research on the basic pharmacology of psilocybin to establish a firm foundation for the assessment of future applications for clinical trials. The rationalization of government according to the value of truth that has taken place in the West requires that regulators protect themselves by drawing on scientific authority (Rose 1999: 24–28). At least in Switzerland, this will to and need for knowledge facilitated the revival of hallucinogen research.
In the United States, a legal culture in which government agencies could easily be sued led to a particularly pronounced tendency of administrators to seek refuge in bureaucratic formalism alongside massive government funding of research (Brickman et al. 1985: 304, 309). In Switzerland, on the other hand, state bureaucracy remained relatively restricted. Much social regulation took place on the community level, mediated through more informal relations. The historian Manfred Hettling (1998) speaks of sociability (Geselligkeit) as the predominant form of societal self-organization in Switzerland. Sociability even seemed to be at work within Swiss bureaucracy (and, to some extent at least, this might apply to modern bureaucracy more generally). In principle, a bureaucracy is meant to make decisions in a strictly formalistic manner according to rational rules and “without regard for persons” (Weber 1946: 215). However, when asked whether Vollenweider’s reputation as a sober scientist had anything to do with the approval of his clinical research, Dietschy admitted point-blank that it did play a significant role in the decisions of the SFOPH. In a contentious field like hallucinogen research, seriousness and respectability were of great importance. Had there been any incidents, it would have been Dietschy as chief administrator who would have been called to account. For this reason, he only wanted to work with people he could trust as responsible scientists.3
The fact that Switzerland’s drug policy was generally liberal and the regulatory conditions for hallucinogen research beneficial did not mean that there was no social control. On the contrary, the regulatory regime was close-meshed—at the time of my fieldwork even more so than in the early 1990s. Special permits were required for research purposes and, by then, institutional review boards had also been established in Switzerland. The densely woven social fabric of this small country lent even more weight to a person’s standing in the community. People carefully observed the behavior of their neighbors—to the extent that the East German theater director Michael Schindhelm polemically called Switzerland “the better GDR,” alluding to the widespread spying of East Germany’s citizens on each other. In fact, Switzerland had a major scandal in 1989, the so-called Fiches Affair, when it became publicly known that the Swiss authorities kept files on 900,000 of 6,500,000 Swiss citizens, including many countercultural activists, supposedly to protect the country from communist subversion (Studer and Schaufelbuehl 2009). Thus, Switzerland provided a tightly controlled and regulated, but permissive, research environment that was created and supported by government agencies. The freedom of science they granted was not a “negative liberty,” leaving people alone to do what they wished without interference (Rose 1999: 67). Instead it was carefully framed by legislators, administrators, ethics committees, and funding agencies to hold scientists and therapists accountable.
This was the regulatory apparatus that gave Vollenweider and other Swiss drug researchers a certain competitive advantage, which liberal Swiss politicians vigorously defended against international pressure. As the former Basel drug delegate Thomas Kessler put it: “One has to be incredibly careful not to destroy the great possibilities, which this research presents. . . . Switzerland, as a research site, must take care that its scientific experiments do not disappear in the machinery of a crude and undifferentiated drug policy” (quoted in Vannini and Venturini 1999: 274).
REGULATORY DIFFERENCES AND CAPITAL FLOWS
Thomas Kessler’s former political superior, Luc Saner, also took part in the drug policy discussion at the LSD Symposium. Saner was a politician. As a member of the Free Democratic Party, he promoted economic liberalism in conjunction with libertarianism. In the 1990s, when Kessler was working at Basel’s Department of Justice, Saner championed a liberalization of Swiss drug policy. He advocated making all generally prohibited substances legally available in a differentiated manner by subjecting them to a variety of legal regulations (Saner 1998). On the panel, Saner said:
I think that, in the case of LSD, one must try to get research projects through in order to create the possibility of registering this substance, so that it can be prescribed by physicians. But I have to tell you that this process is highly complex. Registering a drug is not an easy job. Usually, it costs enormous sums, hundreds of millions. And there is only an interest if there is a prospect of profit. The substance must be patentable and there must be an economic incentive. That’s often not easy with such designer drugs. Maybe the patent has already been issued and cannot be renewed. In this context, we have proposed that the state steps in. Here, the liberal calls for the state. Thomas is laughing at me, but that’s how it is. The state needs to take a leadership role making sure that the legal preconditions are created to provide some sort of access to these substances. The state would have to take over the registration.
After the discussion, some people from the audience approached Saner to ask further questions. A remarkable encounter ensued. Among those wanting to speak to Saner was an American man in his late forties. From their outward appearances, John Gilmore and Luc Saner could not have differed more. Saner was a slick Swiss politician wearing shirt and tie. Gilmore, on the other hand, had come from California with long hair and a goatee, dressed in a purple batik shirt and sandals. He told Saner that he had miscalculated the costs of registering substances like LSD or MDMA. The hundreds of millions of dollars for the successful development of one drug, which Saner had mentioned, actually included a pharmaceutical company’s costs of amortizing all the drugs that failed somewhere along the pipeline. In the case of LSD and MDMA, however, we already knew about their safety and therapeutic efficacy and only had to demonstrate them scientifically. Hence, Gilmore reckoned, the costs for registering these substances would be closer to five to ten million dollars. Saner readily accepted the objection, but asked in reply: “Okay, but who would pay those five to ten million dollars? The pharmaceutical industry would only be interested if there was the prospect of profit, but the patents for these substances have long run out.” Gilmore said: “I could do it. I’m a businessman and a philanthropist. If someone presented a reasonable plan, I would be willing to pay for it.” Looking slightly stupefied, Saner offered Gilmore one of his business cards.
John Gilmore was raised in a middle-class family and started to work in information technology at a time when this did not yet require a college degree. He was not only a world-famous hacker but had also been the fifth employee of Sun Microsystems. As such, he quickly made “too much money,” as he said, by which he meant “more than I could usefully spend on myself in my lifetime and more than I wanted to leave to someone else as an inheritance, because it tends to corrupt people to receive large amounts of money for nothing.” Hence, he decided to become a philanthropist, sponsoring projects that ranged from legal aid for detainees at Guantanamo Bay to the development of free software and psychedelic research. What tied these projects together for Gilmore was a certain libertarian agenda supporting civil liberties, from drug use to firearms possession: “The focus is on individual rights, individual responsibility, and freedom to do what you choose to do.”
I first met Gilmore at the LSD Symposium after I had given a talk about hallucinogen research in Switzerland. Based on my fieldwork in the Vollenweider lab, I had addressed the fact that the Swiss branch of the Heffter Research Institute received money not only from the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health but also from private, mostly American donors. After my presentation, Gilmore introduced himself as one of the people I had spoken about. As one of its donors, he asked me for an evaluation of Heffter, as he was unsure whether the institute served his cause. He had decided to spend ten million dollars in ten years on ending the War on Drugs, which in his eyes caused a large amount of human suffering. The most promising strategy to achieve this goal, he thought, was to get illegal drugs registered for medical applications. Hence his interest in Luc Saner’s suggestion. Gilmore had grown concerned that Heffter might be spending too much
