Rick Strassman's DMT Trials: The First Controlled Research

“Strassman administered IV DMT to 60 participants in 400 sessions at the University of New Mexico from 1990 to 1995. He documented entity contact in the majority of sessions. He didn't know what to do with the data.”

Rick Strassman's DMT research program at the University of New Mexico was the first controlled clinical study of a classic psychedelic in the United States in over twenty years. From 1990 to 1995, working under DEA Schedule I researcher registration and IRB approval, Strassman administered intravenous DMT to 60 participants in approximately 400 sessions.

The primary published findings concerned dose-response relationships, cardiovascular safety, endocrine effects, and subjective experience ratings (using the Hallucinogen Rating Scale). These findings, published in Archives of General Psychiatry in 1994 and subsequent journals, established that IV DMT produced rapid, intense, brief (15-30 minute) experiences with a manageable safety profile across the range of doses tested.

What the published papers did not fully capture, and what Strassman's 2001 book DMT: The Spirit Molecule communicated to a general audience, was the consistency of entity contact across participants. In the majority of high-dose sessions, participants reported encountering autonomous entities: beings who seemed to be present in a real place, who sometimes communicated, who were experienced as independent rather than as products of the participant's imagination.

Strassman describes his own disorientation at this finding: his training had not prepared him to take entity contact seriously as a phenomenon requiring explanation, yet the consistency of the reports across participants with no prior psychedelic experience, and the specificity of their descriptions, made dismissal difficult.

The 2023 Imperial College fMRI study (Timmermann et al., PNAS 120(13)) mapped DMT's global brain effects, large increases in global functional connectivity, network disintegration and desegregation, and compression of the principal cortical gradient. It did not isolate entity contact as a distinct neural signature, and no published imaging study yet has: the phenomenology is well documented, the neural specificity is not. The reports are real as reports; no neural correlate specific to entity contact has been identified. Strassman spent twenty years wondering what it meant. The interpretation remains open.

Sources

• Strassman, DMT: The Spirit Molecule (2001)
• Strassman et al., Arch. Gen. Psychiatry (1994)
• Timmermann et al., PNAS 120(13) (2023)