMT with meth, and so took Akasha under his wing.
他说，他的狱友曾经是一个名叫 Havoc 的摩托帮头目，从表面上看，他喜欢将 DMT 与冰毒混合在一起，因此将阿卡莎纳入自己的保护之下。
Others would later pay Akasha as much as $100 an hour for offline lessons in using the dark web and cryptocurrency.
其他人后来向阿卡莎支付每小时 100 美元的费用，用于使用暗网和加密货币的线下课程。
Akasha faced felony charges of conspiracy to possess, manufacture, and distribute an illegal drug—specifically about 300 kilos of a Schedule I controlled substance.
阿卡莎面临共谋持有、制造和分销非法毒品（具体是约 300 公斤附表 I 管制物质）的重罪指控。
That was the total weight of the two shipments of bark intercepted by authorities, which was described in the criminal complaint against Akasha as simply “unprocessed DMT.” Akasha learned that, legal though jurema bark may be, this particular quantity of it had been made illegal by his intent to manufacture it into DMT.
这是当局截获的两批树皮的总重量，在针对阿卡莎的刑事起诉书中将其描述为“未经加工的 DMT”。阿卡莎了解到，虽然 Jurema 树皮可能是合法的，但由于他打算将其制造成 DMT，所以这一特定数量的树皮已被定为非法。
If convicted of all the charges, Akasha could spend as much as 40 years in prison.
如果所有指控均成立，阿卡莎可能会被判入狱 40 年。
On his attorney’s advice, Akasha decided to accept a plea agreement.
根据律师的建议，阿卡莎决定接受认罪协议。
He says prosecutors floated the possibility of a shorter sentence in exchange for information on his customers, partners, suppliers, or staff, but he refused.
他说，检察官提出了缩短刑期的可能性，以换取有关他的客户、合作伙伴、供应商或员工的信息，但他拒绝了。
Vassighi contends there was little the government didn't already know.
瓦西吉声称，政府几乎已经知道了一切。
After Akasha had been in jail for six months, awaiting sentencing, his attorney made the argument that likely saved him from spending the rest of his life behind bars: Jurema bark might contain DMT, his lawyer told the court and prosecutors, but was not itself DMT.
阿卡莎入狱六个月等待宣判后，他的律师提出了一个论点，这可能使他免于在监狱中度过余生：他的律师告诉法庭和检察官，Jurema 树皮可能含有 DMT，但本身并不是 DMT。
The real weight of controlled substance in those 300 kilograms ought to be whatever small amount of actual N,N-Dimethyltryptamine Akasha planned to extract.
这 300 公斤受控物质的实际重量应该是阿卡莎计划提取的实际 N,N-二甲基色胺的少量。
The Drug Enforcement Administration did its own test to determine what the actual percentage of DMT in Akasha’s jurema bark had been.
缉毒局进行了自己的测试，以确定阿卡莎 Jurema 树皮中 DMT 的实际百分比是多少。
The answer: less than 1 percent.
答案是：不到百分之一。
(Akasha privately scoffed that his labs could have gotten much more than that out of the bark, but he didn’t argue.) Suddenly the weight of illegal drugs at the core of his indictment dropped from around 300 kilos to roughly 3.
（阿卡莎私下嘲笑说，他的实验室本来可以从树皮中得到更多的东西，但他没有争辩。）突然间，他起诉书的核心非法药物的重量从大约 300 公斤下降到大约 3 公斤。
Even after that stunning win, Akasha might still have faced decades in prison.
即使在那次惊人的胜利之后，阿卡莎可能仍面临数十年的监禁。
But he’d had another incredible stroke of good fortune: The state of Colorado, where Akasha was being tried, had just voted to decriminalize a broad swath of psychedelics, including psilocybin, mescaline—and DMT.
但他又遇到了另一件令人难以置信的好运：阿卡莎正在接受审判的科罗拉多州刚刚投票决定将大量致幻剂合法化，包括裸盖菇素、麦司卡林和 DMT。
For so many years of his career as a drug dealer, he’d been told the medicine was protected by a higher power.
在他多年的毒贩生涯中，他被告知这种药物受到更高力量的保护。
Now, with a kind of uncanny timing, it actually was.
现在，在一种不可思议的时机，它确实是这样。
By the day of Akasha’s sentencing in February of 2023, the substance he’d been convicted of manufacturing and selling was no longer a crime to use or own in his home state.
到 2023 年 2 月阿卡莎被判刑之日，他因制造和销售而被定罪的物质在他的家乡使用或拥有不再构成犯罪。
Technically, that change didn't apply to selling and shouldn’t have made any difference to Akasha’s federal case.
从技术上讲，这一变化不适用于销售，也不应该对阿卡莎的联邦案件产生任何影响。
In reality, he says, it entirely changed the tone of both the prosecution and the judge in the hearing that determined his fate.
他说，事实上，这完全改变了决定他命运的听证会中检方和法官的语气。
He was given 24 months, a third of which he’d already served.
他的刑期为 24 个月，其中三分之一他已经服完。
After another eight months, he was out on probation.
又过了八个月，他被缓刑了。
Even Akasha himself couldn’t believe his luck.
就连阿卡莎自己都不敢相信自己的运气。
If Akasha Song could go back in time and do it all again, he says, he would.
他说，如果阿卡莎·宋能够回到过去并重来一遍，他会的。
In February of this year, about 18 months after his release from prison, I meet Akasha Song in a house just down the street from the one where he was arrested.
今年 2 月，也就是他出狱大约 18 个月后，我在阿卡莎·宋被捕地点附近的一所房子里见到了他。
All of the money from his time as a DMT kingpin was spent or seized, so Akasha has mostly been living with his mom in Texas or in an RV since he got out.
他作为 DMT 头目获得的所有钱都被花掉或没收，因此阿卡莎出狱后大部分时间都和他的妈妈住在德克萨斯州或住在房车里。
But he has received permission from his probation officer to meet me here in Boulder, in his natural habitat, where he’s staying with a wealthy friend and supporter—a fan of DMT with psychedelic paintings and 5-foot-tall crystals positioned throughout the house.
但他已经得到缓刑官的许可，可以在博尔德的自然栖息地与我会面，在那里他和一位富有的朋友兼支持者住在一起，这位朋友是 DMT 的粉丝，房子里到处都是迷幻的绘画和 5 英尺高的水晶。
It’s just after 7 pm when we sit down together at the kitchen counter, and the sun has set behind the mountains.
当我们一起坐在厨房柜台前时，已经是晚上七点多了，太阳已经落到山后了。
We talk through his biography, including episodes I thought might be too sensitive to speak about on the phone, from his father’s abuse, to his first wife’s death, to his second wife leaving him with their daughter, to his time in prison.
我们讨论了他的传记，包括我认为可能过于敏感而无法在电话中谈论的情节，从他父亲的虐待，到他第一任妻子的死亡，到他的第二任妻子离开他和女儿，再到他在监狱里的时光。
After five years together, he and Joules have broken up too.
在一起五年后，他和焦尔斯也分手了。
Joules told me that, after Akasha’s arrest, she found out she was pregnant.
焦尔斯告诉我，阿卡莎被捕后，她发现自己怀孕了。
Alone and terrified about the future, she had an abortion that he didn’t learn about until later.
由于孤独和对未来的恐惧，她流产了，直到后来他才知道。
He has yet to forgive her.
他还没有原谅她。
He shares each of these chapters in his life story with the same open, cheerful equanimity.
他以同样开放、愉快的平静来分享他人生故事中的每一章。
I point out that it all seems to contradict his notion of himself as invincible, the sense of spiritual protection he has maintained in his role as medicine man.
我指出，这一切似乎都与他认为自己所向无敌的观念相矛盾，也与他作为巫师角色所保持的精神保护感相矛盾。
In reality, he’s had a pretty rough life.
事实上，他的生活相当坎坷。
He disagrees.
他不同意。
“Every time I go to the grocery store, the front parking spot’s empty,” Akasha says, grinning.
“每次我去杂货店，前面的停车位都是空的，”阿卡莎笑着说道。
“And that happens to me in every situation.
“这种情况在任何情况下都会发生在我身上。
Right before I get sentenced, they change the law.
就在我被判刑之前，他们改变了法律。
What the fuck?” If he could go back in time and do it all again, he says, he would.
搞什么鬼？他说，如果他能回到过去并重来一次，他会的。
I ask him where he thinks that inhumanly optimistic outlook comes from, and he answers that it was part of the lesson of his psychedelic experiences—particularly the breakthrough DMT trip in which the light-based entities invited him to wake up from the dream of his life.
我问他这种非人性的乐观前景从何而来，他回答说这是他迷幻经历的教训的一部分——特别是突破性的 DMT 之旅，其中基于光的实体邀请他从一生的梦想中醒来。
That helped embolden him to take ever-greater risks, he says.
他说，这让他更有勇气去承担更大的风险。
“I’m not going to die and go to hell or die and go to heaven,” he says.
“我不会死后去地狱，也不会死后去天堂，”他说。
“It’s a play.
“这是一场戏。
It’s just God having a good time being everything.”
这只是上帝在享受一切。”
As Akasha explains this to me, I nod along despite having very little idea what he’s talking about.
当阿卡莎向我解释这一点时，我点点头，尽管我不太明白他在说什么。
But he later sends me a YouTube link to an excerpt of a 1969 lecture by Alan Watts, the British writer focused on Eastern philosophy, mysticism, and psychedelics.
但后来他给我发了一个 YouTube 链接，内容是英国作家艾伦·瓦茨 (Alan Watts) 1969 年的演讲摘录，艾伦·瓦茨是一位专注于东方哲学、神秘主义和迷幻药的英国作家。
In the clip, Watts poses a thought experiment: Imagine that you are God and can experience whatever you’d like.
在视频中，瓦茨提出了一个思想实验：想象你是上帝，可以体验你想要的任何东西。
After several lifetimes of pure pleasure and wish fulfillment, maybe you would choose to have more adventurous dreams, less and less in your own control, an infinite number of times.
在几世的纯粹快乐和愿望实现之后，也许你会选择有更多冒险的梦想，越来越不受你自己的控制，无数次。
“Finally you would dream where you are now,” Watts says.
“最后你会梦想自己现在在哪里，”瓦茨说。
“You would dream the dream of living the life you are actually living today.
“你会梦想过上你今天实际过的生活。
That would be within the infinite multiplicity of choices you would have.
那将是在你拥有的无限多种选择之内。
Of playing that you weren’t God.”
假装你不是上帝。”
This is, in fact, what Akasha means by the name he chose for himself, he tells me in his friend’s kitchen: the notion that he and his many DMT customers and his abusive father and Homeland Security Investigations agent Kevin Vassighi and you and I are all facets of God, pretending we are not.
事实上，这就是阿卡莎为自己选择的名字的含义，他在朋友的厨房里告诉我：他和他的许多 DMT 客户、他的虐待狂父亲和国土安全调查特工凯文·瓦西吉以及你和我都是上帝的侧面，但假装我们不是。
That idea, revealed to him by his own homemade N,N,dimethyltryptamine coursing through his brain, changed everything for him.
他自制的 N,N,二甲基色胺在他的大脑中流过，向他揭示了这个想法，改变了他的一切。
“It helped me just play ,” he says.
“这对我的演奏很有帮助，”他说。
“And that made life so much richer.”
“这让生活变得更加丰富。”
“Even before I had the money, even if I never had the money,” Akasha tells me, smiling, staring at me with the wide, blue eyes of a true believer, “I was free.”
“即使在我有钱之前，即使我从来没有钱，”阿卡莎微笑着告诉我，用真正信徒的大蓝眼睛盯着我，“我是自由的。”
Let us know what you think about this article.
让我们知道您对这篇文章的看法。
Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com .
通过 mail@wired.com 向编辑提交一封信。
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3 名青少年差点逃脱谋杀。
Then Police Found Their Google Searches
然后警方发现了他们的谷歌搜索
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We 3D-Printed Luigi Mangione’s Ghost Gun.
我们 3D 打印了 Luigi Mangione 的幽灵枪。
It Was Entirely Legal
这是完全合法的