Rick Strassman

Rick Strassman was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1952. He attended public schools in southern California’s San Fernando Valley and graduated from Ulysses S. Grant High School in Van Nuys in 1969. As an undergraduate, he majored in zoology at Pomona College in Claremont, California, for two years before transferring to Stanford University, where he graduated with departmental honors in biological sciences in 1973. 

During summers in college, he worked for Redken Laboratories, developing cosmetics and a line of hair dyes. In addition, he performed laboratory research at Stanford on the development of the chicken embryo’s nervous system. He attended the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in the Bronx, New York, where he obtained his medical degree with honors in 1977.

Dr. Strassman took his internship and general psychiatry residency at the University of California, Davis, Medical Center in Sacramento and received the Sandoz Award for an outstanding graduating resident in 1981. After graduating, he worked for a year in Fairbanks, Alaska, in community mental health and private psychiatric practice. From 1982-1983, he obtained fellowship training in clinical psychopharmacology research at the University of California, San Diego’s Veteran’s Administration Medical Center. 

He then served on the clinical faculty in the department of psychiatry at UC Davis Medical Center before taking a full-time academic position in the department of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine in Albuquerque in 1984. At UNM, Dr. Strassman performed clinical research investigating the function of the pineal hormone melatonin, in which his research group documented the first known role of melatonin in humans. 

He also began the first new US government-approved clinical research with psychedelic drugs in over twenty years, focusing on DMT and, to a lesser extent, psilocybin. He received grant support from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Drug Abuse, as well as from the Scottish Rite Foundation for Schizophrenia Research. Before leaving the University in 1995, he attained the rank of tenured Associate Professor of Psychiatry and was awarded the UNM General Clinical Research Center’s Research Scientist Award.

In 1984, he received lay ordination in the Western Buddhist Order and co-founded, and for several years administered, a lay Buddhist meditation group associated with the same order. Dr. Strassman underwent a four-year personal psychoanalysis in New Mexico between 1986 and 1990.

From 1996 to 2000, while living in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, Dr. Strassman worked in community mental health centers in Washington State in Bellingham and Port Townsend. For the next four years, he had a solo private practice in Taos, New Mexico. After two years working near the Navajo Nation in Gallup, NM, he returned to northern New Mexico in 2006, where he provided psychiatric services at a mental health center in Espanola. Since mid-2008, he has been writing full-time.

Dr. Strassman’s “DMT: The Spirit Molecule,” an account of his DMT and psilocybin studies, has sold a quarter-million copies as of mid-2021 and has been translated into over a dozen languages, including Mandarin. He co-produced an independent documentary by the same name, which was the most-streamed independent drug documentary on Netflix. He also is the author of “DMT and the Soul of Prophecy,” “Joseph Levy Escapes Death,” and a co-author of “Inner Paths to Outer Space.”

He has published over 40 peer-reviewed scientific papers and has served as a reviewer for 20 psychiatric research journals. He has been a consultant to the US Food and Drug Administration, National Institute on Drug Abuse, Veteran’s Administration Hospitals, Social Security Administration, and other state and local agencies. He has provided consultation to many of the psychedelic startups that began appearing in 2020, including Atai, MindMed, and The Noetic Fund. 

He is on the Scientific Advisory Boards for Alexander Shulgin Research Institute and Ninnion Therapeutics. He is currently a Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine and lives in Gallup, New Mexico.