that was meant to bridge the divide between organized religion and a scientifically enlightened liberal lifestyle open to drugs: “There is a rise in religious fundamentalism at a time when that world view is more and more difficult to sustain. . . . The fundamentalists are scared that psychedelics might delegitimize their particular religion, but I think psychedelics can reinvigorate religion and make people appreciate their traditions. Global spirituality is not inherently anti-religion.” The political neurotheology of the psychedelic revival oscillated between disenchanted but politically defensive atheism and mystically inspired libertarian activism. In accordance with MAPS’ mainstreaming strategy, Doblin deemphasized the marked ideological differences between the reanimated psychedelic movement and the powerful advocates of American conservatism who had also dominated Leon Kass’s President’s Council on Bioethics (Briggle 2009).
THE GLOBAL ASSEMBLAGE OF HALLUCINOGEN RESEARCH
And yet, even at our meeting in 2010, Rick Doblin was still worried that the political climate would change and that everything MAPS had built up over the past two decades could be torn down again. From the very beginning, such concerns had led the psychedelic revivalists to develop an international strategy. As Doblin told me: “We need mul tiple places where this stuff is happening. If there is a backlash in any one of them, hopefully there is a refuge elsewhere.”
Thus, the revival of psychedelic science was not restricted to the United States. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, new research projects were simultaneously budding in Russia, Britain, Spain, Germany, and Switzerland. Many of the protagonists of this development had known each other for many years through the conferences of the International Transpersonal Association established by the Czech psychedelic researcher Stan Grof in 1978. Grof and his allies promoted a form of psychology that studied self-transcendent aspects of human experience, including those induced by drugs. “They were going all over the world trying to unify scientists over spirituality and looking for a place to start this,” Doblin remembered. But not everybody involved in the global reanimation of hallucinogen research was an adherent of transpersonal psychology. In Germany, for example, the group around the biological psychiatrists Manfred Spitzer, Leo Hermle, and Euphrosyne Gouzoulis-Mayfrank was more interested in experimental psychosis than in experimental mysticism. The symposia of the European College for the Study of Consciousness, a virtual institution founded in 1985 by the German psychiatrist Hanscarl Leuner, provided a meeting place for the small but burgeoning scene of European hallucinogen researchers, mostly from Germany and Switzerland. Here, members of different ideological camps came together. Advocates of psycholytic therapy exchanged ideas with basic science researchers, while stern biological psychiatrists spoke to anthropologists practicing neoshamanism.
It did not take long until Europeans and Americans met. In a 1989 newsletter that MAPS sent out to its supporters, Doblin (1989a) mentioned the possibility of conducting MDMA research in the Soviet Union before FDA permission was granted for US studies. A small group of scientists was already active in Moscow and Leningrad. Since 1985, for example, the Russian psychiatrist Evgeny Krupitsky had treated alcoholics and heroin addicts with the hallucinogen ketamine. As the Iron Curtain fell and the USSR began to disintegrate, an opportunity seemed to open up for MAPS: “Soviet state-funded science is in a crisis. It is now possible to assemble a world-class psychedelic research group for a fraction of the cost here in the US” (Doblin 1992).
At about the same time, in 1988, the Swiss Federal Office of Public 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
