TAMPA — One afternoon in late November, security personnel at Tampa International Airport noticed something peculiar in a baggage X-ray: four one-liter bottles wrapped in plastic, each with a broken seal, holding a brown liquid with the consistency of mud.
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The South American brew is a mixture of two plants that contain a substance called DMT — or dimethyltryptamine — which, when ingested, causes psychedelic sensations. Native people of the Amazon basin have used it for hundreds of years as a spiritual medicine in religious ceremonies.

In the United States, DMT is illegal. But its relative scarcity in North America, and its connection to genuine religious practices, makes it difficult for the government to treat it the same as common narcotics.

"To my knowledge, there has never been a successful prosecution of an ayahuasca case in the United States," said Charles Grob, a professor of psychiatry and bio behavioral sciences at the University of California-Los Angeles.