Esoteric thinkerRick Strassman (b. 1952)

Born Los Angeles, 1952; MD Albert Einstein College of Medicine 1977; psychiatric residency at University of California Davis. Joined University of New Mexico School of Medicine 1984. Between 1990 and 1995, Strassman conducted the first FDA-approved human research on a psychedelic in the U.S. since the regulatory shutdown of the late 1970s — a five-year clinical study of N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) at the UNM Hospital Clinical Research Center. The study enrolled 60 volunteers and administered approximately 400 doses, most by intravenous infusion, across a graded dose-response design. Funding came from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA grant DA-08096) and the Scottish Rite Foundation for Schizophrenia Research. Approval required dual sign-off from the FDA, DEA, and UNM’s institutional review board.

The pharmacological findings were published in peer-reviewed venues including Archives of General Psychiatry and Biological Psychiatry (1994). The result for which the study is best known emerged from the high-dose conditions (0.4 mg/kg IV): a substantial fraction of volunteers reported, in the immediate post-infusion debriefing, encounters with autonomous entities perceived as occupying a separate location of consciousness. The phenomenology was strikingly consistent across subjects who did not know each other and had no shared cultural framework — small humanoid figures, sometimes insectoid, sometimes machine-like, in some accounts engaging the volunteer in apparent dialogue. Strassman’s DMT: The Spirit Molecule (Park Street Press, 2001) is the principal published account; the book draws explicit (and careful) parallels to abduction-experience phenomenology and to indigenous-tradition entity reports.

Strassman has been clear in his methodology that the study did not adjudicate the ontological status of the entities. He has continued to publish on DMT and on the cross-cultural phenomenology of religious experience (DMT and the Soul of Prophecy, 2014). The work has been a load-bearing reference point in the post-2000 academic engagement with non-ordinary experience: cited by Diana Pasulka, Jeffrey Kripal, and the broader psychedelics-research renaissance at Johns Hopkins (Roland Griffiths) and Imperial College London (Robin Carhart-Harris). The Strassman corpus is the most-cited single body of clinical-research data on entity-encounter experience in the contemporary literature.