Dr. Rick Strassman is a psychiatrist who, between 1990 and 1995 at the University of New Mexico, led the first U.S. government-approved clinical trials in decades administering DMT (N,N-dimethyltryptamine) directly to human volunteers. He documented the results in his 2000 book DMT: The Spirit Molecule, which became the most widely read popular account of the compound and the research question at its centre: does the human body produce DMT itself, and if so, why?
DMT is, by consensus, the single most potent naturally occurring psychedelic compound known to affect human consciousness. Strassman's specific hypothesis — building on earlier work by researchers going back decades — was that the pineal gland might be a site of endogenous DMT production, potentially released at moments of extreme physiological significance: birth, death, near-death, and deep meditative or mystical states.
What's confirmed, and what's still hypothesis
Here the science has moved carefully. It is now confirmed, through peer-reviewed research including a 2019 study published in Scientific Reports, that the biosynthetic machinery for producing DMT — the enzymes AADC and INMT — is genuinely present in mammalian brain tissue, including the pineal gland, cerebral cortex, and choroid plexus, in both rats and humans. DMT itself has been directly measured in rat pineal gland microdialysate. That part is settled, published, replicated science.
What remains unresolved — and what Strassman himself is careful to describe as hypothesis rather than established fact — is whether the pineal gland releases DMT in quantities sufficient to produce psychedelic effects during specific life events like birth or death, and whether that mechanism plays any role in near-death or mystical experience. This is an active, ongoing area of research rather than a closed question in either direction.
A four-hundred-year-old head start
Strassman's own account of his research repeatedly returns to one historical detail: René Descartes, in the seventeenth century, had already singled out the pineal gland as what he called the "seat of the soul" — centuries before anyone could explain why a small endocrine gland at the centre of the brain might deserve that kind of attention.