Neuropsychedelia. Nicolas Langlitz
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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