Rick Strassman’s DMT research at the University of New Mexico: design, findings and why it ended

THE SHORT VERSION · SWIPE

▶ Watch it as a 20-second video

‹›

Rick Strassman’s studies in Albuquerque produced the most-quoted measurements of DMT’s time course and a new rating scale for hallucinogen effects. Through his later book, they also fed ideas that later research did not support. This article separates the published science from his later interpretations, and his own accounts of why the work stopped from the stories told about it.

Who is Rick Strassman?

Rick Strassman is an American psychiatrist. After medical training in New York and California, he joined the psychiatry department of the University of New Mexico School of Medicine in 1984, where his group first studied the pineal hormone melatonin. He reached the rank of tenured associate professor before leaving in 1995 (Strassman, biography). He has written several books, including DMT: The Spirit Molecule (2000) and DMT and the Soul of Prophecy (2014), and later co-authored laboratory studies of DMT in the rat brain (Dean et al., 2019). Evidence: established.

He chose DMT partly because it is found in the human body. In his own words, he was drawn to the possibility that excess DMT made by the pineal gland might underlie naturally occurring “psychedelic” states such as birth, death and near-death, psychosis and mystical experiences (Strassman, book page). He also states that a decade-long relationship with a Zen Buddhist training monastery shaped how the team prepared and supervised volunteers. Those were his motivations. The study itself was designed to ask basic pharmacological questions. Evidence: his own account.

How did the study get approved?

Strassman describes his project as the first new human research with psychedelics in the United States in over 20 years (Strassman, book page). He described how he applied for and received federal permission to give DMT to people, and the obstacles along the way, in a 1991 paper. He concluded that further human research was possible with persistent, collaborative work with the institutions that oversee it (Strassman, 1991). Evidence: established.

His university gave the protocol the number 89-001, and he notes that it had to rest on a sound scientific foundation and ask only basic questions (Strassman, chapter summaries). The DMT itself was made for the first study by the Purdue chemist David Nichols (Strassman, MAPS, 1995). Evidence: established.

How was the Strassman DMT study designed?

The core of the programme was a set of controlled studies in healthy, experienced volunteers. Each step built on the last:

1. Screening and selection: healthy volunteers who had used psychedelics before, so that the drug state would not be wholly new to them.
2. Dose-response, biological measures: 11 volunteers received several doses of intravenous DMT and a saline placebo, in random order, double-blind, at least a week apart, while blood pressure, heart rate, pupil size, temperature and hormones were measured (Strassman and Qualls, 1994).
3. Dose-response, subjective measures: 12 volunteers were interviewed in detail after each session and completed a new questionnaire, the Hallucinogen Rating Scale, drafted from interviews with 19 other experienced DMT users (Strassman et al., 1994).
4. Tolerance: 13 volunteers received four closely spaced doses, 30 minutes apart, or placebo, on separate days, double-blind, to see whether effects weakened with repetition (Strassman et al., 1996).

Each step is from the published abstracts (Strassman and Qualls, 1994; Strassman et al., 1994; Strassman et al., 1996). The doses are in the papers and are deliberately not reproduced here. In the subjective-effects study, volunteers first received two doses non-blind before entering the double-blind phase, so the blinding was partial (Strassman et al., 1994). Evidence: established.

How many volunteers took part?

About 60 volunteers received about 400 doses, by Strassman’s own count. Over the five years, he writes, he gave approximately 400 doses of DMT to 60 volunteers (Strassman, book page); his chapter summaries say sixty volunteers received nearly 400 doses (Strassman, chapter summaries). In a 2024 interview he referred to “fifty-five or so” normal volunteers (Psychedelic Medicine Podcast, 2024). These totals are his own figures, not counts reported in a paper, and they describe doses, not people: the often repeated “400 volunteers” is wrong. His programme later included psilocybin, to a lesser extent (Strassman, biography). Evidence: preliminary, as self-reported totals.

What did the 1994 papers find?

The first paper measured the body. Peak DMT blood levels and subjective effects came within 2 minutes and were negligible at 30. DMT raised blood pressure, heart rate, pupil diameter and body temperature in a dose-dependent way, and raised blood levels of beta-endorphin, corticotropin, cortisol and prolactin. Growth hormone rose equally at all doses, and melatonin, the pineal gland’s main hormone, was unaffected. The authors concluded that DMT could be given safely to experienced hallucinogen users under these conditions (Strassman and Qualls, 1994). Evidence: established for these measures in this small, screened, monitored sample.

The second paper described the mind. Effects began almost immediately, peaked at 90–120 seconds and were almost completely resolved by 30 minutes, tracking blood levels. At the higher doses, volunteers described a rapidly moving, brightly coloured visual display; a brief, overwhelming “rush” with a sense of loss of control; and a dissociated state in which euphoria and anxiety alternated or coexisted. The effects replaced ongoing mental experience and were described as more vivid and compelling than dreams or waking awareness. Lower doses were mainly emotional and bodily (Strassman et al., 1994). Evidence: established as what these 12 volunteers reported; they are subjective reports.

The same paper introduced the Hallucinogen Rating Scale, which grouped effects better by dose than the biological measures did (Strassman et al., 1994). It gave later researchers a common yardstick for comparing psychedelics. Evidence: established.

Did volunteers build tolerance to DMT?

Before this study, tolerance to DMT’s behavioural effects had been seen inconsistently in animals and had never been produced in people (Strassman et al., 1996). In the 1996 study, tolerance to the subjective “psychedelic” effects did not occur by either clinical interview or rating-scale scores, but the hormone responses (ACTH, prolactin, cortisol) and heart-rate response decreased with repeated doses; blood pressure did not (Strassman et al., 1996). The authors called this differential regulation of the processes behind DMT’s effects. Evidence: established for this single small study.

That “no tolerance” result later became the premise for a different idea. In 2016, Andrew Gallimore and Strassman proposed holding people in a prolonged DMT state for research by target-controlled infusion, citing DMT’s lack of acute tolerance to its subjective effects (Gallimore and Strassman, 2016). Note what the 1996 study did and did not test: four separate doses with gaps between them, not a continuous infusion. Whether the subjective effects stay flat under continuous exposure is a separate question, covered in DMT therapy research. Evidence: preliminary.

Why did Strassman stop his DMT research?

Strassman has given two accounts, and they emphasise different things. In the autumn 1995 MAPS newsletter, he wrote that several factors led him to leave the university at the end of August 1995, and named as the primary one his family’s move to Victoria, British Columbia: running intensive studies in New Mexico while living mostly in Canada did not allow the relationships and follow-up with volunteers he believed necessary, a concern that would have grown with the planned shift to psilocybin, whose effects last far longer (Strassman, MAPS, 1995). Evidence: his own report.

His book, five years later, gives a longer list (Strassman, chapter summaries):

• Volunteer recruitment became harder as add-on studies grew more intrusive.
• In his account, a graduate student caused serious problems, including taking drugs with volunteers after hours.
• Hoped-for colleagues did not arrive, and some set up competing foundations.
• In his words, long-term benefits were meagre and adverse effects were adding up.
• The frequency of reported contact with “beings” was unexpected and personally disorienting to him.
• A serious illness in his family, and the move to Canada.
• Condemnation of his work from within the Zen Buddhist community he belonged to, which came to a head after he published an article linking psychedelics and Buddhism.

He writes that he ended the research several months after moving to Canada and returned the remaining drugs and the last year of grant support to the federal government (Strassman, chapter summaries). His book page puts it in one line: problems inside and outside the research environment ended the studies in 1995 (Strassman, book page). No source we read says the government shut the research down. Evidence: these are his own reports, which differ in emphasis.

How did his interpretation change?

The scientific papers make no claims about other worlds. The book does, and Strassman says so openly: he included what he calls highly speculative ideas, among them that the pineal gland releases DMT when the spirit enters the fetus at 49 days after conception, and that DMT may let the brain perceive dark matter or parallel universes inhabited by conscious entities (Strassman, book page). His model compared the brain to a television receiver whose “channels” DMT changes (Strassman, chapter summaries). Evidence: these are his speculations, not findings.

By 2014 his framework had moved from Buddhism to the Hebrew Bible. In DMT and the Soul of Prophecy he compares the DMT state with prophetic experience as described in the Bible and medieval Jewish philosophy, and proposes what he calls theoneurology, a top-down model in which God communicates through the brain (Strassman, Soul of Prophecy page). In a January 2024 interview he said that only one of his volunteers had what one might call a mystical unitive state, that each person’s experience depended on them rather than the drug, and, on the idea that the body’s own DMT drives non-drug states, that “the data aren’t there yet” (Psychedelic Medicine Podcast, 2024). Evidence: these are his interpretations over three decades.

What later research supported, and what it did not

The pharmacology held up: DMT’s fast onset and short action are now standard findings (Strassman and Qualls, 1994). The pineal speculation did not fare as well. A 2018 review by David Nichols, the chemist who made the study’s DMT, argued that scientific evidence is not consistent with the idea that the pineal gland secretes DMT at birth, in dreams or near death, noting that the tiny amounts detected in brain are not enough to produce psychoactive effects (Nichols, 2018). A 2019 rat study, which Strassman co-authored, measured DMT in the living cortex at levels similar to serotonin, with or without a pineal gland (Dean et al., 2019). In people, brain DMT has never been measured. Evidence: established for the time course; the pineal idea is unsupported; the role of DMT in the human brain is unresolved. See is DMT in the pineal gland.

Risks the studies recorded, and where to get help in Canada

Even in a hospital unit, DMT raised blood pressure and heart rate (Strassman and Qualls, 1994), anxiety was part of the reported experience (Strassman et al., 1994), and Strassman later wrote that adverse effects were adding up (Strassman, chapter summaries). Canada’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health warns that most hallucinogens are illegal and unregulated, may contain toxins or not contain the drug they are sold as, and can impair judgment (CAMH). Evidence: established.

Shroomverse sells mushroom products. This article is general information about the history of Rick Strassman’s DMT research. It is not medical, legal or purchasing advice, and it does not recommend any product.