Rick Strassman is an American psychiatrist who joined the University of New Mexico School of Medicine in 1984 and left in 1995 (Strassman, biography). From 1990 he ran what he describes as the first new US human research with psychedelic drugs in over 20 years; by his own count his team gave DMT about 400 times to 60 volunteers (Strassman, book page).
His 1994 papers are still the most-quoted measurements of DMT’s time course. Given into a vein, DMT acted within about two minutes and was largely over by 30, and raised heart rate, blood pressure and several hormones (Strassman and Qualls, 1994). A companion paper introduced the Hallucinogen Rating Scale (Strassman et al., 1994).
The work has a Canadian twist. In a 1995 newsletter he named his family’s move to Victoria, British Columbia, as the primary reason he left the university, because running intensive studies in New Mexico while living mostly in Canada did not allow proper follow-up with volunteers (Strassman, MAPS, 1995). No source the site found says the government shut the research down.
His 2000 book, DMT: The Spirit Molecule, proposed that DMT made in the pineal gland might play a part in birth, death and mystical states. That remains a hypothesis; he later co-authored rat-brain studies that found DMT without the pineal gland (Dean et al., 2019).
Sources
- Strassman and Qualls, 1994, Archives of General Psychiatry: dose-response study I
- Strassman et al., 1994, Archives of General Psychiatry: dose-response study II and the HRS
- Strassman, MAPS Newsletter, Autumn 1995: University of New Mexico update
- Rick Strassman: biography
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