Dr. Rick Strassman (Interview Archive)
My early research centered on the pineal gland. For thousands of years, various esoteric traditions had treated it as a kind of spiritual organ. You find this idea in Kabbalah, in Hinduism and the chakras, in the Sufi path, each of them placing the pineal as the physical seat of the highest spiritual states a person could reach. It wasn't until around the middle of the 20th century that scientists identified melatonin as the gland's main product.
When I started out on my own as a researcher in the 1980s, melatonin was still poorly understood. A handful of findings even hinted that it might be psychoactive, maybe strongly so, possibly psychedelic. That was enough to pull me in. I ran a two-year study on what pineal melatonin actually does in people, and the results pointed mostly toward sedation. It also affected core body temperature; the dip you see in the early morning hours turned out to be tied to it. On the psychedelic front, though, it was mild. Nothing dramatic.
Around that same stretch I came across DMT, short for dimethyltryptamine. Chemically it's a close relative of both serotonin and melatonin. It shows up in thousands of plants, and it's especially prominent in the psychoactive plant medicines of Latin America. What caught my attention most, though, was something else entirely: the human body makes it. Researchers first found DMT in the body fluids of rodents during the 1960s, and within a few years it was detected in people too, turning up in blood, urine, and spinal fluid.
Up to that point, psychiatrists in America and Europe had mostly examined DMT as a possible factor in schizophrenia and other psychotic conditions. The assumption ran negative. No one had seriously asked whether this naturally produced compound might be behind spiritual experiences, the sort of profoundly altered states that people describe in positive terms. After testing melatonin as a candidate for that role and coming up short, I turned to DMT with the same question in mind: a substance the body releases under certain conditions that could trigger something close to a spiritual experience.
It was the first new human study of these compounds in the United States in a generation, and that history shaped how I built it. I kept it as a plain piece of psychopharmacology. I couldn't frame it openly around spiritual or therapeutic goals. So much time had passed since anyone had given these drugs to human subjects in the U.S. that the only workable approach was to strip the design down to its simplest possible form.