Читать книгу Neuropsychedelia - Nicolas Langlitz - Страница 9

2

Swiss Psilocybin and US Dollars

CONTESTED, UNCONTESTED

“LSD—killer drug! LSD—killer drug!” around 150 protesters chanted on the second day of the LSD Symposium in front of the Basel Convention Center. They belonged to the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, Switzerland, an organization cofounded by the Church of Scientology, which was well-known for its antipsychiatric activism. They handed out flyers titled LSD: The Cruel Time Bomb, accusing psychiatrists—many of whom were said to have gathered in the conference building—of giving LSD to their patients to worsen their mental problems so they could maintain power over them.

And, indeed, while the scientological human rights activists were protesting, one of those psychiatrists administering hallucinogenic drugs (even though not LSD) to healthy volunteers (not patients) was giving a workshop inside. Franz Vollenweider and his collaborator, Felix Hasler, were hosting a panel titled “Preconditions for Work with Hallucinogens in Switzerland.” They mostly explained the regulatory framework of their research to an international lay audience. During the question and answer period one listener asked: “The research you’re doing is relatively controversial and I could imagine that you encounter some rough resistance. Where does this resistance come from? Colleagues? Pseudoreligious groups? Politicians? And how do you deal with it?” Considering the intense politicization of psychedelic drugs and the regulatory hurdles Rick Strassman had had to overcome in the United States, Vollenweider’s answer came as a surprise:

We have done about fifty studies and examined 600 to 700 people, but I haven’t experienced any resistance so far. Once, there was criticism from the USA because of an MDMA study we did. They claimed that our doses came close to those given to animals and that this might be dangerous. We checked this meticulously, but our doses were significantly lower than those used in animal models where MDMA is suspected to be toxic. That was the only discussion I had with American colleagues and such disagreements are argued out at conferences.¹ But, interestingly, we have never had any problems here in Switzerland. If there is resistance, it comes from psychiatry insofar as we are seen to be doing too much biology. People always want psychological models. But, of course, doing psychology without biology is nonsense. Psychology is a brain function and the brain is a function of the psyche. It’s a vicious circle. This kind of prattle can be ignored. If someone is still a dualist today, he is behind the times.

Obviously, Vollenweider did not consider the scientologists spreading antipsychiatric conspiracy theories in front of the Convention Center a serious threat to his research. Whereas the Church of Scientology was suspiciously watched by the Swiss authorities (it had repeatedly been accused of exploiting its members and harassing its critics), Vollenweider could count on government support for his scientific work with hallucinogenic drugs. The fierce antagonism between authorities and psychedelic culture that had marked the American field after the prohibition of hallucinogens in the late 1960s had no direct match in Switzerland. It was because of this historical and cultural difference that Rick Doblin had reason to hope that Switzerland would lead the way to a revival of hallucinogen research.

HELVETIC COUNTERCULTURE

However, Switzerland had not been spared the sociopolitical conflicts sparked by the appearance of the so-called counterculture. In fact, the Alp republic had already been home to such experimentation with alternative lifestyles many decades before Theodore Roszak coined the term to designate the heterogeneous ensemble of protest movements mushrooming not only in the United States but in almost all industrial countries in the course of the 1960s. Between 1900 and 1920, the small Swiss-lake village of Ascona attracted many disgruntled members of the European Bildungsbürgertum, such as the novelist Hermann Hesse and the psychoanalyst Otto Gross, who were looking for alternative ways of life. They experienced what one of these visitors, the German professor of economics Max Weber (1992/1920: 123–124), described as a sense of living in an “iron cage”: a world increasingly rationalized, bureaucratized, and populated by a modern vocational humanity (Berufsmen-schentum) that had grown out of, but had become unmoored from, the spiritual foundations of the Protestant moral asceticism so profoundly shaping the country of Calvin and Zwingli (Whimster 2001). To counter this stifling side of modernity, the intellectuals frequenting Ascona defied “society”: they advocated anarchy and pacifism, practiced free love, attempted to square individual self-liberation and the renewal of deeply rooted group bonds, rebelled against science and medicine, and sought to experiment with the potential of their own and each others’ bodies. They longed for a return to nature while devising this-worldy forms of religiosity that reconciled monism and mysticism. Like their successors half a century later, some of these spiritual dissidents experimented with drugs. Especially after a young woman died of an overdose of cocaine, the Swiss authorities considered the Asconan milieu to be highly undesirable and dangerous and began to take legal action against its most exposed members. But eventually this early counterculture did not disappear due to police action. When the First World War broke out, many members of this scene were drafted for military service, persecuted for refusing to fight for their country, or were simply no longer able to cross borders to travel from their home countries to the Swiss resort. The spirit of Ascona, however, lived on and manifested itself in very different forms as the twentieth century began to take its course (Green 1986).

One of these recurrences involves the events called to mind by the year 1968. Like their counterparts in other Western countries, the Swiss protest movements of the late 1960s revived many of the Asconan ideas by associating them with the political order of the day: protests against the Vietnam war and imperialism, challenges to technocracy, and advocacy of Maoism, feminism, environmentalism, and libertarianism (Linke and Scharloth 2008; Studer and Schaufelbuehl 2009). These ideological currents connected countercultural rebels from San Francisco to Zurich and from Berne to Berlin. While American hippies dropped out to live in small communes in rural California, Swiss youth, most prominently the so-called Bärglütli, sought harmonious relations to nature, fellow human beings, and themselves in the Alps, where they practiced herbal medicine, organized workshops in Sufi dancing, and took LSD together (Bittner 2009). As elsewhere, these protests against the established social order resulted in violent clashes between rebellious youth and police forces (Zweifel 1998).

But there was also a distinctly Swiss flavor to the revolts in this part of the world. On the one hand, in Switzerland 1968 was a less apparent historical break than in other countries. In contrast to France, a political takeover did not even seem a faint possibility. Unlike Italy, no sustainable alliance emerged between students and workers. The Swiss government and bureaucracy were not laced with former Nazis and no leftist radicalization gave rise to terrorism as happened in Germany. Having grown up in a notoriously neutral country, Swiss youth were not at risk of having to serve in Vietnam, nor did their society experience the kind of racial tensions that brought together black civil rights activists and the student movement in the United States. Thus, in the case of Switzerland, the historical continuities were as significant as the caesura of ’68 (Schär 2008).

On the other hand, the Swiss suffered from what, in 1964, was first diagnosed as the “Helvetic malaise.” The term was coined by a member of the Free Democratic Party, classically liberal in its political orientation, who was soon seconded by intellectuals such as the writers Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt who sympathized with the nonconformist youth. They all expressed a growing discontent with the “spiritual defense” of Switzerland: a political and cultural movement that had emerged in the early 1930s to protect values and customs perceived as genuinely Swiss against the totalitarian ideologies of national socialism, fascism, and later on communism. In the 1960s, however, both liberals and leftists came to experience this political culture as intellectually suffocating and as an impediment to an open democratic society flourishing by way of permanent self-reflection and self-critique (Färber and Schär 2008).

This convergence of liberal reform and radical protest movements led the Swiss historian Bernhard Schär (2008) to interpret 1968 in Switzerland—despite the Marxist self-conceptions of many of its leftist actors—as a revival of the values of the failed liberal bourgeois revolutions of 1848. Like their nineteenth-century predecessors, Schär argues, this generation of activists fought for more inclusive democratic participation and emphasized individual freedom. The quest for consciousness expansion was not so much about a return to the ecstatic communion of a premodern collective as it was about mental self-determination and the fulfillment of one’s own potential. This reading seems further justified—and maybe even applies beyond the borders of Switzerland—when considering the unintended economic effects of 1968: the experimentation with alternative lifestyles facilitated the transition from industrial to consumer capitalism, new markets came to cater to the demand for self-realization, and, certainly in the United States, the counterculture gradually merged into a lucrative cyberculture. Hence, it was also the tranquil history of Switzerland, especially the relative tameness of its sixties, that predisposed the country to helping alleviate the conflict between culture and counterculture.

COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

The fact that, in the 1990s, Switzerland came to be at the forefront of the revival of hallucinogen research was not only because it was the homeland of LSD but also because this small country, at the heart and yet outside of Europe, had a history of resisting the internationalization of drug policy. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the problems and conflicts caused by the global opium trade led to the emergence of drug control as an issue of international concern. In 1912, the Hague Convention was passed as the first international drug policy treaty, even though it did not become operational until after World War I (McAllister 2000). The cause was subsequently adopted by the League of Nations (which would be replaced by the United Nations in 1945). However, Switzerland refused to enter into the convention. In part, this might be explained by the nation’s long-standing reservations toward international involvements (Suter 1998). Additionally, the Swiss pharmaceutical industry served as one of the world’s biggest suppliers of heroin. Its successful lobbying prevented Switzerland from ratifying the Hague Convention until 1925, when the Swiss government finally gave in to massive international pressure from the United States and the League of Nations (Tanner 1990; Boller 2005: 145–146).

Although Switzerland did not become a member of the United Nations until 2002, it signed the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs in 1961 and the Convention on Psychotropic Substances in 1971. The latter was presented as ushering in a new age of drug control and included the international prohibition of hallucinogens. But this gradual surrender of Swiss neutrality to the US-driven War on Drugs only occurred reluctantly. The Swiss historian Jakob Tanner remarked: “Generally, one can say that the power of the United States to define what is and what is not a drug has been crucial. Particularly the Single Convention of 1961, which replaced or abolished almost all previous agreements had a very characteristic trademark. I think that it wouldn’t have occurred to Switzerland to prohibit opiates. Probably, one would have continued to manage this by way of laws regulating the manufacture and distribution of medicines [Arzneimittelverordnungen] as had been the case before the Narcotics Law” (quoted in Vannini and Venturini 1999: 266).

Regarding the prohibited substances listed by this law, Tanner told me that “in general, one wanted to keep the list short or at least one wanted a list that did not restrain the innovation potential of the chemical and pharmaceutical industry.” While in the United States a problematization of drug use had already set in around the turn of the century, the isolationist mountain state deemed itself immune from the world’s drug problems. Even in 1967, the writer Frank Arnau still claimed that intoxicants of any kind were foreign to the Swiss national character (Boller 2005: 151). But, however grudgingly, Switzerland eventually decided to join the international community in adopting a more repressive drug policy. By the late 1960s, Swiss policy makers had to acknowledge that their citizens were not as impervious to the temptations of inebriants as once thought. In a major revision of the Narcotics Law of 1951, LSD was prohibited in 1975 (in comparison with 1966 in the United States and 1967 in neighboring Germany), and for about fifteen years Switzerland adopted a primarily repressive course. As in the American case, the illegalization of hallucinogenic drugs seriously hampered their scientific investigation even though half a dozen researchers continued to work in the field (Vannini and Venturini 1999: 285–305).

A second and more momentous parallel to the development in America was the exacerbation of the “drug problem” despite—or maybe because of—these repressive measures. Paradoxically, the availability and consumption of cocaine increased as the American drug war grew fiercer during the 1980s (Davenport-Hines 2002: 338–383). Simultaneously, more and more Swiss became addicted to heroin. The artificial scarcity of heroin produced by police operations made the drug significantly more expensive and, consequently, the crime rate skyrocketed. Soon political pressure began to mount as an increasing number of citizens were affected by thefts, robbery, and the public display of abject misery in the neat streets of Zurich and Berne.

The United States responded to the failure of its counternarcotics policy by stepping up its interdiction efforts. The country imprisoned ever more drug users at home and reinforced its police and military operations in drug-producing countries abroad. The Swiss, however, decided on an almost antithetical response to the problem. In 1994, the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health (SFOPH) began to distribute heroin to addicts under medical supervision—a decision not without controversy, especially in the French- and Italian-speaking cantons, but overall it was supported by the Swiss citizenry (Fahrenkurg 1995).

In the late 1980 and early 1990s, the civil servants of the SFOPH were also grappling with a very different drug-related problem. The Swiss Medical Association for Psycholytic Therapy (SAPT) had asked for permission to use LSD, psilocybin, and MDMA for psychotherapeutic purposes. In 1988, the group received a special permit to administer these controlled substances to patients (Styk 1992/93; Saunders 1993). But this exemption remained problematic. In 1989, a new government official took over the Department of Pharmacy at SFOPH, where he would be in charge of both the logistics of the heroin program and the scientific and medical applications of hallucinogenic drugs. After initial skepticism, Paul J. Dietschy approved both uses. Neither America, trying to form a united front in its War on Drugs, nor the United Nations that was advocating a similarly repressive stance were pleased about the Swiss pullout from the internationally established hard line on the use of controlled substances. Representing Switzerland on the International Narcotics Control Board, the Commission of Narcotic Drugs, and the Commission Pompidou of the Council of Europe, Dietschy had to bear the brunt of international criticism. However, when Claudio Vannini and Maurizio Venturini interviewed him for their history of Swiss psychedelic science, Dietschy stressed the importance of drug research for Switzerland:

In the international research community, our experiments with heroin or hallucinogens have aroused much interest. In the past, the Americans were at the forefront of this area. But then their government did not approve of such research anymore for political reasons. (This attitude has recently begun to change again.) Switzerland is one of the few countries in which such experiments are possible at all. Politically, our experiments provoke much skepticism [on the international level]. This is not voiced publicly but has been articulated repeatedly in discussions with us. . . . Apart from that, the international treaties leave a lot of freedom to the member states as to the conduct in one’s own country as long as the interests of other countries are not affected. This freedom must be used for the benefit of Switzerland. (Quoted in Vannini and Venturini 1999: 269)

Here, the very technocracy that the counterculture had rebelled against by using psychedelic drugs endorsed their scientific investigation. This government support contributed significantly to the competitive advantage of Swiss hallucinogen research and helped to make Franz Vollenweider such an interesting collaborator in the eyes of his American colleagues.

When, during my fieldwork in 2005, I first came across Dietschy’s advocacy of the Swiss drug and drug policy experiments, I began to wonder about the relationship between the Swiss government’s backing of psychedelic science and its heroin program. Was there an underlying policy, a comprehensive plan, a broader cultural matrix constituting the regulatory conditions of the work I was about to observe in the lab? To find out, I arranged a meeting with Dietschy who, it turned out, was no longer working for the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health but had moved to Swissmedic, a new federal agency comparable to the American FDA that had just taken over the regulation of medicines (but not of controlled substances) from the Swiss cantons to establish a nationally uniform regulatory regime.

Paul Dietschy was an authoritative man in his fifties with a long moustache. He wore a dark gray suit, white shirt, and a paisley silk tie. We met in one of the conference halls of the new Swissmedic building. Glass walls separating the room from the foyer gave the institution an appearance of transparency. Dietschy had invited a second person to our conversation: a tall bearded man of about the same age, but more casually dressed in a gray shirt and a sweater. Rudolf Brenneisen was a professor of pharmaceutical science at the University of Berne. The careers of Dietschy and Brenneisen had been closely entwined. During the turbulent years of Swiss drug policy reform, Brenneisen had become Dietschy’s closest scientific ally. He conducted most of the basic science research, which Dietschy needed to back up his often difficult administrative decisions. Together they had shaped one of the most adventurous episodes in the history of twentieth-century drug policy. Reminiscing about the 1990s, they looked back on a time when the current regulatory regime governing the scientific and medical uses of controlled substances in Switzerland was still in the making. Dietschy began:

When I started my job in 1989, there was a medical association for psycholytic therapy, which wanted to do research on patients with LSD, ecstasy, and psilocybin. As these substances are prohibited, the Swiss Medical Association for Psycholytic Therapy had to get a federal license according to Article 8, paragraph 5 of the Narcotics Law. Hence, they asked the SFOPH for permission. My predecessor Dr. Jean-Pierre Bertschinger and the then director kept putting this off. It wasn’t quite clear how to deal with it. Nobody had any experience in Europe. What did one have to take into account? Thus there was a vacuum and the response was continuously postponed. But then this medical association complained to the minister in charge. He gave brief directions to the federal office: No matter what, but come to a decision! In 1987 or 1988, the SAPT was given authorization without further requirements. When a renewal was due in ’89, my then chief of staff came up to me and told me where to sign. I glanced over the document and asked, “Where is the approval of the ethics commission?” And he said, “The ethics what?” At this point in time, ethics commissions were only just being introduced into human trials in Switzerland. This was pushed by the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences. The state didn’t care yet. Shortly after I began my job, I had a meeting with this group of physicians and I told them, “Hey, the ethics commission is missing and I can’t see a neat study design. I want to see more.”

Considering that, in the United States, institutional review boards had been introduced in 1966 (Rothman 1991), it is striking that, on the federal level, Switzerland only came to police pharmaceutical research activities in the 1990s. In 1989, Dietschy was among the first to make the approval of an ethics commission a requirement. At the time, drug regulation was organized by the cantons, that is, the states of the Swiss confederation—some strict, some more permissive. To homogenize the Swiss regulatory landscape, an intercantonal control agency coordinating cantonal regulations issued guidelines for clinical trials in the mid-1990s. Only in 2002, when Swissmedic was established, did the Swiss state put an end to the cantonization of its regulatory regime. “We were in a field that was just emerging,” Dietschy remembered. In the late 1980s, the Narcotics Law only stated that the SFOPH could grant special permits for scientific research and limit medical applications of prohibited substances. “A completely open wording,” Dietschy said. “This provided us with latitude, which we don’t have anymore today.”

But this regulatory freedom was accompanied by much uncertainty, especially when internationally prohibited drugs like heroin or hallucinogens were involved. “We had zero experience with this,” Dietschy recalled. “Apart from England, there was no research on illicit drugs in Europe, which could have served as a foundation. I was a civil servant who actually had nothing to do with research. My task was a different one. But I always got applications for research projects. I was in the situation that I constantly had to face problems for which I couldn’t find an answer anywhere.”

This was how Rudolf Brenneisen became involved. The administrative decisions Dietschy had to make were politically and medically risky. As the prohibition had also choked off pharmacological research on heroin and the hallucinogens, a lot of information he would have needed was missing in the medical literature. Consequently, the SFOPH invited Brenneisen to conduct the studies necessary to fill in the blanks. Brenneisen scientifically supported Dietschy, who was in charge of the logistics of the Swiss heroin program. But he also helped him assess applications from the renascent field of hallucinogen research. For this purpose, Brenneisen’s doctoral student Felix Hasler generated drug-safety data for psilocybin, which the SFOPH needed in order to assess applications like the one submitted by the Swiss Medical Association for Psycholytic Therapy.

It did not take long for Dietschy to realize how vital questions of drug safety were in this area. In 1990, one of the patients treated by SAPT president Peter Baumann died during a therapy session. After a number of prior irregularities, Baumann had taken the woman to a remote, ill-equipped lodge in France (not Switzerland), far away from an emergency room, where he gave her ibogaine, a powerful plant hallucinogen used for ritual purposes in the West African spiritual tradition of Bwiti. Ibogaine was not among the substances approved of by the SFOPH. Dietschy also claimed that, after this fatal incident, other patients came forward reporting that, while in the clinical trial, they had come to suffer from severe depression. “Probably their serotonin supplies had been depleted,” Dietschy said. “Exactly the opposite of what one had aimed for had happened. They were not, as they told us, taken care of. The doctor just pushed them aside because it didn’t fit into his preconceptions.” Soon charges of medical misconduct were filed against a second member of the SAPT.

By this time, Dietschy had grown deeply mistrustful of the organization: “We became very reserved. We felt that there was a lack of scientific seriousness. They were freaks who thought, ‘Here we get a chance to make our mark.’ My impression was, they don’t want to stick to the rules.” Because of the experiences and data provided by Brenneisen, however, Dietschy continued to believe that psychedelic drugs might have a great potential to treat severe mental disorders. Therefore, he told the SAPT that he was not opposed to hallucinogen research in principle but that, in the future, he would only support applications that had a clear study design and were approved by an ethics commission.

At this point, Franz Vollenweider entered the scene proposing to test psilocybin on humans. Dietschy was impressed:

The application was scientifically perfectly neat and correct. I have rarely seen such a solid documentation. The SFOPH waved it through relatively quickly and, to a certain extent, we also supported his research because it was an important part of the puzzle for us to be able to decide later on whether to test these drugs in humans again. This is how Vollenweider got involved and I have to say that I have always only seen top-quality work from him. Few researchers—Brenneisen and Vollenweider among them—never had any problems with us regarding approvals. The SFOPH also supported them financially. Today, Swissmedic doesn’t have research funds anymore. Back then we had budgets for international projects and for research. When you saw a new problem, you could decide relatively spontaneously. Those were the days.

And Brenneisen seconded: “It was an enormous privilege to have authorities that massively supported research. I admit, for me this was the chance of my academic career. Without the politics and the research support of the SFOPH, financially and ideationally, this would not have been possible.”

Paul Dietschy (PJD) and Rudolf Brenneisen (RB) brought their account of hallucinogen research to a close by relating two more reminiscences explaining how Vollenweider’s lab managed to leave behind its local rivals and move to the forefront of the global resurgence of psychedelic science.

PJD:		Reminiscence 1: I left SFOPH in 2001 and gave up these responsibilities. Until then, the SAPT did not get another approval. Within ten years they did not manage to turn in a dossier complying with the usual standards of good clinical practice. The second point is a funny reminiscence: At the beginning of the 1990s, we got some psilocybin back for disposal, as we were the authorities in charge of this. It was really ancient material.
NL:		Who gave it to you?
PJD:		We got it from someone who had used it for experiments, syntheses, for various things. The laboratory assistant called and said, “Mr. Dietschy, I got some psilocybin. How shall I dispose of it?” I took a look, called Brenneisen, and said, “I would like to know whether the substance still meets any quality standards.” The answer came a few days later: “It meets all standards!” Suddenly we had 100 g of pure psilocybin. Nobody else in the world had such an amount. And the production was very expensive. To give you an example: When I went to an international conference of the US Drug Enforcement Administration, I mentioned this in an aside to people from DEA labs. They said, “What? You really got that? We need this for our kits.” I asked, “How much do you need? I’ll bring it to you to the next conference in Washington.” Today, this would be inconceivable. These were really easygoing times.
RB:		That’s the cue: the link to the US. Of course, they were following what was going on here, also on the level of psychiatric research. “What can Switzerland do? Why can’t we do this as well? Aren’t we allowed to do that too?” There was Rick Strassman in Albuquerque. They got DMT and other materials with FDA approval. But unfortunately his project failed and Strassman left the US for personal reasons. Then David Nichols took over that role.
PJD:		I don’t know whether Vollenweider would ever have been able to start his work if we had not had that psilocybin. If he had had to synthesize it, he would probably not have been able to pay for it. Hence, a number of lucky coincidences came together and made this possible. (Figure 2 pictures some of this Swiss psilocybin freshly encapsulated.)

THE MANIFOLD MATRIX OF SWISS DRUG POLICY

After a short coffee break, Dietschy and Brenneisen recounted in equal detail the no less venturesome development of the heroin program and Swiss cannabis research and policy in the 1990s. Their accounts were captivating and comprehensive. But when, three hours later, we went for lunch, I still could not see how these different plots added up to a distinctive policy approach. Dietschy had already told me in his first response to my query that, “from the end of the ’80s to the mid-’90s of the last century, there was no continuously planned and stringently designed research policy concerning hallucinogens at SFOPH” and that, “in the first half of the 1990s, important decisions were rather made on an ad hoc basis.”

Swiss drug policy was an assemblage of heterogeneous governmental strategies. In the language of policy makers, this was called the Fourfold Approach (Vier-Säulen-Modell), comprising four strategic trajectories or “pillars”: repression (law enforcement), prevention (keeping citizens from using drugs in the first place), therapy (treatment and reintegration of former drug users), and harm reduction (survival support). In an alternative jargon, borrowed from Michel Foucault (2007), one could also speak of an assortment of elements from three different apparatuses: law, discipline, and security. The law constitutes a purely negative form of normativity, which prohibits particular acts within a confined territory, for example, the manufacture, sale, and consumption of drugs like heroin and LSD in Switzerland. Discipline ideally aims at a continuous panoptic observation of individuals responding even to minute deviations from a norm by disciplinary measures. Close monitoring of all people having to do with illicit substances can serve as an example. Drug scenes were infiltrated by undercover narcotics officers; dealers and consumers were prosecuted; scientists studying controlled substances needed special permits and their laboratories could be subject to inspections. At the same time, addicts willing to undergo therapy were registered (“Nobody could enter into a heroin trial without the permission of the SFOPH,” Dietschy told me); they were tested for the additional use of street drugs (based on a method developed by Brenneisen) and had to inject the heroin provided by the Swiss state under supervision in special outpatient clinics. The heroin-assisted treatment programs served to enmesh addicts in the safety net of the otherwise not overly developed Swiss welfare state. These measures were highly effective. In the course of the 1990s, many patients enrolled in these programs managed to return to a well-ordered life, and the number of addicts declined significantly—in part because the heroin programs destroyed the image of the junkie as countercultural hero defying society by making him into a welfare case dependent on the state (Aarburg and Stauffacher 2004).

However, total control of society has remained a totalitarian utopia. As neither proscriptions nor treatment or continuous monitoring of individuals could guarantee the desired outcomes, a third strategy was developed: security. The emergence of security as a form of government can be interpreted as a response to the limits of legal and disciplinary instruments. Here, the aim of total control is replaced by the modulation of a preexisting milieu in order to regulate a population at large. While discipline is based on sustained interventions, security adopts, at least to a certain extent, a laissez-faire attitude, only intervening as a last resort and after observation and evaluation of the specific tendencies of a given situation (Foucault 2007: 1–86). As a key element of biopolitical government (which aims at the promotion rather than the repression of life), Foucault’s notion of security differs from the traditional sense of the term. It is not based on the restriction of civil liberties for the sake of protecting the population through preventive exclusion of malign agents. The biopoliticized security apparatus of the advanced liberal state monitors and manages the chances and risks associated with the largely unhindered activities of its citizens (Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero 2008).

This strategy was integrated into Swiss drug policy in the late 1980s as the problematization of drug use shifted from the repression of inebriation and addiction to fostering the health and safety of consumers and other citizens (Boller 2005: 10). It was briefly pursued when the municipality of Zurich temporarily tolerated drug trade in a confined area known as Needle Park before the heroin program was initiated. At the time of my fieldwork, the Foucauldian security dispositif was actualized in the form of a drug-checking program.² On the weekends, a mobile lab with cutting-edge analytic machinery, including a high-performance liquid chromatograph, run by the Cantonal Pharmacist’s Office, Berne, was moving from party to party allowing ravers to test the quality and dosage of their black-market drugs. This enabled recreational users to make informed and responsible decisions about the drugs they consumed. As products of poor quality were quickly identified and abandoned, this measure improved the quality of the drugs traded (for better or worse).

In this circumscribed context, the Swiss state accepted that illicit drugs were taken and tried to reduce the harm they caused by making the black market more transparent. At the same time, the drug-checking lab allowed the authorities to carry out spot checks, which in turn let them monitor the black market and track consumption patterns. The collected information was mostly used to develop more effective prevention strategies and to warn users, through flyers and postings on party scene–related websites, against adulterated and mislabeled drugs. The mobile lab also provided associated social workers an opportunity to approach users of illegal drugs in an informal but direct manner. Even though it would be misleading to reduce the development of Swiss drug policy in the 1990s to the formation of this security apparatus, the integration of such elements appears to be its most distinctive feature in comparison with the hard-line policies of the United States or neighboring European countries such as France or Germany.

At a panel discussion titled “Modern Drug Policy” at the LSD Symposium, Thomas Kessler, the former delegate for drug issues from the municipality of Basel, argued that progress in drug policy equaled differentiation regarding substances and patterns of consumption: heroin-assisted treatment programs for opiate addicts, drug checking for so-called recreational users of party drugs, strictly regulated sales of strong alcoholic beverages and absinthe, approval of psychotherapeutic applications of psychedelics despite their prohibition in nonmedical settings, and so on. Measured against this metric of differentiation, Switzerland had already gone further than most other countries. If there was a shared matrix in which the different aspects of Swiss drug policy developed in the 1990s, it was this attentiveness to pharmacological differences paired with a businesslike approach to the corresponding perils and possibilities. Pharmacologist Felix Hasler (2007: 42), a native of Liechtenstein, described his Swiss neighbors as “reasonable pragmatics who weigh benefits and risks and value individual responsibility.”

The Swiss government’s liberal technocratic attitude toward drugs required both more and a different kind of knowledge than mere repression did. If a drug was simply prohibited, all the state needed to know was how to detect it for forensic purposes. But if a state decided, for example, to prescribe heroin medically, it also had to learn about its pharmacokinetics to determine an appropriate form of application (tablets, cigarettes, injections, etc.). It also needed to understand the drug’s pharmacodynamics, adverse effects, interactions with other medications, and so on. The SFOPH funded some of Brenneisen’s and Vollenweider’s research on the basic pharmacology of psilocybin to establish a firm foundation for the assessment of future applications for clinical trials. The rationalization of government according to the value of truth that has taken place in the West requires that regulators protect themselves by drawing on scientific authority (Rose 1999: 24–28). At least in Switzerland, this will to and need for knowledge facilitated the revival of hallucinogen research.

In the United States, a legal culture in which government agencies could easily be sued led to a particularly pronounced tendency of administrators to seek refuge in bureaucratic formalism alongside massive government funding of research (Brickman et al. 1985: 304, 309). In Switzerland, on the other hand, state bureaucracy remained relatively restricted. Much social regulation took place on the community level, mediated through more informal relations. The historian Manfred Hettling (1998) speaks of sociability (Geselligkeit) as the predominant form of societal self-organization in Switzerland. Sociability even seemed to be at work within Swiss bureaucracy (and, to some extent at least, this might apply to modern bureaucracy more generally). In principle, a bureaucracy is meant to make decisions in a strictly formalistic manner according to rational rules and “without regard for persons” (Weber 1946: 215). However, when asked whether Vollenweider’s reputation as a sober scientist had anything to do with the approval of his clinical research, Dietschy admitted point-blank that it did play a significant role in the decisions of the SFOPH. In a contentious field like hallucinogen research, seriousness and respectability were of great importance. Had there been any incidents, it would have been Dietschy as chief administrator who would have been called to account. For this reason, he only wanted to work with people he could trust as responsible scientists.³

The fact that Switzerland’s drug policy was generally liberal and the regulatory conditions for hallucinogen research beneficial did not mean that there was no social control. On the contrary, the regulatory regime was close-meshed—at the time of my fieldwork even more so than in the early 1990s. Special permits were required for research purposes and, by then, institutional review boards had also been established in Switzerland. The densely woven social fabric of this small country lent even more weight to a person’s standing in the community. People carefully observed the behavior of their neighbors—to the extent that the East German theater director Michael Schindhelm polemically called Switzerland “the better GDR,” alluding to the widespread spying of East Germany’s citizens on each other. In fact, Switzerland had a major scandal in 1989, the so-called Fiches Affair, when it became publicly known that the Swiss authorities kept files on 900,000 of 6,500,000 Swiss citizens, including many countercultural activists, supposedly to protect the country from communist subversion (Studer and Schaufelbuehl 2009). Thus, Switzerland provided a tightly controlled and regulated, but permissive, research environment that was created and supported by government agencies. The freedom of science they granted was not a “negative liberty,” leaving people alone to do what they wished without interference (Rose 1999: 67). Instead it was carefully framed by legislators, administrators, ethics committees, and funding agencies to hold scientists and therapists accountable.

This was the regulatory apparatus that gave Vollenweider and other Swiss drug researchers a certain competitive advantage, which liberal Swiss politicians vigorously defended against international pressure. As the former Basel drug delegate Thomas Kessler put it: “One has to be incredibly careful not to destroy the great possibilities, which this research presents. . . . Switzerland, as a research site, must take care that its scientific experiments do not disappear in the machinery of a crude and undifferentiated drug policy” (quoted in Vannini and Venturini 1999: 274).

REGULATORY DIFFERENCES AND CAPITAL FLOWS

Thomas Kessler’s former political superior, Luc Saner, also took part in the drug policy discussion at the LSD Symposium. Saner was a politician. As a member of the Free Democratic Party, he promoted economic liberalism in conjunction with libertarianism. In the 1990s, when Kessler was working at Basel’s Department of Justice, Saner championed a liberalization of Swiss drug policy. He advocated making all generally prohibited substances legally available in a differentiated manner by subjecting them to a variety of legal regulations (Saner 1998). On the panel, Saner said:

I think that, in the case of LSD, one must try to get research projects through in order to create the possibility of registering this substance, so that it can be prescribed by physicians. But I have to tell you that this process is highly complex. Registering a drug is not an easy job. Usually, it costs enormous sums, hundreds of millions. And there is only an interest if there is a prospect of profit. The substance must be patentable and there must be an economic incentive. That’s often not easy with such designer drugs. Maybe the patent has already been issued and cannot be renewed. In this context, we have proposed that the state steps in. Here, the liberal calls for the state. Thomas is laughing at me, but that’s how it is. The state needs to take a leadership role making sure that the legal preconditions are created to provide some sort of access to these substances. The state would have to take over the registration.

After the discussion, some people from the audience approached Saner to ask further questions. A remarkable encounter ensued. Among those wanting to speak to Saner was an American man in his late forties. From their outward appearances, John Gilmore and Luc Saner could not have differed more. Saner was a slick Swiss politician wearing shirt and tie. Gilmore, on the other hand, had come from California with long hair and a goatee, dressed in a purple batik shirt and sandals. He told Saner that he had miscalculated the costs of registering substances like LSD or MDMA. The hundreds of millions of dollars for the successful development of one drug, which Saner had mentioned, actually included a pharmaceutical company’s costs of amortizing all the drugs that failed somewhere along the pipeline. In the case of LSD and MDMA, however, we already knew about their safety and therapeutic efficacy and only had to demonstrate them scientifically. Hence, Gilmore reckoned, the costs for registering these substances would be closer to five to ten million dollars. Saner readily accepted the objection, but asked in reply: “Okay, but who would pay those five to ten million dollars? The pharmaceutical industry would only be interested if there was the prospect of profit, but the patents for these substances have long run out.” Gilmore said: “I could do it. I’m a businessman and a philanthropist. If someone presented a reasonable plan, I would be willing to pay for it.” Looking slightly stupefied, Saner offered Gilmore one of his business cards.

John Gilmore was raised in a middle-class family and started to work in information technology at a time when this did not yet require a college degree. He was not only a world-famous hacker but had also been the fifth employee of Sun Microsystems. As such, he quickly made “too much money,” as he said, by which he meant “more than I could usefully spend on myself in my lifetime and more than I wanted to leave to someone else as an inheritance, because it tends to corrupt people to receive large amounts of money for nothing.” Hence, he decided to become a philanthropist, sponsoring projects that ranged from legal aid for detainees at Guantanamo Bay to the development of free software and psychedelic research. What tied these projects together for Gilmore was a certain libertarian agenda supporting civil liberties, from drug use to firearms possession: “The focus is on individual rights, individual responsibility, and freedom to do what you choose to do.”

I first met Gilmore at the LSD Symposium after I had given a talk about hallucinogen research in Switzerland. Based on my fieldwork in the Vollenweider lab, I had addressed the fact that the Swiss branch of the Heffter Research Institute received money not only from the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health but also from private, mostly American donors. After my presentation, Gilmore introduced himself as one of the people I had spoken about. As one of its donors, he asked me for an evaluation of Heffter, as he was unsure whether the institute served his cause. He had decided to spend ten million dollars in ten years on ending the War on Drugs, which in his eyes caused a large amount of human suffering. The most promising strategy to achieve this goal, he thought, was to get illegal drugs registered for medical applications. Hence his interest in Luc Saner’s suggestion. Gilmore had grown concerned that Heffter might be spending too much money on basic research instead of focusing on making psilocybin into a medicine. Formally, a registration with the FDA only required the demonstration of a drug’s safety and efficacy. The mechanism of action, Gilmore argued, could still be explored at a later point in time when a preceding registration would have made it easier for researchers to study the controlled substance in question. To reach this goal, John Gilmore (JG) had a plan.

JG:		People have struggled to improve drug policies forever, but mere advocacy seldom works because the governments are so resistant to change. What you actually have to do and what I have been trying to fund are projects that require the governments to change, that don’t merely suggest that they change. If we actually completed a full drug development program, it would require the government to change its scheduling, to move the drug out of Schedule I, which has no medical use, into another schedule that allows physicians to prescribe it. Then it would not be optional on the government’s part to make that change.
NL:		You said that your goal was to end the War on Drugs. On your website, you write about the huge number of people who get incarcerated for drug-related crimes. This might apply to cannabis. But the share of people who go to jail for crimes related to psychedelics in particular is fairly low. So why focus on this class of substances?
JG:		Partly because most other donors in drug policy focus on marijuana. If I depend on them to largely handle marijuana, I can expand the efforts to also include psychedelics rather than psychedelics being left behind when marijuana becomes legal.
NL:		And the substances responsible for the majority of imprisonments, like heroin and cocaine, are off-limits anyway. You won’t get them legalized.
JG:		Right. And opiates are already widely used in medicine. OxyContin, for example, is a prescription drug that is widely abused, but doctors are free to prescribe it. There is nothing to fix there in the legal situation unless you’re aiming at full legalization, which I think is a harder problem than the ones I’m trying to solve.
NL:		Is there no medical use for cocaine in the United States?
JG:		No, there is. It’s in Schedule II. It’s used as an anesthetic for people who have corrective surgery on their noses, for example.
NL:		Yeah, or in eye surgery. But if there was a medical use for psychedelics, they would probably be put into Schedule II as well. However, that would still be restrictive enough to continue to fuel the War on Drugs, just as heroin and cocaine do. The question is whether the approval of a medical use would really end the War on Drugs.
JG:		It wouldn’t end the War on Drugs. Indeed, I don’t think I will end the War on Drugs by 2010, which was my goal. But, like with the Berlin Wall, I’m hoping to take a few big stones out and then it will probably fall on its own accord, but through normal social processes. The medical use of marijuana has clearly improved the public’s opinion of its recreational use. In each state where medical use has been allowed, you can see over the succeeding years more and more support for recreational use among the public in polls and in voting. That’s because the fear factor goes away. When everyone knows somebody who uses marijuana medically, and they don’t turn into a demon and they don’t lose their job and they don’t go out raping small children, then they wonder, what is all this trouble with marijuana about anyway? If they want to use it, let them use it.

Gilmore’s strategy of ending the War on Drugs by funding clinical research was a response to regimes of government built on the production of knowledge that provided authority to their authority. The rationalization of government brought about a situation in which knowledge was heavily invested with power relations and vice versa. This was especially true in the United States, where the legal system made regulatory agencies vulnerable to attacks from various private interest groups—from transnational corporations to litigious libertarian activists like Gilmore. As a result, there was a high degree of polarization in American science. As Brickman and colleagues (1985: 309–310) point out:

The expansion of the government’s scientific research capacity in response to political pressure is one aspect of a more general phenomenon in the United States. American regulators, being more politically exposed than their European counterparts, have a greater need to support their actions through formal analytical arguments. . . . The structure of the American rule-making process subjects the analytical case for regulation to intense political scrutiny. Any weaknesses are exploited, and the uncertainties and shortcomings of the relevant scientific base are readily exposed. . . . In this adversarial setting, participating scientists often appear as advocates of particular regulatory outcomes rather than disinterested experts. . . . The polarization induced by the U.S. regulatory process has tainted even the federal government’s own research institutions, undermining their credibility as a source of unbiased expertise.

The greatest loss of credibility in US government-funded drug research in the recent past occurred in 2003 when psychopharmacologist George Ricaurte—the colleague who had previously accused Vollenweider of giving dangerously high doses of MDMA to human subjects—had to withdraw his sensational study on the neurotoxicity of the substance published in Science one year earlier (Ricaurte et al. 2002, 2003). Based on primate research funded by the National Institute of Drug Abuse, Ricaurte had postulated such a high degree of neurotoxicity for MDMA in doses regularly consumed at raves that ecstasy users should have died very frequently. Many of those who had seen the drug being used in their own social environment regarded Ricaurte’s claims with suspicion. Eventually, he had to concede that he had actually administered the significantly more toxic methamphetamine (speed) to the monkeys. This mistake had been based on a mislabeling of containers, he claimed.

Such crises of confidence in government-funded research were exactly what Heffter’s competitor MAPS was trying to take advantage of to relegitimize various medical and nonmedical applications of psychedelic drugs. MAPS founder Rick Doblin explained at the LSD Symposium: “The key point here is to build credibility. The government has lost credibility about the risks because they completely exaggerate them. The government has also lost credibility about benefits because they completely deny them. So we need to be at the forefront of looking at risks and at benefits.” The goal was to acquire greater scientific authority than either countercultural propagandists or experts supported by the US government. As an activist organization, MAPS funded both research and lawsuits against the US Drug Enforcement Administration, employing the scientific knowledge it helped to generate to pursue its political goals.

Even though the Heffter Research Institute also had as a goal the registration of psilocybin as a medicine, the organization tried to stay out of the trenches of the drug war. It was key to Heffter’s strategy of depoliticization to support and conduct clinical research and basic science alike—an approach Gilmore criticized as not sufficiently goal-oriented. The tensions manifesting in this situation arose from a regulatory regime in which the supposed value neutrality of science was simultaneously claimed and undermined by the warring parties. The War on Drugs was also a war of knowledge, in which victories were occasionally based on new scientific findings. But the sharpest weapons blunt rapidly when wielded with too much fervor.