Ronald Siegel

Profile – Ronald K. Siegel (1943–2019)

Ronald Siegel was a pioneer of drug studies and explorer of altered states of consciousness. He had a PhD in psychology from Dalhousie University and was a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles, until his retirement in 2008. In the 1970s, he and his colleagues trained people to become ‘psychonauts’—that is, to go into altered states and report what they experienced as it happened. He researched the effects of LSD, THC, marijuana, MDMA, mescaline, psilocybin, and ketamine, among other drugs, and acted as a consultant to several government commissions on drug use. He was not just an experimenter and theoretician of psychopharmacology, but also trained in martial arts, experienced sleep paralysis, took part in shamanic rituals, and was once locked in a cage for more than three days without food or water, all in the interests of investigating consciousness. He published many books on topics including drugs, hallucinations, intoxication, and paranoia.