Rick Strassman's DMT Study: What It Actually Found

One of the men would later contradict a research nurse who told him about a dream of her own. What she was describing, he said, was a dream. This was real.

That study, run at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque between 1990 and 1995, is the paper trail behind a modern myth. It produced the book DMT: The Spirit Molecule, a 2010 documentary, and thousands of forum posts about the pineal gland and the "entities" behind the veil. What this article gives you: the study as it appears in the medical journals, what was measured, what was only reported, and a measurement from February 2026 that puts one of the most beautiful hypotheses in consciousness research under real pressure. What it does not give you: any guidance on obtaining, preparing or using DMT. In the United States, DMT is a Schedule I controlled substance.

Budapest, 1956: the man Sandoz would not send LSD

The story does not start in New Mexico but in Budapest, with a chemist and psychiatrist named Stephen Szára. In 1955 he read Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception and tried mescaline on himself. He wanted to continue with LSD and wrote to Sandoz in Basel, its manufacturer. The answer, as he remembered it fifty years later: regrettably, they could not send him any.

So Szára looked for another route. In the November 1955 issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society he found a paper on cohoba, a snuff that Indigenous communities in South America and the Caribbean used in religious ceremonies. The chemists had identified DMT and bufotenine in it, but nobody knew whether DMT was active in humans at all. Szára set out to find out. A former lab colleague helped him synthesize it, and after review by his institute's ethics board, he and three colleagues tested it on about thirty volunteers.

In the summer of 1956, shortly before the Hungarian uprising, Szára sent a short communication to the Swiss journal Experientia. The full report appeared in 1958, in German, under the title "Dimethyltryptamin: ein neues Psychoticum" ("Dimethyltryptamine: a new psychotic agent"). What struck him most, Szára wrote later, was the time course: the effect began within minutes and was short. The entire arc could be observed in under an hour.

It did not stay a research tool for long. In the 1960s DMT was still compared with LSD in studies on prison inmates in the United States, and then the window closed. Szára summed it up in 2007: DMT had "a difficult first 50 years in medical research," above all for legal reasons, because U.S. authorities and the World Health Organization classified it as a drug of abuse. Under the federal Controlled Substances Act of 1970, DMT sits in Schedule I, alongside LSD and psilocybin: no accepted medical use, research only under a DEA registration.

The timeline

When	What happened
November 1955	Chemists identify DMT in cohoba, a ceremonial snuff from South America and the Caribbean.
Summer 1956	Stephen Szára reports the psychoactive effect of DMT from Budapest in Experientia.
1970	Controlled Substances Act: DMT becomes Schedule I in the United States.
1990	After 21 months of approvals, Rick Strassman begins the first new U.S. psychedelic study in over twenty years, in Albuquerque.
February 1994	Two papers in the Archives of General Psychiatry: eleven volunteers, double-blind, placebo-controlled.
1995	The studies end: about 400 doses given to nearly 60 volunteers.
2001	DMT: The Spirit Molecule makes the pineal hypothesis popular.
2013	DMT detected for the first time in fluid from the pineal gland of rats.
June 2019	University of Michigan measures DMT in the rat visual cortex, including in animals without a pineal gland.
February 2026	Odense and Zurich find no endogenous DMT in the rat brain; Nature Medicine publishes the first placebo-controlled DMT trial in depression.

A psychiatrist who wanted to understand the pineal gland

Rick Strassman came to DMT by a detour. He studied biology at Stanford, earned his medical degree at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, and finished his psychiatry residency at the University of California, Davis, in 1981. At the University of New Mexico he first researched not psychedelics but melatonin, the hormone of the pineal gland. His group, according to his own biography, described the first known function of melatonin in humans. On the side, he had practiced Zen for years and led a meditation group.

The pineal gland is a pea-sized organ deep in the brain, and few organs carry so much history. Descartes considered it the seat of the soul; later esoteric teachings turned it into the "third eye." (We trace that lineage in How to Open Your Third Eye.) Strassman was not untouched by any of this. In a report for the psychedelic research organization MAPS in the winter of 1991/92, he wrote that he had been fascinated by the pineal gland's possible role in unusual states of consciousness, and that he had thought it possible the gland could produce compounds like DMT.

Why DMT of all things? The compound occurs in many plants and, in traces, in the human body; it had been found in blood, urine and cerebrospinal fluid. If the body makes its own psychedelic, the reasoning went, it might be involved in the great transitions of life: dreaming, psychosis, birth, death. But to test any of that, you first need something more basic: data on what DMT does in a human being at all. There was practically none.

Twenty-one months of paperwork

Strassman applied for the study at the end of the 1980s. In his MAPS report he describes how long approval took: 21 months. The first 18 were spent simply finding a source of the compound that could be approved for human use. The last three went into confirming that the preparation met the requirements of the Food and Drug Administration. On top of that came a license from the Drug Enforcement Administration and the university's review committees. Funding came from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a federal agency, and from a foundation for schizophrenia research.

In 1990 it began. Strassman's biography calls it the first new, government-approved clinical research with psychedelics in the United States in more than twenty years. That is not marketing, it is the plain situation: since the early 1970s no lab in the country had been permitted to give a person one of these substances. Anyone filing an application in 1990 was entering not only scientific but political territory, at the height of the War on Drugs.

Strassman chose DMT deliberately. His reasoning is in the study itself: a short duration of action, known clinical safety from the older studies and, at the time, little recreational use. A substance whose effects fade after half an hour can be studied in a hospital bed under supervision. With LSD, which lasts a whole day, that would hardly have been possible.

Twelve volunteers, four doses, one placebo

The first study was small and strict. Twelve volunteers, all with prior psychedelic experience, recruited by word of mouth. Anyone with a current psychiatric illness, an ongoing physical illness or regular medication was excluded. One of the twelve had to withdraw halfway through when, under several stresses at once, a depression returned; he was treated. That left eleven people, one woman and ten men.

Each first received two doses open-label, knowing what they were getting. Then came the actual experiment: double-blind, against placebo, in random order, four dose levels, at least a week between sessions. Almost everything measurable in a reclining person was measured: blood pressure, heart rate, pupil size, body temperature, plus stress hormones and other chemical messengers in the blood.

The results appeared in February 1994 as two papers in the Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the most respected journals in the field. The body reacted clearly. Blood pressure, heart rate, pupil diameter and temperature rose with the dose, as did beta-endorphin, cortisol, prolactin and ACTH. In his MAPS report Strassman mentions another volunteer who had to be excluded because his blood pressure rose too sharply even at the low dose. And one detail almost disappears in the excitement about visions, though for the man who wanted to understand the pineal gland it is remarkable: melatonin levels, the hormone of exactly that gland, did not change.

From interviews with nineteen experienced users, the team also built a new instrument, the Hallucinogen Rating Scale. It separated the dose levels better than any of the physical measurements. You can read that as a technical footnote. It is actually the core of what the study left behind: a questionnaire still used in research today, and the finding that experience can be measured more precisely than a pulse.

What they saw: a bird, a desert, beings

The second 1994 paper is unusual for a psychiatric journal. It quotes, for pages, what the volunteers said after their sessions. Strassman and the research nurse had decided not to ask questions during the short effect, but to talk at length afterward. So the sentences survive, verbatim, with page numbers.

There are images: "a fantastic bird," "a tree of life and knowledge," "a ballroom with crystal chandeliers," DNA double helices, tunnels, stairways. Colors ten to a hundred times more saturated than in daily life. "Like the blue of a desert sky," one said, "but on another planet." Many lost the sense of their body. "I had no body," "I thought I was dead," "My body dissolved; I was pure awareness" are phrases the authors call typical.

And there was something a psychiatrist in 1990 could hardly have expected. Many volunteers spoke of an "other intelligence." It was "supra-intelligent" but "emotionally detached." "They were aware of me, but not particularly concerned," one said, "like a parent looking into a playpen at a one-year-old." Another described "elves," four of them, by the side of a road, mischievous and moody. They controlled the scene completely, "it was their territory," and showed him panels of unbearably beautiful, swirling geometric patterns. Several said they were made to look at things: "Look at this, look at that, pay attention!"

"What you are describing was a dream. This is real. It's totally unexpected, quite constant, and objective."

A volunteer to a study nurse after a double-blind session, quoted in Strassman, Qualls, Uhlenhuth and Kellner, Archives of General Psychiatry 51 (1994), pp. 98–108.

What matters is what the study does not hide. The paper names the dark side too. One volunteer described the room suddenly turning threatening: the wall colors were "malevolent," the clock looked right and yet uncanny, "like a New Age horror movie." At the highest dose almost everyone experienced a near-total loss of control. "I'm glad you two were with me," one said. "I don't know what I'd have done alone in that state." Some spent parts of later sessions working through earlier ones.

Another observation: the first open-label high dose was usually more frightening than the later one in the double-blind phase. The authors attributed that to familiarity. Anyone who had been through the state once knew they would come out of it, and trusted the team more. Expectation and setting shape the experience. That observation resurfaces thirty years later in Basel.

Whether the beings exist anywhere, the paper does not answer and does not try to. It documents that people experienced them, and how they described them. That is exactly where the line runs that should never be blurred on this topic: the reports are documented; their content is not.

Five years, about 60 people, about 400 doses, and an ending

More studies followed. In one, the team tested whether the body builds tolerance to DMT when it is given several times on the same day. Thirteen experienced volunteers took part, again double-blind against placebo. The result, published in Biological Psychiatry in 1996, was a surprise: the subjective experience did not weaken, neither in interviews nor on the rating scale. The hormone response and heart rate did. The body adapted; the mind did not. Other protocols looked at which receptors carry the effect, and psilocybin was tested on a smaller scale.

Added up, the five years produce the numbers that appear in every text about Strassman, and that he gives himself: about 400 doses given to nearly 60 volunteers between 1990 and 1995. Then it stopped. On his own page about the book, there is a single sentence on the matter: problems inside and outside the research setting led to the end of the studies in 1995. He explains nothing further there, and we will not read more into it. In a 2022 interview he put it simply: "I finished my DMT work in 1995."

In 2001 DMT: The Spirit Molecule was published. The book combines the study with session reports and with Strassman's interpretations, and those go far. He speculates that the pineal gland might release DMT at birth, at death and in near-death states, and that a first release on the 49th day after conception marks the spirit's entry into the embryo. The number comes from Tibetan Buddhist tradition, in which the passage between death and rebirth lasts 49 days. He himself calls these hypotheses "unproven" in the book. The documentary of the same name followed in 2010. A study with eleven people in its first protocol became a pop-culture motif: the "spirit molecule gland."

Strassman tried to rein it back in. In June 2010 he wrote an addendum to an article on Erowid, the drug information archive. He had tried hard in his book to separate what was known from what he speculated, he wrote, but it was remarkable how ineffective those efforts had been. So many people wrote to him as if his speculations were facts. And then, very plainly: "We do not know if DMT is made in the pineal gland." People whose pineal gland had been removed because of a tumor went on to live fairly normal lives. He pinned his hopes on newer, more sensitive measuring methods. Those would come.

The pineal gland under the mass spectrometer

In 2013 a team led by chemist Steven Barker at Louisiana State University published a new detection method. Among the authors: Jimo Borjigin of the University of Michigan, and Rick Strassman. Using microdialysis, they flushed the pineal gland of rats with artificial cerebrospinal fluid and analyzed what came out. For the first time, they wrote, DMT could be detected in that fluid. How much, the paper did not say. The method was qualitative: it shows that something is there, not how much.

For many readers that was proof. The pharmacologist David Nichols, one of the best-known psychedelic chemists in the United States, did the math in 2018. An adult's pineal gland weighs less than 0.2 grams, he wrote in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, roughly the weight of a few grains of rice. Its main job is to make about 30 micrograms of melatonin a day. That tiny amounts of DMT had been detected in the brain was clear, but they were not enough to be psychoactive. His paper's subtitle: "Separating fact from myth."

A year later came an answer from Michigan, more surprising than either side had expected. In June 2019, Borjigin's team reported in Scientific Reports that they had measured DMT directly in the visual cortex of rats, at concentrations comparable to known neurotransmitters such as serotonin. After an induced cardiac arrest, levels rose markedly. And then the sentence that quietly buried Strassman's original idea: in rats whose pineal gland had been removed, levels were not lower, if anything somewhat higher. DMT in the brain, yes, but apparently not from the pineal gland. Whether the measured amounts could produce a psychedelic effect was unknown, the authors wrote themselves.

Then, in February 2026, a paper from Odense and Zurich. Mikael Palner, Paul Cumming and colleagues looked in Neuropharmacology for exactly this endogenous DMT store in the rat brain, with a sensitive detection method and under conditions in which any DMT present should have accumulated. The result: below the detection limit. "We found no evidence of naturally occurring DMT in the adult rat brain," Palner said, "even when we inhibited its breakdown." The title of the paper leaves no room: DMT is neither formed nor retained in serotonin terminals in the rat brain.

Does the brain make DMT? Four measurements since 2013

Year and lab	Finding	Direction
2013 · Baton Rouge / Michigan	DMT detected in fluid from rat pineal glands, amount not stated	Detected
2018 · David Nichols (calculation)	Gland under 0.2 g: amounts too small for a psychoactive effect	Objection
2019 · Ann Arbor, Michigan	DMT in the visual cortex at levels similar to serotonin; not lower without a pineal gland	Detected
2026 · Odense / Zurich	No endogenous DMT detectable, even with its breakdown blocked	Not detected

All findings come from animal studies. In the living human pineal gland, DMT has never been measured.

Two labs, two findings that do not fit together. That is no reason to accuse either of fraud: measurements in the nanomolar range are delicate, and methods and brain regions differ. But it is a reason to be careful with a sentence repeated thousands of times online: "The pineal gland releases DMT when you die." Nobody has measured that in a human. In the rat, the pineal gland as the source has become unlikely, and whether there is any meaningful endogenous store at all is more open since February 2026 than it was before. Strassman wrote in 2010: "We don't know yet." Sixteen years later that is still the most honest sentence on the subject.

The beings, surveyed 2,561 times

What was written down sentence by sentence in Albuquerque, Johns Hopkins University collected at scale in 2020. A team led by Alan Davis and Roland Griffiths surveyed 2,561 people online about their most memorable encounter with an "entity" on DMT. The most common labels: being, guide, spirit, alien, helper. Forty-one percent reported fear during the encounter, yet the strongest emotions were love, kindness and joy. Sixty-nine percent said they received a message, nineteen percent a prediction about the future. More than half of those who had called themselves atheists beforehand no longer did afterward. Most respondents considered the entity conscious, intelligent and benevolent, and real, only in a different dimension of reality.

That is a finding about people, not about dimensions. Respondents volunteered, they described a memory, and someone whose experience left them indifferent rarely fills out a long questionnaire about it. The researchers themselves stress something else: the reports closely resemble encounters without any substance, as known from religious contexts, abduction narratives and near-death experiences.

Imperial College London had tested that parallel in the lab in 2018. Thirteen healthy volunteers received DMT and, on another day, a placebo, and afterward completed an established near-death experience questionnaire. Under DMT the scores rose markedly, and the profile matched that of people who had actually had a near-death experience on almost every feature. How far real near-death research has come is the subject of our piece Near-Death Experience: What the Studies Found. Similarity on a questionnaire is not causation, though. None of these studies showed that DMT "explains" the near-death experience. For that you would have to measure it in a dying human, and that has never been done.

Back in the clinic: London, Basel, 2026

Thirty years after Albuquerque, DMT is back where Strassman wanted it: in a hospital bed, under supervision, wired to instruments. In 2023, Imperial College used simultaneous EEG and functional MRI on twenty volunteers to show how brain connectivity changes under DMT. Networks that normally work separately suddenly communicate across their boundaries, most strongly in the evolutionarily youngest regions of the cortex. Study lead Christopher Timmermann called it the most advanced view of the psychedelic state to date.

In Basel, the group of pharmacologist Matthias Liechti at the University Hospital has spent years studying how DMT behaves in the bloodstream. In 2023 they showed in 27 healthy volunteers that a continuous infusion keeps the experience stable over a longer period and that it fades within about fifteen minutes after the infusion stops. In March 2026 a paper followed that connects directly to Albuquerque. Same dose levels, once double-blind in random order, once open-label and stepped up gradually: the open-label version was tolerated clearly better, and at the same level participants rated the effect as less intense. The authors say this shows the influence of blinding and expectation on the experience. It is, with modern statistics, the same observation Strassman's team made in 1994 about that first, frightening session.

And in February 2026, Nature Medicine published the first placebo-controlled trial of DMT in people with moderate to severe major depression. Thirty-four participants, phase IIa, a single dose with psychotherapeutic support. After two weeks, depression scores fell further in the DMT group than under placebo, and no serious adverse events occurred. That is a result to take seriously, and it is small. The investigators themselves caution that early results always need careful reading. There is no approved treatment, and in the United States DMT remains Schedule I outside licensed research. If you are struggling with depression, the right place is a doctor, a therapist or a clinic, not a magazine article. In a crisis, call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

A related thread in U.S. law is ceremonial use: the Supreme Court's 2006 decision in Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita concerned a church's sacramental use of ayahuasca, a DMT-containing brew. We cover that case, and why it is not a general permission, in Ayahuasca: Tradition, Science and U.S. Law.

Claim, source, status

Most of what circulates about DMT online sounds more certain than the research allows. Here are the most common claims, the source they rest on, and what holds up as of September 2026.

Claim	Source	Status
The pineal gland releases DMT at birth and death.	Strassman, book 2001, explicitly as a hypothesis	Not proven; never measured in humans
The mammalian brain makes its own DMT.	Barker et al. 2013, Dean et al. 2019 for; Palner et al. 2026 against (all rats)	Disputed in rats, open in humans
The pineal gland is the source.	Dean et al. 2019: no less DMT without the gland; Nichols 2018	Evidence points against it
Many people encounter "entities" on DMT.	Strassman 1994; Davis et al. 2020 (2,561 respondents)	Documented as reports
These entities exist independently of the brain.	Interpretation of many respondents	Not proven
DMT resembles the near-death experience.	Timmermann et al. 2018, 13 people, questionnaire	Similarity shown, cause not
DMT treats depression.	Nature Medicine 2026, phase IIa, 34 people	Not proven as a therapy; one small early trial

"Documented as reports" means: it is on record that people experienced and described this, not that the content of the experience corresponds to reality.

The open question

In 1990 Rick Strassman wanted to know two things: what DMT does in a human being, and whether humans make it themselves. His study answered the first question so thoroughly that researchers in London and Basel pick up his numbers and confirm his observations thirty years later. The second question stayed open, and over the last seven years it has not become smaller but sharper. One lab measures DMT in the rat brain at serotonin-like levels; another finds nothing. The pineal gland, where it all began, seems to play no role. And what happens in a dying human brain, nobody has measured.

What remains is the question nobody in Albuquerque could answer and no measurement ever will: why so many people who do not know one another, under the same substance, run into the same thing. Intelligences that watch them, show them something, and do not take them particularly seriously. You can call that the brain. You can call it another reality. We are not going to invent an answer here. We can show you where the mystery really starts: not in the pineal gland, but in the gap between what a person experiences with absolute certainty and what an instrument can capture of it.

One of Strassman's volunteers described that gap in a single sentence in 1994: "It was so alien. You immediately try to connect it with something familiar, but you can't."

Related reading on the pineal gland and the chakra system: Third Eye Chakra: Ajna Explained.

Key takeaways

• From 1990 to 1995, Rick Strassman ran the first new government-approved U.S. psychedelic study in two decades, at the University of New Mexico: about 400 doses to nearly 60 volunteers.
• The effects peaked within one to two minutes and faded after about 30 minutes; blood pressure, heart rate and stress hormones rose, melatonin did not change.
• Many volunteers described an "other intelligence." The reports are documented verbatim; their content is not evidence of independent beings.
• The pineal-gland DMT theory was always a hypothesis. Rat studies conflict (2013 and 2019 detected DMT, 2026 did not), and it has never been measured in the living human pineal gland.
• DMT is Schedule I in the United States. A first small depression trial (2026) is promising but no approval.

Frequently asked questions

What was Rick Strassman's DMT study?

From 1990 to 1995, psychiatrist Rick Strassman studied the effects of DMT in humans at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. It was the first new government-approved psychedelic research in the United States in more than twenty years. By his own account, nearly 60 volunteers received about 400 doses. The first results appeared in 1994 in the Archives of General Psychiatry.

Did Strassman prove the pineal gland makes DMT?

No. That was his hypothesis, which he called unproven in DMT: The Spirit Molecule (2001). In 2010 he wrote that we do not know whether DMT is made in the pineal gland. In rats, DMT was detected in pineal fluid in 2013, but in 2019 animals without a pineal gland did not show lower levels. In humans it has never been measured in the pineal gland.

Does the human brain produce DMT?

That is open. A Michigan team found DMT in the rat cortex in 2019 at levels similar to serotonin. A team from Odense and Zurich found no endogenous DMT in the rat brain in February 2026. Comparable measurements in the human brain do not exist.

What did the volunteers in Albuquerque experience?

The published reports describe intense images and colors, loss of body awareness and, for many, the sense of an other intelligence or beings. There was also fear, loss of control and disturbing moments. What is documented is that the volunteers experienced and described this, not that the beings exist independently of the brain.

Is DMT legal in the United States?

No. DMT is a Schedule I controlled substance under the federal Controlled Substances Act. Research requires DEA registration and FDA oversight. A narrow religious exemption exists for specific churches using ayahuasca after a 2006 Supreme Court decision; it is not a general permission.

Why did the Strassman studies end in 1995?

Strassman says only that problems inside and outside the research setting led to the end. He has not given more detail publicly, and any further explanation would be speculation.

Is DMT a treatment for depression?

Not an approved one. A small phase IIa trial with 34 participants, published in Nature Medicine in 2026, found a stronger short-term drop in depression scores than placebo. That is an early signal, not proof of a therapy. Anyone with depression should talk to a doctor or therapist; in a crisis, call or text 988.

Sources and further reading

• Rick J. Strassman, Clifford R. Qualls, Eberhard H. Uhlenhuth, Robert Kellner, "Dose-response study of N,N-dimethyltryptamine in humans. I. Neuroendocrine, autonomic, and cardiovascular effects" and "II. Subjective effects and preliminary results of a new rating scale," Archives of General Psychiatry 51 (1994), 85–97 and 98–108.
• Rick J. Strassman, Clifford R. Qualls, Laura M. Berg, "Differential tolerance to biological and subjective effects of four closely spaced doses of N,N-dimethyltryptamine in humans," Biological Psychiatry 39 (1996), 784–795.
• Rick Strassman, DMT: The Spirit Molecule, Park Street Press, 2001; MAPS Bulletin report, winter 1991/92.
• Stephen Szára, "DMT at fifty," Neuropsychopharmacologia Hungarica 9 (2007).
• Steven A. Barker, Jimo Borjigin, Izabela Lomnicka, Rick Strassman, "LC/MS/MS analysis of the endogenous dimethyltryptamine hallucinogens," Biomedical Chromatography 27 (2013).
• David E. Nichols, "N,N-dimethyltryptamine and the pineal gland: Separating fact from myth," Journal of Psychopharmacology 32 (2018).
• Jon G. Dean et al., "Biosynthesis and extracellular concentrations of N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) in mammalian brain," Scientific Reports 9 (2019).
• Mikael Palner, Paul Cumming et al., "N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is neither formed nor retained in serotonin terminals in the rat brain," Neuropharmacology (2026).
• Alan K. Davis et al., "Survey of entity encounter experiences occasioned by inhaled N,N-dimethyltryptamine," Journal of Psychopharmacology 34 (2020).
• Christopher Timmermann et al., "DMT models the near-death experience," Frontiers in Psychology 9 (2018); "Human brain effects of DMT assessed via EEG-fMRI," PNAS 120 (2023).
• "A short-acting psychedelic intervention for major depressive disorder: a phase IIa randomized placebo-controlled trial," Nature Medicine (2026).
• Further reading on Desire Diaries: Near-Death Experience · Ayahuasca and U.S. Law · How to Open Your Third Eye

This article describes the history of clinical research. It contains no instructions for obtaining, preparing or using any substance and makes no healing claims. DMT is a Schedule I controlled substance in the United States.

The reports are real. What they report is still an open question.