Richard Louis Miller, Ph.D.
Psychologist; Author; Host, Mind Body Health and Politics Radio
Psychologist, author, and radio host who conducted extensive interviews with first-wave psychedelic research pioneers — preserving their clinical knowledge and historical perspective in the foundational oral history book Psychedelic Medicine.
Biography
Richard Louis Miller is a clinical psychologist who has spent decades at the intersection of psychology, psychedelic medicine, and public communication. He is the host of Mind Body Health and Politics, a radio program broadcast on KPFA in Northern California that has covered psychedelic medicine, drug policy, and mental health for a general audience for many years.
Miller's most significant contribution to the psychedelic field is his 2017 book Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca — an extensive collection of interviews with pioneering researchers and clinicians including Stanislav Grof, Ann Shulgin, Charles Grob, Rick Doblin, James Fadiman, and others. These interviews constitute a critical oral history of the psychedelic medicine movement, capturing the perspectives of first-wave and second-wave researchers in their own words at a moment when many of the first-wave figures were elderly.
Miller's background as a clinical psychologist gives his interviews a depth and technical precision that journalistic interviewers often cannot match — he understands what his subjects are saying and asks the follow-up questions that matter. The resulting book has been used in academic courses on psychedelic medicine and is widely referenced in the field as a primary source for historical and clinical perspectives.
He has also been involved in California and national drug policy advocacy and has spoken publicly about the intersection of psychedelic medicine, the War on Drugs, and the politics of mental health treatment for decades.
Organizations
Why They Matter to the LearnShrooms Community
Miller's interview collection preserves the first-person perspectives of the researchers who built the scientific and clinical foundations of psychedelic medicine — knowledge that would otherwise exist only in papers and archives, not in the voices and nuanced reasoning of the people who developed it. His work is an essential complement to the formal academic literature.
Legal Context
For the legal landscape where Richard Louis Miller, Ph.D. operates, see psilocybin laws in California.