Neuropsychedelia. Nicolas Langlitz
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Health gave permission to a group of physicians, the Swiss Medical Association for Psycholytic Therapy (SAPT; Schweizer Ärztegesellschaft für Psycholytische Therapie), to treat patients with LSD, psilocybin, and MDMA. Doblin was thrilled: “Finally, somewhere in the world, psychotherapeutic research with MDMA is taking place,” he wrote in a MAPS newsletter article titled “Switzerland Leads the Way” (Doblin 1989b). He was hopeful that the Swiss experience would help MAPS convince American regulatory agencies of the value of psychedelic research: “The fact that hundreds of patients have been successfully treated with MDMA in Switzerland strengthens the circumstantial case for research into the therapeutic use of MDMA” (1).
When the Heffter Research Institute was founded in 1993, the axis between American and Swiss psychedelic scientists was further consolidated. It was the fiftieth anniversary of Hofmann’s discovery of LSD. To mark the occasion, the academic conference “50 Years of LSD” was organized by the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences and sponsored by Sandoz and the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health. On this occasion, Dave Nichols, Mark Geyer, and Rick Strassman traveled to Switzerland, where they met Spitzer, Hermle, and Gouzoulis from Germany. Soon Geyer’s lab began to cooperate with Gouzoulis. Yet a second encounter would turn out to have even greater bearing on the future of Heffter. Franz Vollenweider was a young Swiss researcher building up a laboratory at the Psychiatric University Hospital in Zurich, where he was conducting the first neuroimaging studies on the effects of psilocybin. Nichols remembered that they immediately realized that Vollenweider was very bright and promising—if “a bit scrambled.” But in Vollenweider they saw not only a highly talented young brain researcher with a passionate interest in psychedelics but also a potential collaborator who had access to neuroimaging technologies none of their allies in the United States had at their disposal. Even more importantly, Vollenweider was based in Switzerland, a country with a significantly more permissive drug policy and regulatory regime. Despite the optimism Nichols, Geyer, and Strassman were spreading when addressing potential donors, they still felt distressed about the resistance that psychedelic research met in America. After all, Strassman’s study had only been approved after struggling for two years with various regulatory bodies, and it was not clear whether other universities would be equally accommodating. Geyer recalled: “After meeting Franz and setting up the collaboration, I first told the Heffter people about this: There is actual research going on in Europe! What we had been frustrated about getting going in the US was happening in Germany and Switzerland.”
The fact that Vollenweider could conduct clinical research in Zurich became even more important when Strassman left Heffter. Strassman had been the only person at Heffter with access to a clinical research facility. But he became increasingly dissatisfied with his work. He resented the restrictions imposed by the ethics committee and the pressure to stick to the biomedical model, in which mechanisms were more important than the psychedelic experience (Strassman 2001: 278–293). After pushing through the clinical study, which lent so much credibility to Heffter’s enterprise, Strassman also refused to acknowledge Nichols as president of the organization. Claiming a leadership role for himself, he expected his colleagues to join him in New Mexico, where he wanted to build up a center for psychedelic studies. But they refused. Strassman complained: “It was easier to talk about the transformative value of the psychedelic experience than it was to put into practice some of its contents. My colleagues may have had inspiring experiences, but they were not committed to goals that required work and sacrifice” (282). Or, as Geyer told me: “Despite experiences with these compounds, people still had egos to contend with.” Eventually, Strassman resigned from his academic position and withdrew from Heffter. He also turned his back on his Buddhist community after they spoke out against his association of psychedelics with spirituality. Instead, he returned to his Jewish roots and began to study the Hebrew scriptures in an attempt to further understand the role of endogenous DMT. In 1996, the Heffter Research Institute integrated Vollenweider’s lab as a new site to conduct clinical studies in Switzerland. But how had this small, politically introverted country become so central to the global assemblage of hallucinogen research?
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