Neuropsychedelia. Nicolas Langlitz
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from peripheral neuropathy. The US Congress passed the Kefauver-Harris amendments in the following year, giving the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) control over all investigational drugs (Daemmrich 2004: 60–69). LSD happened to be such an investigational drug just like thalidomide. A drug safety study on Hofmann’s problem child, also published in 1962, warned against the risks of suicide and prolonged psychotic reactions (Cohen and Ditman 1962). Regulations were tightened. Consequently, researchers could no longer mail a form to Sandoz, receive LSD in return, and administer it to patients without even informing them about the experimental nature of their treatment. Now they had to undergo the newly created Investigational Exemption to the New Drug Application process. Henceforth, the FDA had to give prior approval for all testing of experimental drugs. Additionally, Sandoz had grown concerned about its reputation and restricted the provision of LSD in the United States to researchers associated with the National Institute of Mental Health, Veterans Affairs hospitals, and to state commissioners of mental health. As a result, the number of researchers who had access to psychedelics was reduced from several hundred to approximately 70 (or, according to another source, even 13). They were all scientists working within federal and state agencies or they had obtained grants or permissions from such agencies (Masters and Houston 1966: 66; Stevens 1987: 182–182; Novak 1997; Doblin 2000).
Up to this point the history of the medical uses of hallucinogens had been part of a much broader history of controlling pharmaceuticals in the United States. What was at issue when scientific applications of hallucinogens were subjected to a strict regulatory regime in the early 1960s was not spiritual liberation through consciousness-expanding drugs and their association with the politics of the counterculture, but medical paternalism and pharmaceutical marketing practices. After all, the distribution of thalidomide and LSD as investigational drugs primarily served to acquaint doctors with new products and to establish a lucrative therapeutic application from which industry could profit. The expansion of the FDA’s duties and power was meant to protect American citizens from ruthless or adventurous physicians, scientists, and businessmen. It belonged to a profound transformation of medical decision making, challenging and curbing physicians’ professional dominance with a commitment to individual rights. In the 1960s, trust in medical authority was shaken and thereafter doctors and researchers had to make their decisions about patients and test subjects, treatments and study designs alongside lawyers, judges, legislators, members of ethics committees, and FDA officers (Rothman 1991). These developments in the medical sector were part of an even more far-reaching restructuring of the governance of technological change in industrialized countries that was responding to public concern about the risks accompanying scientific and technological innovation (Brickman et al. 1985: 19). But this was only the beginning of the end of hallucinogen research.
POLITICAL NEUROTHEOLOGY
In 1960, an established middle-aged personality psychologist went on a vacation to Mexico before taking up a new position at Harvard’s Center of Personality Research. In the area where Timothy Leary was staying, the New York banker and amateur mycologist Gordon Wasson had rediscovered and widely publicized the ritual use of hallucinogenic mushrooms only five years earlier. Interested in experiencing their effects for himself, Leary bought such Psilocybe mushrooms at the market, tried them—and had what he would later describe as a religious epiphany (Leary 1970: 13–14). By the time he arrived in Cambridge, he had decided to make the effects of psilocybin, the pharmacologically active compound of the toadstool (just isolated and synthesized by Hofmann), the center of his new research program (Greenfield 2006: 110–114).
The last experiment, which Leary supervised during his short tenure at Harvard in 1962, instantiated a science, which Huxley (1962: 94, 144) simultaneously envisaged in Island under the newly coined rubric of neurotheology. It is in this work of fiction that the term was coined to designate a discipline studying the relationship between physiology and spiritual experience (Horgan 2003: 74). Considering that the academic discipline of theology traditionally studies and elaborates a rational system of religious beliefs, it is debatable whether the biological investigation of spiritual experiences is aptly characterized as neurotheology. But, since this is how the term has been used ever since, I will adopt the concept of neurotheology to describe this emergent discourse instead of replacing it by the possibly more appropriate designation neurospirituality. Following William James’s (1958/1902: 298–299) association of drug-induced mind states and divine illumination, Leary and his doctoral student Walter Pahnke administered psilocybin to twenty theology students who attended the Good Friday sermon at Boston University’s Marsh Chapel. Subsequently, they compared the participants’ experience reports with experiences described in the mystical literature and concluded that hallucinogens could facilitate genuine mystical experiences (Pahnke 1963; Pahnke and Richards 1966; Lattin 2010: 73–84).
But the situation was becoming more and more difficult for Leary and his allies. As in any university department, there were power struggles between them and other factions in the psychology faculty. At a time when behaviorism reigned, there was much opposition to their introspective approach to psychopharmacology. Ethically, Leary was also criticized for ignoring the medical risks associated with the administration of psilocybin and for his use of graduate students as experimental subjects. Legend has it that he was eventually dismissed from Harvard in 1963 when undergraduates became involved in his experimentation as well. But, in fact, it was Leary who declared himself fired on a TV talk show, fashioning himself as a repressed but rebellious countercultural hero. It was not just Harvard that drove him out but also he himself who turned his back on Harvard (Greenfield 2006: 195–199; Das and Metzner 2010: 81–91; Lattin 2010: 85–106).
Even after Leary had decided that he was “through playing the science game” (quoted in Jonnes 1996: 229), he remained intellectually rooted and continued to influence the field of psychology (Devonis 2012). But he also metamorphosed into the prophet of a pharmacologically revitalized religious movement (Leary 1968). “Drugs are the religion of the twenty-first century,” Leary (1970: 44) announced. He propagated hallucinogens as a psychopharmacological cure for all social ills: “It seemed to us that wars, class conflicts, racial tensions, economic exploitation, religious strife, ignorance, and prejudice were all caused by narrow social conditioning. Political problems were manifestations of psychological problems, which at bottom seemed to be neurological-hormonal-chemical. If we could help people plug into the empathy circuits of the brain, then positive social change could occur” (Leary 1983: 49–50).
This optimism resonated with the high hopes inspired by the psychopharmacological revolution. A decade or two earlier, drugs had hardly been accepted as remedies of mental disorders. But since the mid-1950s, Americans had grown convinced that no illness was beyond the capacities of pharmaceutical science. Leary took this new confidence in biological psychiatry one step further, from the clinic to society at large, which he declared a suitable target of pharmacotherapeutic intervention. Moving from scientific detachment to social activism, Leary (1983: 50) plotted a “neurological revolution”: “Bolshevik bomb throwing was out. The new bombs were neurological. You don’t blow up the Czar’s palace. You blow minds” (quoted in Greenfield 2006: 333).
The rhetorics of Leary’s “politics of ecstasy” were radical and new. New because of the abundance of brain metaphors and neuro- prefixes. They might appear less striking against the background of the current hype around the neurosciences. But when Leary invented this vocabulary, he was among the first to introduce such loose brain talk into popular discourse. His biologizing manifestos and sermons were also radical in that they advocated the liberation of people’s “divine bodies” from a repressive “robot society.” Consciousness-expanding drugs were meant to facilitate the “opening” of the cortex and its “liberation from the cultural self” (Leary 1965: 69, 93, 141). In contrast to much critical scholarship in contemporary anthropology, Leary’s impatience for liberty did not turn to historical and cultural contingencies but to biospiritual universals, framed by Huxley’s perennial philosophy, as a way out of a societal situation experienced as overly restraining. In this respect, the counterculture was not just a subculture opposing the Establishment but a culture against culture per se. But however novel and extreme these calls for a consciousness revolution were, Leary did not simply see himself in the tradition of political avant-gardism. He cast himself as involved in a recurrent transhistorical battle that every new generation had to fight all over again to recover