Episode 40 – Dr. Rick Strassman – DMT: The Spirit Molecule

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We are the intimate strangers. Thank listening. The human experience is being injected intravenously activating the DMT in your brain as we speak to my guest, Dr. Rick Strassman. Rick, welcome to HXP. Well, thanks very much, Xavier. I'm glad to be on your show. So Rick, I would like to credential this conversation. If you could just give us your academic background, I think that would help lay the foundation.

Let's see. I went to public schools in Los Angeles, took my first two years of undergraduate training at Pomona College in Claremont, California, then my last two undergraduate years at Stanford University. Then I went to medical school at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, then returned to California to do my internship and psychiatry residency at UC Davis. After a year in Alaska, I returned to academics and was trained in psychopharmacology research at UC San Diego in La Jolla. And then I went out to UNM, University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, and was on another couple of years of training funding, which supported my melatonin research in the early 80s.

years, then worked in the clinical sector, primarily community mental health, but some private practice. And I retained my relationship with UNM. I'm currently clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the School of Medicine at UNM. Okay. Well, I appreciate you detailing that. We can get into the fun stuff now. So, Rick, in your book, The Spirit Molecule, DMT, The Spirit Molecule, you cover your DMT research project in quite some depth from its origins to its conclusions.

But it was the first government approved research into the effects of DMT. I mean, what did this research mean to you? How did this make you feel to be granted this approval by the government to do this research? Well, I mean, it was a pretty long and slow process to get all of my permits and my funding in line. It was interesting, actually. I received funding from both private sources and from the federal government even before I got my permits to begin doing this study.

So there was a lot of interest in supporting this work. but the infrastructure getting clinical grade DMT to give to people was really a stumbling block and that's what took the majority of time but I kind of began with this area of interest with being curious about the biological bases of spiritual experience and I had begun thinking about those sorts of things even in my undergraduate years.

So this was in the late 60s, early 1970s, and these psychedelic drugs were kind of had escaped the laboratory and were causing all kinds of public health problems. So it was a bit anathema in academics to discuss doing clinical research with the psychedelics. It was interesting. I went to some good schools and got good grades as an undergraduate. And I applied to 21 medical schools.

And everyone that I shared why I wanted to be a doctor, which was to do psychedelic drug studies, you know, 19 of those schools rejected me.

And the two schools I got into, you know, one of them, I think, felt sorry for me. And the other one didn't even give me a chance to describe my motivations. So, you know, that was the kind of climate, which was prevailing at the time in terms of doing human research with these drugs. So I learned quickly to keep my interests to myself up until the point that I actually was positioned to be able to work up a real bona fide psychopharmacology study giving DMT.

So by that time, I had gotten grants. I had performed the melatonin pineal study and established my credentials as a clinical researcher. I'd worked through the granting process and publication process. And at a certain point, it just seemed like it was now or never to begin working on the DMT permits and funding. So it was one step at a time. It was pretty frustrating. But as long as people didn't say no, that meant to me that it was still a possibility.

So, yeah, I mean, the main thing was to get the FDA and the DEA to talk to each other, which took quite a while. And once lines of communication opened between them, things moved along pretty quickly after that. So, I mean, I felt a huge sense of relief. I felt a huge sense of responsibility. I was kind of poised at a threshold at that point when we began the study. Yeah, I'm very interested in talking about what you said about biological basis of spiritual experience.

But, I mean, your project consisted of dosing around 60 volunteers with several hundred doses between 1990 and 1995. I mean, what, in your opinion, kinds of useful data resulted from this experiment? What implications do you think this had? Well, the study was pretty much a straightforward psychopharmacology dose response study. So I didn't want to get in over. I just wanted to take one step at a time.

So the people that were mentoring my study were quite clear that because it was the first new project with these drugs in the U.S. in a generation, that it was critical to keep the study as simple as possible to not make any outrageous claims. So I, in some ways, established the groundwork for the current science in psychedelic studies in the U.S. And I think I did that by, number one, establishing that you could get permission from the authorities if the study were designed in a stringently scientific manner.

I also established that you could do these studies safely. recruit volunteers, you could give them the drug, and you could generate reasonable data without people dying or becoming permanently insane or turning into drug abusers or the kinds of concerns that a lot of the hysteria had generated in the late 1960s when these drugs were made illegal. I established also, or I began establishing anyway, a correspondence between human data and animal data.

Even though human studies had ended in around 1970 or so, studies in lower animals continue to pace and were instrumental in establishing the role of serotonin in psychopharmacology. so a number of theories had been proposed about the relationship between serotonin and the effects of psychedelic drugs in lower animals but there weren't any confirmatory human data so well as a result of the the you know biological orientation of my study you know we were able to confirm or refute or extend some of the animal serotonin data.

And, you know, we also developed a new means of objectively quantifying the DMT effect. I interviewed a number of recreational users of DMT to get a general sense of what to expect from my volunteers. And over the space of the performance of the study, we were able to develop a fairly finely tuned instrument that was able to quantify various aspects of the DMT experience.

And that questionnaire has been translated into a number of different languages, has been applied to a whole slew of psychoactive drugs, including psilocybin, mescaline, marijuana, MDMA, MDE, ibogaine, ketamine.

So it's been quite useful in people being able to compare numerically or statistically the subjective effects of various psychoactive agents. But also I was quite interested in the case reports as they were, the trip reports of the volunteers because of my underlying interest in comparing the DMT state to non-drug spiritual experience. Yeah. So, I mean, when you mentioned earlier the biological base of spiritual experience, how do you quantify such a thing? And what were some of the effects on your participants that were noteworthy?

Well, I began with this area of inquiry, I think in my college years, pretty much, because of being struck by the overlap or the correspondence in descriptions between people using the psychedelics and people describing non-drug spiritual states like those resulting from meditation, near-death experiences. And later as I worked or later on as I was exploring other non-drug altered states which might be useful in terms of thinking about the DMT effect, even the descriptions of the alien abduction encounter.

So I was thinking that to the extent that the two sets of states resemble each other, a psychedelic state and the collection of non-drug spiritual experiences, it seemed as if there must be some underlying biological mechanisms taking place. And put simplistically, for example, if there could be a part of the brain which was activated as a result of ingesting a psychedelic drug, and that same part of the brain might be activated through the practice of meditation or as a result of being near death or for whatever reasons, as a trigger or a correlate of the alien abduction experience.

In my DMT project, I was especially interested in comparing the DMT state to the state of Buddhist enlightenment because of the spiritual model and system I have been working in both personally with both study and practice was the Zen Buddhist model. Well, and in the state of enlightenment, to the extent that it can be described, it's usually described as a state of emptiness. There's no contents.

There's no form. There's no thinking. There's no feeling. There's no body. There's no sensations, anything like that. So I was expecting the ultimate response to DMT to be that kind of state. And the majority of my volunteers also were expecting that kind of state because the majority were practitioners of Eastern religious meditation practices. So it was quite surprising to both me and them when instead of entering into a unitive mystical state of absorption into the white light of emptiness, instead they returned reporting quite interactive and relational experiences with beings made of light in a world consisting of light.

all kinds of interactions, questions, answers, physical things being done back and forth, the maintenance of one's sense of self, spoken words, emotional and intellectual exchanges. Somebody in that state usually was able to willfully interact with the contents of that world. You know, they could decide what to attend to, what, you know, what to ignore, you know, they can bargain, they could negotiate with the state as it were. So it was quite different than the Enlightenment state, you know, that everybody had been expecting.

What was the, what would you say in, in your opinion, was the most remarkable thing that came out of this research? Well, I suppose the most remarkable thing was just consistency of And the other strangeness of the reports, I think in the beginning, I was kind of startled by the kinds of descriptions that people were sharing with me. And then I was sort of startled by their consistency year after year after year.

And it was extremely strange. It was as if there was a parallel level of reality that was existing all of the time around or around us, as it were, or around them, which could be entered almost instantly. The response to DMT begins within a few heartbeats and peaks within like a minute or two. So it isn't as if it's a figment of someone's imagination where they kind of, in a way, build up to it. It's just instantly there almost in the snap of one's fingers.

And a consistent quality that the volunteers returned describing was the reality feeling of this state. It didn't seem to them as if it were imaginary or hallucinatory, a dream, or even like their previous experiences with these psychedelics. So it was quite real, quite solid, which surprised me in some ways because of being led to believe both through my study of other psychedelic drug states where people were quite capable of distinguishing the reality basis of what they were undergoing as compared to everyday reality.

in the face of all of my Buddhist training, which kind of looked at these states as illusory, as non-real, as kind of hallucinatory way stations on the way to the formless enlightened state. So I think that the quality of the experience in its content was extremely different than both my expectations and those of the volunteers.

And, you know, the reality basis, it seemed as great or even greater than everyday reality, which was something I also was not expecting and neither were the volunteers. So DMT in the context of transmethylation hypothesis have have you found that dmt has increased stress levels and like how does this affect psychosis or ptsd and how is dmt a biological mediator of this relationship yeah um well you were speaking of the trans you know methylation theory of psychosis that came out um in the early 1960s or so.

DMT has only been on the psychiatric radar for maybe 60 years or so.

It was first discovered in mind-altering plants from the Amazon in the 1940s, but it wasn't determined to be psychoactive in humans until the 1950s or so. Then about 10 years later, it was actually discovered to be a natural constituent or it was found in the body fluids of mammals. And then a few years after that, the corresponding discoveries were described in humans as well.

So psychiatry at the time, especially during the 1950s and the 1960s, was quite concerned with psychosis. State mental hospitals were bursting at the gills. There weren't any effective treatments for psychosis, especially schizophrenia. So it also was around that time that the first antipsychotic medication was discovered called Thorazine.

And the role of serotonin in psychosis and in mental states was also just being discovered. So when people discovered DMT in the human body, obviously they wanted to determine if somehow that knowledge could be turned to treat psychosis or to understand psychosis. So one of the theories was that schizophrenics methylated tryptamine, naturally occurring tryptamine in the human body, to an extent greater than occurred in normal people.

So people were looking for things that either indicated overactivity of the methylating system or some kind of ways of slowing it down in order to help treat psychosis. In terms of synthesis of DMT in the body, it begins with taking in dietary tryptophan from the diet. And then it's converted by just a couple of steps into a compound called tryptamine. And then tryptamine is methylated twice. In other words, methyl groups are added to the compound tryptamine, and then you get dimethyltryptamine.

So with respect to DMT and psychosis, there were a number of approaches taken. One was to measure levels of DMT or metabolites, the breakdown products in schizophrenics versus controls. but that never really panned out because the concentrations are extremely low and it's still even nowadays it's still you can't quite you know measure naturally occurring DMT in the body but you can kind of measure you know things you know like it or close to it or as good as it and that's what you know people were you know measuring in the 60s and the 70s there was some indication that schizophrenics perhaps excreted more DMT in their urine when their psychosis increased,

and usually that was a result of some kind of stress.

And in lower animals anyway, it appears to be the case that brain levels of DMT increase with stress as well. I don't think there's much information out there yet on DMT levels and post-traumatic stress disorder, but people are describing, at least in the field, some benefits of ayahuasca with respect to post-traumatic stress disorders, and people are using psychedelics to treat that condition as well.

So just moving on here, I appreciate you answering that in detail. You are the president of Cottonwood research foundation in a body that wants us further investigate scientific consciousness. And one of the projects of the foundation is to develop new technologies that allow for these tiny amounts of DMT to be discovered. I was reading one of these releases, these articles that you guys put out, DMT found in the pineal gland of live rats. How important is that type of discovery to the study of consciousness? Well, I think it would depend who you ask.

You know, like I, you know, marshaled quite a bit of evidence in support of a DMT locale, I mean, a, you know, pineal gland location of DMT synthesis in my first book, The Spirit Molecule, which came out the end of 2000. And I was, you know, given a lot of grief because people, they interpreted or understood my speculation as a kind of a statement of fact. But at the time, it wasn't known that DMT either did or didn't exist in the pineal gland.

I brought to bear a large amount of circumstantial evidence supporting a search for DMT in the pineal, but it was still speculation. But just a couple of years ago, a group in Ann Arbor, Michigan discovered DMT in the living rodent pineal gland. So I felt vindicated. And it also lends support to the role of the pineal gland in naturally occurring spiritual experiences. You know, the pineal gland has been venerated by esoteric physiologies for millennia, Kabbalah, the Hindu chakra system.

Amal speculated about place in the brain or in subjective consciousness, which corresponds to the location of the pineal gland as being activated as a result of spiritual experience or its activation results in spiritual experience of the highest nature. So the fact that there is DMT in the pineal gland supports those kinds of esoteric speculations.

But at the same time, most people live a normal life without their pineal gland. It may turn out to be the case that it is more difficult for them to respond to transcontinental flights because of circadian rhythm problems. and jet lag, those kinds of things. But by and large, if you don't have a pineal gland, either from a stroke of your pineal or a pineal-destroying tumor, you live a pretty normal life.

The lungs are the primary source of DMT. That's been known since the 1950s. And it appears as if the lungs are always secreting a certain amount of DMT into the bloodstream. And then from the bloodstream, it's transported into the brain. It could be that pineal DMT is recruited during extraordinary states as opposed to everyday consciousness, which may be more of what's going on with DMT levels from the lung.

If we could just move into your book here, DMT and the Soul of Prophecy, I mean, how much criticism do you think that you received from people who were kind of reading your work and thinking, well, here's this guy writing this book about God and relating it to Judaism when he had just put out a book on this special compound? I mean, how did you get to comparing these prophetic states with DMT and how much criticism do you think that you received?

Well, I actually began taking notes from my new book even before I completed my first book. And I completed my studies with DMT in 1995. And I took off a year or two, just stopped thinking about it.

And then once I began writing the book, there were a number of other things which led me to begin looking for other models for the DMT effect. And one of those models or one of those places I began to look was the Hebrew Bible, which was in 1998 or so I began taking notes, maybe 18 months or so before the DMT book came out. And I was led to the Hebrew Bible for a couple of reasons. One is that my Zen community didn't like me publicly discussing the importance of the psychedelic drug state to Buddhist practice or at least the beginning of Buddhist practice, which was the case with the vast majority of the members of the community.

You know, so I was over time kind of extruded from that community, which although it was, you know, rather painful, it still gave me the opportunity to explore other spiritual systems. You know, so I began, well, I kind of returned to my roots as it were and started looking at the Bible, you know, as a, you know, kind of as another spiritual, you know, model, you know, both to take the place of what had been, you know, kind of abandoned, you know, through Zen practice.

At the academic or the cognitive level, Buddhism didn't quite account for both the reality bases of the descriptions of my volunteers and the state of the full-blown DMT effect. You know, so I was looking for other models which could explain the reality basis and the interactive relational qualities of the DMT state. So as I began reading the Bible in the late 1990s, I was increasingly struck by the descriptions of the figures in the text of an interactive relational spiritual state.

And it was felt as real or even more real to the experience than everyday reality. You know, so it began, you know, to dawn on me this, you know, notion of the prophetic experience or the prophetic state of consciousness. And so I decided to undertake a very careful comparison of the two states, the prophetic state and the DMT state. And, you know, in common parlance, people think about the word prophecy as foretelling or forecasting or predicting the future.

But that is mostly an artifact of the translation of the Hebrew word for prophet, which is navi, into the Greek word prophetis. Greek was the first language that the Hebrew Bible was translated into. This was maybe 200 BC. And the Greeks were extremely interested in what is called divination. In other words, a spiritual experience which allows one to predict the future. So any spiritual state seen by the Greeks was considered three-way to predicting.

So that is why they translated Navi into the Greek word prophetis, which means to speak before or to speak before something happens. But I am expanding the definition of prophecy for the purposes of my current work to include any spiritual experience recounted by any figure in the Hebrew Bible. So this could be any visions or any voices. It could be experienced by a canonical prophet like Ezekiel or by a common foot soldier in the enemy camp who has a prophetic dream.

So it can include any recounting of visions and voices, inspiration, extreme emotional states, novel insights, somatic effects like shaking and trembling as a result of a divine or spiritual encounter. So if you look at the definition from that broader sense, the entire book or the entire Hebrew Bible is bursting with descriptions of a prophetic experience. So would you say, I mean, you mentioned this earlier, but would you say that DMT is the biological basis of spiritual experience?

Well, I think it's conceivable that the contents or specific elements of the spiritual experience, depending on how you define that, are mediated through elevated levels of DMT. You know, that's a theory. It's not been proven. But, you know, if you're in the prophetic state and you have visions and you have voices which are similar to the accounts of my DMT volunteers, then you could speculate that perhaps the people who were experiencing a prophetic state in the text were also experiencing higher than the normal levels of naturally occurring DMT.

So that doesn't mean that if you use DMT, you're going to experience a prophetic state. And it does mean that the visions and the voices might be comparable in the prophetic state and the DMT state. You know, clearly the characters in the Hebrew Bible, their reports of their experiences have been written down. They've been around for 3,000 years. You know, they've exerted a pervasive and enduring influence on the civilization of the planet.

So the message of the prophetic state seems more important probably overall in terms of impact than the actual shapes and forms and the figures that they see or behold. But at the same time, the information which is contained in the prophetic experience is transmitted through those visions and through those voices. You know, it requires, though, you know, the translation of those visions into an intelligible message, you know, the interpretation of the visions into a form which can be shared with the larger community in an intelligible manner.

We're approaching the end here, Dr. Strassman. I'm just curious to know if there is any single takeaway for yourself. I mean, you said that you had to take a break for a while from this research, but is there anything that you took away from, you know, seeing these people experience this and your own connection to spirituality? What was that one thing that you think that you could share with us as far as your personal learning?

I think once I stopped my studies in 1995, the most striking belief I had once I completed the work was I had no idea what was going on. It was way more than I had bargained for. I mean, I was expecting I would give this drug, people would have these experiences, and I'd write them down, and it would all be fine. But it was like I discovered or kind of opened Pandora's box, you know, had a tiger by the tail.

Yeah, it was definitely, you know, not, you know, me that was determining the agenda of these descriptions of these experiences. I felt like I had really, you know, tapped into something, you know, way beyond. So that's kind of what required just completely kind of removing myself from the field for a couple of years. And then once I resumed thinking about it and writing about it, my approach took a decidedly more spiritual bent.

Kind of like, what does it mean as opposed to what part of the brain is being activated? I mean, you could understand what part of the brain is being activated. But you really don't know why things are so configured. Why is it the case that DMT is capable of transporting people to a completely different level of reality? And what does it mean that the DMT state is similar to that of the prophetic state?

So, yeah, I think I found out that approaching it from a purely scientific, bottom-up kind of approach wasn't really cutting it, at least for me. I needed to kind of put it in a more holistic context. And as a result, I started to look for spiritual models, which were more of what you might call a top-down model, that the brain is so configured for a purpose as opposed to this is just how it is in random or even a purely evolutionary kind of model, biologically, socially.

I am more convinced of the existence of DMT and its properties as evidence of a higher order of organization, which led me to the Bible, to the prophetic state, and to concepts of God within the Jewish tradition and so on. Yeah, it really seems like it changed your worldview and your paradigm itself. I mean, Dr. Strassman, I truly appreciate your time. Sir, where can people find your work? You can read about my work, order my books, which I'll inscribe and sign on my website.

It's rickstrassman.com. That's one long word. And you can order books through Amazon, Barnes & Noble. I'm your local bookstore. But if you order through my site, I will sign and inscribe the books. And you can read about what's going on. I've been recording some videos here and there that you can download. So it's rickstrassman.com. So check it out. We will make sure that people can access that link below this conversation when we put it out.

Dr. Trassman, again, thank you so much for your time. This is the human experience. We are going to get out of here. We will see you guys next week.