Neuropsychedelia. Nicolas Langlitz
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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