1998) had conducted follow-up studies on two of Leary’s experiments and had found that Leary had committed scientific fraud. Together with his doctoral student Walter Pahnke, Leary had furthermore concealed the fact that one subject from the Good Friday experiment had become so severely psychotic that he had to be tranquilized with an antipsychotic drug. “Tim justified this in his mind as, ‘The society is demonizing these drugs, so if I fudge things a bit, it’s excusable because I’m fighting a bigger evil,’ ” Doblin explained. On the opposite side, Doblin saw a society not prepared for those “incredible dynamic energies.” In response to the drugs’ gradual association with cultural rebellion, this society equally distorted the facts, exaggerated risks, and suppressed research “to keep the stories going about how terrible these things were.”
But Doblin saw the ostracism of hallucinogens in a much broader temporal framework. Following historical speculations about the use of hallucinogenic drugs in initiation ceremonies at Eleusis in ancient Greece (Wasson et al. 1978), Doblin said: “The Eleusinian Mysteries were wiped out by the Church in 396. That was the last time in Western culture that psychedelics had been integrated in a central way. So our mission is a 1600-year mission to try to bring psychedelics back into the core of our culture.”
For Doblin, however, the escapism of the counterculture—the fantasy of self-actualization on a remote island as envisioned by Huxley’s novel—had turned out to be a dead end. “The self-definition of the counterculture was inherently destructive. If you’re separated from the core of society, you will eventually be overwhelmed. That’s why I have a picket fence, a station wagon, and a boring middle-class life. That’s the route, though. It’s to mainstream these things and take them away from cultural rebellion and use them for cultural renewal. I long for a conventional life that has psychedelics and spirituality as part of it.” Doblin is Jewish, but his this-worldly mysticism is inspired by the Mahayana Buddhist figure of the Bodhisattva who puts off nirvana to help others: “Even the idea that you could be done on Earth and then you’re off the wheel of reincarnation is distasteful to me. It implies that you have no sense of social responsibility and that there is something more spiritual than what we have here on Earth, which I don’t think there is. I think this is it. This is the playground, the proving ground. I don’t believe in heaven.”
Doblin started working toward the mainstreaming of psychedelics in 1984, when MDMA was about to be prohibited as well. A friend of his had founded a nonprofit organization, Earth Metabolic Design Laboratories, dedicated to the development of alternative energy. Since the friend did not use the organization, Doblin took over, reinterpreted its mission as being about “mental energies,” and began working against the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA): “This was about moving from ‘I’m a criminal, I’m a draft resister, I’m a drug user, I’m a countercultural person’ to—wow!—this system has also created a mechanism for change within it that will give us the ability to take money from people who get tax reductions to fight the system.” With the money it raised, Earth Metabolic Design Laboratories sponsored a toxicity study testing MDMA on dogs and rodents as well as a first preclinical trial on humans (Downing 1986; Frith et al. 1987).
Doblin quickly turned into a psychedelic entrepreneur and lobbyist, speaking out in favor of ecstasy and other psychedelics in TV talk shows and at the World Health Organization in Geneva. When, in 1985, all efforts to prevent the illegalization of MDMA had failed, he abandoned Earth Metabolic Design Laboratories and planned to build a “psychedelic orphan drug pharmaceutical company.” The following year, Doblin established it as another nonprofit organization called Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). It assembled a network of drug researchers and raised funds from private donors to support its work. MAPS also made a sustained effort to develop a respectful relationship with the FDA to improve communication between the psychedelic community and regulators. For this purpose, Doblin enrolled in the PhD program of Harvard’s prestigious Kennedy School of Government, where he wrote a dissertation on the regulation of medical uses of psychedelics (Doblin 2000). Through an internship program for graduates interested in careers in the federal government, Doblin managed to develop strong ties to the FDA officers in charge of hallucinogen studies, and he learned from them how to create admissible research protocols before returning to MAPS. The ultimate goal of his organization was to get MDMA and other psychedelic drugs tested in clinical trials in order to register them as prescription medicines.
But MAPS did not remain the only organization promoting the revival of hallucinogen research. On both sides of the Atlantic, further associations emerged for MAPS to collaborate and compete with. In the United States, the Heffter Research Institute, named after the German chemist who had first isolated mescaline, arrived on the scene in 1993. At the LSD Symposium in 2006, the institute’s president and cofounder, David Nichols, a professor of medicinal chemistry, related how this virtual institution, connecting laboratories and research groups at various universities in America and Switzerland, was conceived:
I began my career in 1969, concentrating on research on psychedelics, and it has been a major focus of my life ever since. [Turning to Hofmann who was sitting in the audience:] Albert, thank you! My life would be very different had LSD not been discovered. And certainly less interesting and colorful. After I got my PhD in 1973, I started thinking about the fact that clinical research had stopped. I thought this was really too bad. I would go to scientific meetings and share beers with colleagues, saying, “You know, there should be clinical research.” And they would say, “No, no, you can’t do it.” And I would say, “Well, you can do it. You can’t get the government to pay for it, but you need private money.” Around 1990, I would be telling the same story to someone, and I thought, “Dave, you gonna be ninety years old sitting in a rocking chair telling the same story.” So I decided to start the Heffter Research Institute.
Holding a so-called Schedule I permit, which allowed him to handle even the most tightly controlled psychoactive compounds, Nichols had been one of the very few people able to pursue their scientific interest in hallucinogens continuously since the late 1960s. In his laboratory at Purdue University, he synthesized a range of new substances and tried them out on animals. As a well-respected chemistry professor, he never experienced any difficulties with government agencies—even after the prohibition of hallucinogens. The red line not to be crossed, however, was human research.
In 1990, Nichols’s colleague Rick Strassman, a psychiatrist at the University of New Mexico, was the first to test the regulatory limits. He was particularly interested in the short-acting but extremely powerful hallucinogen N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) because it was the only psychedelic endogenously produced by the human body and was possibly involved in naturally occurring psychedelic states such as birth, death and near-death, psychosis, and mystical experiences. Strassman believed it was excreted by the “mysterious pineal gland,” which Descartes had taken to be the seat of the soul and where both Eastern and Western mystical traditions had located “our highest spiritual center” (Strassman 2001: xv). In Strassman’s eyes, DMT was the key to our humanity. As a Buddhist, he believed that human life began forty-nine days after conception when the spirit ensouled the fetus. The neurobiological correlate of anthropogenesis, Strassman speculated, was a pineal gland release of the “spirit molecule” DMT (xvii).
Strassman proposed to start off with a randomized double-blind dose-response study. He stuck to the unwritten rules, asking to study DMT as a “drug of abuse” and focusing on its pharmacology instead of psychotherapeutic applications (which would have suggested that there was a benefit to taking an illegal drug). He was backed by Daniel Freedman, one of the most powerful figures in American psychiatry at the time (a former president of the American Psychiatric Association and editor of the highly prestigious journal Archives of General Psychiatry), who had conducted LSD research himself in the 1950s and 1960s. Despite the damaged reputation of hallucinogens, Strassman’s colleagues at the medical school also turned out to be supportive of his project. In 1988, he submitted a research protocol to the Human Research Ethics Committee of his university. In the first phase of hallucinogen research, such institutional review boards had not yet played a major role. Their emergence was part of the institutionalization of medical ethics
