an example: When I went to an international conference of the US Drug Enforcement Administration, I mentioned this in an aside to people from DEA labs. They said, “What? You really got that? We need this for our kits.” I asked, “How much do you need? I’ll bring it to you to the next conference in Washington.” Today, this would be inconceivable. These were really easygoing times.THE MANIFOLD MATRIX OF SWISS DRUG POLICY
After a short coffee break, Dietschy and Brenneisen recounted in equal detail the no less venturesome development of the heroin program and Swiss cannabis research and policy in the 1990s. Their accounts were captivating and comprehensive. But when, three hours later, we went for lunch, I still could not see how these different plots added up to a distinctive policy approach. Dietschy had already told me in his first response to my query that, “from the end of the ’80s to the mid-’90s of the last century, there was no continuously planned and stringently designed research policy concerning hallucinogens at SFOPH” and that, “in the first half of the 1990s, important decisions were rather made on an ad hoc basis.”
Swiss drug policy was an assemblage of heterogeneous governmental strategies. In the language of policy makers, this was called the Fourfold Approach (Vier-Säulen-Modell), comprising four strategic trajectories or “pillars”: repression (law enforcement), prevention (keeping citizens from using drugs in the first place), therapy (treatment and reintegration of former drug users), and harm reduction (survival support). In an alternative jargon, borrowed from Michel Foucault (2007), one could also speak of an assortment of elements from three different apparatuses: law, discipline, and security. The law constitutes a purely negative form of normativity, which prohibits particular acts within a confined territory, for example, the manufacture, sale, and consumption of drugs like heroin and LSD in Switzerland. Discipline ideally aims at a continuous panoptic observation of individuals responding even to minute deviations from a norm by disciplinary measures. Close monitoring of all people having to do with illicit substances can serve as an example. Drug scenes were infiltrated by undercover narcotics officers; dealers and consumers were prosecuted; scientists studying controlled substances needed special permits and their laboratories could be subject to inspections. At the same time, addicts willing to undergo therapy were registered (“Nobody could enter into a heroin trial without the permission of the SFOPH,” Dietschy told me); they were tested for the additional use of street drugs (based on a method developed by Brenneisen) and had to inject the heroin provided by the Swiss state under supervision in special outpatient clinics. The heroin-assisted treatment programs served to enmesh addicts in the safety net of the otherwise not overly developed Swiss welfare state. These measures were highly effective. In the course of the 1990s, many patients enrolled in these programs managed to return to a well-ordered life, and the number of addicts declined significantly—in part because the heroin programs destroyed the image of the junkie as countercultural hero defying society by making him into a welfare case dependent on the state (Aarburg and Stauffacher 2004).
However, total control of society has remained a totalitarian utopia. As neither proscriptions nor treatment or continuous monitoring of individuals could guarantee the desired outcomes, a third strategy was developed: security. The emergence of security as a form of government can be interpreted as a response to the limits of legal and disciplinary instruments. Here, the aim of total control is replaced by the modulation of a preexisting milieu in order to regulate a population at large. While discipline is based on sustained interventions, security adopts, at least to a certain extent, a laissez-faire attitude, only intervening as a last resort and after observation and evaluation of the specific tendencies of a given situation (Foucault 2007: 1–86). As a key element of biopolitical government (which aims at the promotion rather than the repression of life), Foucault’s notion of security differs from the traditional sense of the term. It is not based on the restriction of civil liberties for the sake of protecting the population through preventive exclusion of malign agents. The biopoliticized security apparatus of the advanced liberal state monitors and manages the chances and risks associated with the largely unhindered activities of its citizens (Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero 2008).
This strategy was integrated into Swiss drug policy in the late 1980s as the problematization of drug use shifted from the repression of inebriation and addiction to fostering the health and safety of consumers and other citizens (Boller 2005: 10). It was briefly pursued when the municipality of Zurich temporarily tolerated drug trade in a confined area known as Needle Park before the heroin program was initiated. At the time of my fieldwork, the Foucauldian security dispositif was actualized in the form of a drug-checking program.2 On the weekends, a mobile lab with cutting-edge analytic machinery, including a high-performance liquid chromatograph, run by the Cantonal Pharmacist’s Office, Berne, was moving from party to party allowing ravers to test the quality and dosage of their black-market drugs. This enabled recreational users to make informed and responsible decisions about the drugs they consumed. As products of poor quality were quickly identified and abandoned, this measure improved the quality of the drugs traded (for better or worse).
In this circumscribed context, the Swiss state accepted that illicit drugs were taken and tried to reduce the harm they caused by making the black market more transparent. At the same time, the drug-checking lab allowed the authorities to carry out spot checks, which in turn let them monitor the black market and track consumption patterns. The collected information was mostly used to develop more effective prevention strategies and to warn users, through flyers and postings on party scene–related websites, against adulterated and mislabeled drugs. The mobile lab also provided associated social workers an opportunity to approach users of illegal drugs in an informal but direct manner. Even though it would be misleading to reduce the development of Swiss drug policy in the 1990s to the formation of this security apparatus, the integration of such elements appears to be its most distinctive feature in comparison with the hard-line policies of the United States or neighboring European countries such as France or Germany.
At a panel discussion titled “Modern Drug Policy” at the LSD Symposium, Thomas Kessler, the former delegate for drug issues from the municipality of Basel, argued that progress in drug policy equaled differentiation regarding substances and patterns of consumption: heroin-assisted treatment programs for opiate addicts, drug checking for so-called recreational users of party drugs, strictly regulated sales of strong alcoholic beverages and absinthe, approval of psychotherapeutic applications of psychedelics despite their prohibition in nonmedical settings, and so on. Measured against this metric of differentiation, Switzerland had already gone further than most other countries. If there was a shared matrix in which the different aspects of Swiss drug policy developed in the 1990s, it was this attentiveness to pharmacological differences paired with a businesslike approach to the corresponding perils and possibilities. Pharmacologist Felix Hasler (2007: 42), a native of Liechtenstein, described his Swiss neighbors as “reasonable pragmatics who weigh benefits and risks and value individual responsibility.”
The Swiss government’s liberal technocratic attitude toward drugs required both more and a different kind of knowledge than mere repression did. If a drug was simply prohibited, all the state needed to know was how to detect it for forensic purposes. But if a state decided, for example, to prescribe heroin medically, it also had to learn about its pharmacokinetics to determine an appropriate form of application (tablets, cigarettes, injections, etc.). It also needed to understand the drug’s pharmacodynamics, adverse effects, interactions with other medications,
