Dr Rick Strassman took his internship and general psychiatry residency at the University of California, Davis, Medical Center in Sacramento, and received the Sandoz Award for outstanding graduating resident in 1981. After graduating, he worked for a year in Fairbanks, Alaska in community mental health and private psychiatric practice. From 1982-1983, he obtained fellowship training in clinical psychopharmacology research at the University of California, San Diego’s Veteran’s Administration Medical Center. He then served on the clinical faculty in the department of psychiatry at UC Davis Medical Center, before taking a full-time academic position in the department of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine in Albuquerque in 1984.
From 1996 to 2000, while living in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, Dr Strassman worked in community mental health centers in Washington State in Bellingham and Port Townsend. For the next four years, he had a solo private practice in Taos, New Mexico. After two years working near the Navajo Nation in Gallup NM, he returned to northern New Mexico in 2006, where he provided psychiatric services at a mental health center in Espanola. Since mid-2008, he has been writing full-time.
Dr Strassman’s DMT: The Spirit Molecule, an account of his DMT and psilocybin studies, has sold a quarter-million copies as of mid-2021, and been translated into over a dozen languages, including Mandarin. He co-produced an independent documentary by the same name, which was the most-streamed independent drug documentary on Netflix. He also is the author of DMT and the Soul of Prophecy, Joseph Levy Escapes Death, and a co-author of Inner Paths to Outer Space.
He has published over 40 peer-reviewed scientific papers and has served as a reviewer for 20 psychiatric research journals. He has been a consultant to the US Food and Drug Administration, National Institute on Drug Abuse, Veteran’s Administration Hospitals, Social Security Administration, and other state and local agencies. He has provided consultation to many of the psychedelic startups that began appearing in 2020, including Atai, MindMed, and The Noetic Fund. He is on the Scientific Advisory Boards for Alexander Shulgin Research Institute and Ninnion Therapeutics.
He currently is Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine and lives in Gallup, New Mexico.
