Protestant work ethic could not be any starker (Weber 1958/1919; Bellah 1999).
Already in the 1960s, sociologically informed observers and self-reflexive members of the American counterculture described that culture’s drug mysticism against the background of Weber’s work. For example, the Stanford psychologist Richard Blum (1964: 283) noted, “For the user [of LSD] who does move in the direction of contemplative mysticism, there is a fleeing from the world and the re-establishment of the ethic of brotherhood, symbolized in becoming more loving.” And the countercultural activist Jerry Rubin explained: “Drug use signifies the total end of the Protestant ethic: screw work, we want to know ourselves. But of course the goal is to free oneself from American society’s sick notion of work, success, reward, and status and to find oneself through one’s own discipline, hard work, and introspection” (quoted in Jonnes 1996: 239). This blend of drug mysticism and the desire for self-knowledge was articulated in opposition to what was imagined as the Protestant spirit of capitalism (Davis and Munoz 1968).
Representatives of the psychedelic movement presented their conflict with the so-called Establishment as a fight over religious values. This framing enabled them to defend the use of “sacramental biochemicals like LSD” (Leary 1970: 18) by claiming their constitutional right of religious liberty. In a Senate hearing, one of them even warned against a “religious civil war” that would break out if Leary was arrested for drug possession (Greenfield 2006: 274). In the course of the 1960s, the struggle over hallucinogens became a political struggle over the spiritual foundations of America’s social and economic order. Soon, Leary’s political neurotheology became so influential that the Nixon administration came to see him as public enemy number one in its “War on Drugs”—even though the opponents of the counterculture preferred to present the situation as a moral threat and a public health crisis rather than a religious conflict (Davenport-Hines 2002: 265; Greenfield 2006: 343). The attribution of a political neurotheology to Leary and the psychedelic movement evokes not only the late Huxley’s sense of biospirituality but also Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology (2005), originally published in 1922. Of course, politically and theologically, the far-right Catholic jurist from Germany and the libertarian high priest of the American psychedelic movement could not have been further apart. Schmitt’s famous dictum that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts” (36) led him to embrace authoritarianism. In his eyes, Hitler restored a dimension of political transcendence by reoccupying a position of sovereignty above the law—analogous to the omnipotent God of theist theology.
Leary, on the other hand, drew from an antistatist tradition equally inherent in Christianity. Here, God did not appear as celestial king upon a throne in heaven. Instead of identifying Him with a position in a symbolic system that ordered the social and political world, Leary (2001) proclaimed: “Your brain is God!” The divine was to be found as inner experience, and psychedelics served as chemical keys to this God within: “Religion is consciousness expansion, centered in the body and defined exactly the way it sounds best to you” (Leary 1965: 9). Antithetical to Schmitt’s authoritarian politicotheological order, Leary called for an anarchist drug mysticism: “You must start your own religion. You’re God—but only you can discover and nurture your divinity. No one can start your religion for you” (7). This was both spiritual and legal advice followed by numerous “dope churches” that quoted the freedom of religion to defend their use of illicit drugs (Leary 1965: 12–15; Miller 1991: 31–34). But only members of the Native American Church and, since 2006, of the syncretist churches União do Vegetal and Santo Daime were granted the right to use peyote and ayahuasca for religious purposes (Stewart 1987: 213–238; Fuller 2000: 177–190; Dobkin de Rios and Rumrrill 2008).3
The attempt to introduce psychedelic drugs as mediators of the divine into the modern world threw 1960s America into a crisis. Eventually, however, this moment of conflict and indetermination was resolved by legislators. The spreading consumption of hallucinogens among white middle-class youth (probably promoted more effectively by Ken Kesey’s hedonistically oriented electric Kool-Aid acid tests than by Leary’s tongue-in-cheek proselytizing [Wolfe 1968]), along with a growing number of drug-related accidents and their scandalization in the media, resulted in the gradual prohibition of this class of drugs between 1966 and 1970. Consequently, the utopian visions of an alternative drug culture, which Huxley’s novel Island had inspired at the beginning of the decade, were shattered.
THE DARK ERA
Even though hallucinogen research was drastically curbed in the late 1960s, it never came to a total standstill. Despite the numerous hurdles and restrictions limiting the freedom of science it was, in principle, still possible to pursue research on psychedelic drugs and, in fact, some scientists did obtain licenses that allowed them to go ahead. Two of them, the chemist David Nichols and the neuropsychopharmacologist Mark Geyer, would later play a crucial role in the resurgence of hallucinogen research. For those holding a special permit, chemical analysis and synthesis as well as pharmacological studies in animals were legally possible throughout the 1970s and 1980s. There were even a very few human studies during the period that Geyer ironically referred to as “the Dark Era” (e.g., Francom et al. 1988; Lim et al. 1988). In Germany and the Netherlands, the psychiatrist Hanscarl Leuner and the psychoanalyst Jan Bastiaans were also allowed to continue using hallucinogens in therapeutic settings until they retired in the mid-1980s (Passie 1996/97; Snelders and Kaplan 2002). Of course, the scale of this medical research was infinitesimal in comparison to the vibrant scientific experimentation in the 1950s, but it was enough to demonstrate that such research was not categorically prohibited. The mechanisms that led to its deterioration were subtler. Scientists were not officially denied their academic freedom and yet they were discouraged, worn down, and guided away from further work on these compounds. A subtle microphysics of power (allocation of funding, having to guard one’s reputation, approval of research projects, recruitment of test subjects, etc.) led to an almost total breakdown of academic hallucinogen research.
At the same time, however, psychedelic science flourished in the underground. The central figure of this nonacademic hallucinogen research was Alexander Shulgin. Invited to a symposium at the University of California, San Diego, in 2006, Shulgin indicated that in the nineteenth century the Western world had only known two psychedelic drugs: marijuana and peyote. By the 1950s, it already knew dozens. And at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the number was about two hundred—many of which Shulgin had invented himself (see Shulgin and Shulgin 1991, 1997). If this logarithmic growth continued, Shulgin calculated, there would be about 2,000 compounds by 2050. Since the birth of the Internet, largely contemporaneous with the revival of hallucinogen research in the 1990s, clandestine psychedelic science has found a highly efficient venue for publication and collaboration (Langlitz 2009). It blossomed in the shadow of prohibition. But this is for another book.4
AFTER THE COUNTERCULTURE: THE REVIVAL OF PSYCHEDELIC RESEARCH
In 2010—by now the revival had been simmering for two decades—I went to visit Rick Doblin, one of its most important initiators, to talk about how this comparatively quiet return of psychedelics into academic science had begun. Together with his wife, three children, and a dog, Doblin was living in Belmont, an affluent suburb of Boston, just a short bus ride away from where Timothy Leary had brought hallucinogen research into disrepute. Some neighbors demonstrated their patriotism by planting little Star Spangled Banners in their well-trimmed front gardens, while Doblin was advocating scientific and recreational drug use. Yet the exuberant outgrowths of the War on Drugs, which President Obama’s newly appointed drug czar had only rhetorically ended, seemed worlds apart (Kerlikowske 2009). And so we spent a peaceful afternoon talking next to a Jacuzzi on the rooftop. The only noise interfering with my interview recording was the soft rustling of leaves.
Asked about the sixties, Doblin stated: “Most people explain the breakdown with psychedelic experiences going wrong in a recreational context. But I would say that it had more to do with psychedelic experiences going right: people having unitive mystical experiences that changed their political perspectives and which got them involved in social justice movements challenging
