Rick Strassman is an American clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine.

He studied zoology at Pomona College in Claremont for two years before transferring to Stanford University, where he graduated with departmental honors in biological sciences in 1973.

He continued laboratory research at Stanford before attending Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in New York, where he graduated with an M.D.

[5] Strassman's interest in the human biology of altered states of consciousness led him to study the pineal gland hormone melatonin in the 1980s, at which time there were suggestive data regarding its psychoactive effects.

This research took place at the University of New Mexico's School of Medicine in Albuquerque, where he became a tenured associate professor of psychiatry.

From 1990 to 1995, Strassman led a government-funded clinical research team at the University of New Mexico studying the effects of N,N-dimethyltryptamine, also known as DMT, on human subjects in experimental conditions.

As a result of his research, Strassman came to call DMT the "spirit molecule" because its effects include many features of religious experience, such as visions, voices, disembodied consciousness, powerful emotions, novel insights, and feelings of overwhelming significance.

[citation needed] A follow-up study demonstrated lack of tolerance of the psychological effects of repeated closely spaced doses of DMT, making it unique among classical psychedelics.

Strassman has conjectured that when a person is approaching death or possibly when in a dream state, the body releases a relatively large amount of DMT, mediating some of the imagery survivors of near-death experiences report.

[19][citation needed] Inspired by visions he had when he took LSD in the early 1970s, Strassman began studying Buddhism as a young man.

[20] As a result, Strassman wrote that these experiences of his experimental participants "also left me feeling confused and concerned about where the spirit molecule was leading us.