States, the counterculture gradually merged into a lucrative cyberculture. Hence, it was also the tranquil history of Switzerland, especially the relative tameness of its sixties, that predisposed the country to helping alleviate the conflict between culture and counterculture.
COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
The fact that, in the 1990s, Switzerland came to be at the forefront of the revival of hallucinogen research was not only because it was the homeland of LSD but also because this small country, at the heart and yet outside of Europe, had a history of resisting the internationalization of drug policy. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the problems and conflicts caused by the global opium trade led to the emergence of drug control as an issue of international concern. In 1912, the Hague Convention was passed as the first international drug policy treaty, even though it did not become operational until after World War I (McAllister 2000). The cause was subsequently adopted by the League of Nations (which would be replaced by the United Nations in 1945). However, Switzerland refused to enter into the convention. In part, this might be explained by the nation’s long-standing reservations toward international involvements (Suter 1998). Additionally, the Swiss pharmaceutical industry served as one of the world’s biggest suppliers of heroin. Its successful lobbying prevented Switzerland from ratifying the Hague Convention until 1925, when the Swiss government finally gave in to massive international pressure from the United States and the League of Nations (Tanner 1990; Boller 2005: 145–146).
Although Switzerland did not become a member of the United Nations until 2002, it signed the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs in 1961 and the Convention on Psychotropic Substances in 1971. The latter was presented as ushering in a new age of drug control and included the international prohibition of hallucinogens. But this gradual surrender of Swiss neutrality to the US-driven War on Drugs only occurred reluctantly. The Swiss historian Jakob Tanner remarked: “Generally, one can say that the power of the United States to define what is and what is not a drug has been crucial. Particularly the Single Convention of 1961, which replaced or abolished almost all previous agreements had a very characteristic trademark. I think that it wouldn’t have occurred to Switzerland to prohibit opiates. Probably, one would have continued to manage this by way of laws regulating the manufacture and distribution of medicines [Arzneimittelverordnungen] as had been the case before the Narcotics Law” (quoted in Vannini and Venturini 1999: 266).
Regarding the prohibited substances listed by this law, Tanner told me that “in general, one wanted to keep the list short or at least one wanted a list that did not restrain the innovation potential of the chemical and pharmaceutical industry.” While in the United States a problematization of drug use had already set in around the turn of the century, the isolationist mountain state deemed itself immune from the world’s drug problems. Even in 1967, the writer Frank Arnau still claimed that intoxicants of any kind were foreign to the Swiss national character (Boller 2005: 151). But, however grudgingly, Switzerland eventually decided to join the international community in adopting a more repressive drug policy. By the late 1960s, Swiss policy makers had to acknowledge that their citizens were not as impervious to the temptations of inebriants as once thought. In a major revision of the Narcotics Law of 1951, LSD was prohibited in 1975 (in comparison with 1966 in the United States and 1967 in neighboring Germany), and for about fifteen years Switzerland adopted a primarily repressive course. As in the American case, the illegalization of hallucinogenic drugs seriously hampered their scientific investigation even though half a dozen researchers continued to work in the field (Vannini and Venturini 1999: 285–305).
A second and more momentous parallel to the development in America was the exacerbation of the “drug problem” despite—or maybe because of—these repressive measures. Paradoxically, the availability and consumption of cocaine increased as the American drug war grew fiercer during the 1980s (Davenport-Hines 2002: 338–383). Simultaneously, more and more Swiss became addicted to heroin. The artificial scarcity of heroin produced by police operations made the drug significantly more expensive and, consequently, the crime rate skyrocketed. Soon political pressure began to mount as an increasing number of citizens were affected by thefts, robbery, and the public display of abject misery in the neat streets of Zurich and Berne.
The United States responded to the failure of its counternarcotics policy by stepping up its interdiction efforts. The country imprisoned ever more drug users at home and reinforced its police and military operations in drug-producing countries abroad. The Swiss, however, decided on an almost antithetical response to the problem. In 1994, the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health (SFOPH) began to distribute heroin to addicts under medical supervision—a decision not without controversy, especially in the French- and Italian-speaking cantons, but overall it was supported by the Swiss citizenry (Fahrenkurg 1995).
In the late 1980 and early 1990s, the civil servants of the SFOPH were also grappling with a very different drug-related problem. The Swiss Medical Association for Psycholytic Therapy (SAPT) had asked for permission to use LSD, psilocybin, and MDMA for psychotherapeutic purposes. In 1988, the group received a special permit to administer these controlled substances to patients (Styk 1992/93; Saunders 1993). But this exemption remained problematic. In 1989, a new government official took over the Department of Pharmacy at SFOPH, where he would be in charge of both the logistics of the heroin program and the scientific and medical applications of hallucinogenic drugs. After initial skepticism, Paul J. Dietschy approved both uses. Neither America, trying to form a united front in its War on Drugs, nor the United Nations that was advocating a similarly repressive stance were pleased about the Swiss pullout from the internationally established hard line on the use of controlled substances. Representing Switzerland on the International Narcotics Control Board, the Commission of Narcotic Drugs, and the Commission Pompidou of the Council of Europe, Dietschy had to bear the brunt of international criticism. However, when Claudio Vannini and Maurizio Venturini interviewed him for their history of Swiss psychedelic science, Dietschy stressed the importance of drug research for Switzerland:
In the international research community, our experiments with heroin or hallucinogens have aroused much interest. In the past, the Americans were at the forefront of this area. But then their government did not approve of such research anymore for political reasons. (This attitude has recently begun to change again.) Switzerland is one of the few countries in which such experiments are possible at all. Politically, our experiments provoke much skepticism [on the international level]. This is not voiced publicly but has been articulated repeatedly in discussions with us. . . . Apart from that, the international treaties leave a lot of freedom to the member states as to the conduct in one’s own country as long as the interests of other countries are not affected. This freedom must be used for the benefit of Switzerland. (Quoted in Vannini and Venturini 1999: 269)
Here, the very technocracy that the counterculture had rebelled against by using psychedelic drugs endorsed their scientific investigation. This government support contributed significantly to the competitive advantage of Swiss hallucinogen research and helped to make Franz Vollenweider such an interesting collaborator in the eyes of his American colleagues.
When, during my fieldwork in 2005, I first came across Dietschy’s advocacy of the Swiss drug and drug policy experiments, I began to wonder about the relationship between the Swiss government’s backing of psychedelic science and its heroin program. Was there an underlying policy, a comprehensive plan, a broader cultural matrix constituting the regulatory conditions of the work I was about to observe in the lab? To find out, I arranged a meeting with Dietschy who, it turned out, was no longer working for the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health but had moved to Swissmedic, a new federal agency comparable to the American FDA that had just taken over the regulation of medicines (but not of controlled substances) from the Swiss cantons to establish a nationally uniform regulatory regime.
Paul Dietschy was an authoritative man in his fifties with a long moustache. He wore a dark gray suit, white shirt, and a paisley silk tie. We met in one of the conference halls of the new Swissmedic building. Glass walls separating the room from the foyer gave the institution an appearance of transparency. Dietschy had invited a second person to our conversation: a
