Rick Strassman

Rick Strassman is an American clinical psychiatrist who conducted the first U.S. government-approved human research on a psychedelic in decades, administering DMT to volunteers at the University of New Mexico in the early 1990s.

His book DMT: The Spirit Molecule (2001) reported that many subjects described encounters with seemingly autonomous “beings” and otherworldly realms, and speculated—explicitly beyond his data—that endogenous DMT, possibly from the pineal gland, might mediate birth, death, and mystical experience.

He later linked these themes to Hebrew prophetic states in DMT and the Soul of Prophecy. Strassman’s contribution to the mind-power lineage is twofold. Methodologically, his rigorous trials helped reopen legitimate psychedelic science, lending institutional credibility to a field the 1960s had made taboo.

Conceptually, his “spirit molecule” framing—and the widely circulated entity reports—gave entheogenic spirituality a compelling, science-adjacent narrative that consciousness may access realities beyond the brain. It is important to mark the boundary: his clinical observations are real, but the pineal-DMT and “biology of the soul” interpretations are speculative hypotheses, not established findings, and Strassman himself presents them as such.