giving LSD to their patients to worsen their mental problems so they could maintain power over them.
And, indeed, while the scientological human rights activists were protesting, one of those psychiatrists administering hallucinogenic drugs (even though not LSD) to healthy volunteers (not patients) was giving a workshop inside. Franz Vollenweider and his collaborator, Felix Hasler, were hosting a panel titled “Preconditions for Work with Hallucinogens in Switzerland.” They mostly explained the regulatory framework of their research to an international lay audience. During the question and answer period one listener asked: “The research you’re doing is relatively controversial and I could imagine that you encounter some rough resistance. Where does this resistance come from? Colleagues? Pseudoreligious groups? Politicians? And how do you deal with it?” Considering the intense politicization of psychedelic drugs and the regulatory hurdles Rick Strassman had had to overcome in the United States, Vollenweider’s answer came as a surprise:
We have done about fifty studies and examined 600 to 700 people, but I haven’t experienced any resistance so far. Once, there was criticism from the USA because of an MDMA study we did. They claimed that our doses came close to those given to animals and that this might be dangerous. We checked this meticulously, but our doses were significantly lower than those used in animal models where MDMA is suspected to be toxic. That was the only discussion I had with American colleagues and such disagreements are argued out at conferences.1 But, interestingly, we have never had any problems here in Switzerland. If there is resistance, it comes from psychiatry insofar as we are seen to be doing too much biology. People always want psychological models. But, of course, doing psychology without biology is nonsense. Psychology is a brain function and the brain is a function of the psyche. It’s a vicious circle. This kind of prattle can be ignored. If someone is still a dualist today, he is behind the times.
Obviously, Vollenweider did not consider the scientologists spreading antipsychiatric conspiracy theories in front of the Convention Center a serious threat to his research. Whereas the Church of Scientology was suspiciously watched by the Swiss authorities (it had repeatedly been accused of exploiting its members and harassing its critics), Vollenweider could count on government support for his scientific work with hallucinogenic drugs. The fierce antagonism between authorities and psychedelic culture that had marked the American field after the prohibition of hallucinogens in the late 1960s had no direct match in Switzerland. It was because of this historical and cultural difference that Rick Doblin had reason to hope that Switzerland would lead the way to a revival of hallucinogen research.
HELVETIC COUNTERCULTURE
However, Switzerland had not been spared the sociopolitical conflicts sparked by the appearance of the so-called counterculture. In fact, the Alp republic had already been home to such experimentation with alternative lifestyles many decades before Theodore Roszak coined the term to designate the heterogeneous ensemble of protest movements mushrooming not only in the United States but in almost all industrial countries in the course of the 1960s. Between 1900 and 1920, the small Swiss-lake village of Ascona attracted many disgruntled members of the European Bildungsbürgertum, such as the novelist Hermann Hesse and the psychoanalyst Otto Gross, who were looking for alternative ways of life. They experienced what one of these visitors, the German professor of economics Max Weber (1992/1920: 123–124), described as a sense of living in an “iron cage”: a world increasingly rationalized, bureaucratized, and populated by a modern vocational humanity (Berufsmen-schentum) that had grown out of, but had become unmoored from, the spiritual foundations of the Protestant moral asceticism so profoundly shaping the country of Calvin and Zwingli (Whimster 2001). To counter this stifling side of modernity, the intellectuals frequenting Ascona defied “society”: they advocated anarchy and pacifism, practiced free love, attempted to square individual self-liberation and the renewal of deeply rooted group bonds, rebelled against science and medicine, and sought to experiment with the potential of their own and each others’ bodies. They longed for a return to nature while devising this-worldy forms of religiosity that reconciled monism and mysticism. Like their successors half a century later, some of these spiritual dissidents experimented with drugs. Especially after a young woman died of an overdose of cocaine, the Swiss authorities considered the Asconan milieu to be highly undesirable and dangerous and began to take legal action against its most exposed members. But eventually this early counterculture did not disappear due to police action. When the First World War broke out, many members of this scene were drafted for military service, persecuted for refusing to fight for their country, or were simply no longer able to cross borders to travel from their home countries to the Swiss resort. The spirit of Ascona, however, lived on and manifested itself in very different forms as the twentieth century began to take its course (Green 1986).
One of these recurrences involves the events called to mind by the year 1968. Like their counterparts in other Western countries, the Swiss protest movements of the late 1960s revived many of the Asconan ideas by associating them with the political order of the day: protests against the Vietnam war and imperialism, challenges to technocracy, and advocacy of Maoism, feminism, environmentalism, and libertarianism (Linke and Scharloth 2008; Studer and Schaufelbuehl 2009). These ideological currents connected countercultural rebels from San Francisco to Zurich and from Berne to Berlin. While American hippies dropped out to live in small communes in rural California, Swiss youth, most prominently the so-called Bärglütli, sought harmonious relations to nature, fellow human beings, and themselves in the Alps, where they practiced herbal medicine, organized workshops in Sufi dancing, and took LSD together (Bittner 2009). As elsewhere, these protests against the established social order resulted in violent clashes between rebellious youth and police forces (Zweifel 1998).
But there was also a distinctly Swiss flavor to the revolts in this part of the world. On the one hand, in Switzerland 1968 was a less apparent historical break than in other countries. In contrast to France, a political takeover did not even seem a faint possibility. Unlike Italy, no sustainable alliance emerged between students and workers. The Swiss government and bureaucracy were not laced with former Nazis and no leftist radicalization gave rise to terrorism as happened in Germany. Having grown up in a notoriously neutral country, Swiss youth were not at risk of having to serve in Vietnam, nor did their society experience the kind of racial tensions that brought together black civil rights activists and the student movement in the United States. Thus, in the case of Switzerland, the historical continuities were as significant as the caesura of ’68 (Schär 2008).
On the other hand, the Swiss suffered from what, in 1964, was first diagnosed as the “Helvetic malaise.” The term was coined by a member of the Free Democratic Party, classically liberal in its political orientation, who was soon seconded by intellectuals such as the writers Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt who sympathized with the nonconformist youth. They all expressed a growing discontent with the “spiritual defense” of Switzerland: a political and cultural movement that had emerged in the early 1930s to protect values and customs perceived as genuinely Swiss against the totalitarian ideologies of national socialism, fascism, and later on communism. In the 1960s, however, both liberals and leftists came to experience this political culture as intellectually suffocating and as an impediment to an open democratic society flourishing by way of permanent self-reflection and self-critique (Färber and Schär 2008).
This convergence of liberal reform and radical protest movements led the Swiss historian Bernhard Schär (2008) to interpret 1968 in Switzerland—despite the Marxist self-conceptions of many of its leftist actors—as a revival of the values of the failed liberal bourgeois revolutions of 1848. Like their nineteenth-century predecessors, Schär argues, this generation of activists fought for more inclusive democratic participation and emphasized individual freedom. The quest for consciousness expansion was not so much about a return to the ecstatic communion of a premodern collective as it was about mental self-determination and the fulfillment of one’s own potential. This reading seems further justified—and maybe even applies beyond the borders of Switzerland—when considering the unintended economic effects of 1968: the experimentation with alternative lifestyles facilitated the transition from industrial to consumer capitalism, new markets came to cater to the demand for self-realization,
