Dr. Rick Strassman: Career and History
Rick Strassman is probably best known for DMT: The Spirit Molecule, a bestseller he later helped adapt into a 2010 documentary. Most of his working life, though, went into something less cinematic: careful medical research on what psychoactive compounds actually do inside the brain. He was born in Los Angeles in 1952.
His schooling started with zoology at Pomona College in Claremont, California. In 1973 he moved to Stanford to read biological science, and he left there with an undergraduate degree earned with high honors. Money during those years came partly from Redken, where he worked on cosmetics and hair dyes. The research that got people's attention happened in the school lab, where he added original work on the nervous systems of chicken embryos. Watching the cells, he noticed that growth at their outer edges followed patterns that were not random.
A residency followed at the University of California, Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, and his graduate work in psychiatry earned him the Sandoz Award. He then headed north to Fairbanks, Alaska, splitting his time between mental health work and private psychiatric practice.
Around 1982 and 1983 the question of altered states of consciousness took hold of him. That curiosity pointed him toward plant-derived compounds, DMT in particular. He wanted two things at once: to understand how such states get triggered, and to track what they do to body and mind once they arrive.
The psychedelic project itself started in Albuquerque, at the University of New Mexico's School of Medicine, where he held a tenure-track position teaching psychiatry. The pineal gland pulled his attention next, specifically how it might tie into consciousness. His clinical study of the brain established that the pineal gland makes melatonin, and he was the first to document what that hormone does in people. Large doses, he found, did not produce anything psychedelic. Mostly they left subjects drowsy or asleep.
His later proposal won federal approval, and the government funded what became the first clinical psychedelic research in the United States in twenty years. The field has a name, psychopharmacology, meaning the study of how drugs shift mood, sensation, thought and behavior. He ran the work in both humans and animals. The compounds, he observed, switched on serotonin receptors in both the central and peripheral systems. One result stood out: over half the volunteers, deep in the visionary part of the session, described encounters with beings that were not human.
Out of that work came published papers on the psychological effects and a tool his team built called the Hallucinogen Rating Scale, or HRS, now a familiar instrument for gauging the mental effects across a range of psychedelics. Strassman has dozens of peer-reviewed papers to his name and has served as a reviewer for various psychiatric journals. His studies on brain chemistry and psychological effect have also brought him into contact with the US Food and Drug Administration, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a Veterans Administration hospital, and the Social Security Administration, among other bodies.
In 2007 he co-founded the Cottonwood Research Foundation alongside Steve Barker, PhD, and Andrew Stone. The foundation backs research into how hallucinogens are absorbed, distributed, broken down and cleared from the body, and into their behavior as hormones that occur naturally in the nervous system. Much of the inquiry centers on how these compounds move through neurological pathways and shape perception and cognition, in both healthy and diseased states.
Researchers have shown that DMT is present in the pineal glands of living rodents, and the hunt has continued for DMT in the cerebrospinal fluid of animals and humans, the goal being to link the gland to consciousness itself. Strassman's view is that the pineal gland releases DMT during near-death episodes and dream-like trances, and that this could account for the altered states people describe at those moments. Nothing beyond the reports of those who have had near-death experiences confirms it so far. Still, what they describe lines up closely with what subjects report after being given psychedelics. More recently he has turned to psilocybin mushrooms, giving doses as much as 1.1 mg above the amount needed to reach the usual psychedelic threshold.