American psychiatrist who obtained the approvals to run the first human psychedelic research in the United States in a generation, and who administered DMT to around sixty volunteers at the University of New Mexico between 1990 and 1995.
What he did not expect
He designed the study as a psychopharmacology trial, with rating scales and dose-response curves. What a substantial minority of volunteers reported instead was contact with apparently autonomous beings, and Strassman’s own account of the study is largely an account of a clinician discovering that his instruments did not cover the data. He published it as DMT: The Spirit Molecule in 2001, including the material that made his colleagues uncomfortable, and has been careful since not to claim more than the reports themselves.
The position he actually holds
Not that the entities are real, and not that they are hallucinations. He has argued that the honest position is that the phenomenology is reproducible and its ontology is undetermined, which is the same position the better parts of the Experiencers literature occupy, and the reason his work keeps being cited by people on both sides of it.
Connections
DMT · Terence McKenna · Experiencers · John E. Mack · The Anunnaki Connection · Near-Death Experience