study the controlled substance in question. To reach this goal, John Gilmore (JG) had a plan.
| JG: | People have struggled to improve drug policies forever, but mere advocacy seldom works because the governments are so resistant to change. What you actually have to do and what I have been trying to fund are projects that require the governments to change, that don’t merely suggest that they change. If we actually completed a full drug development program, it would require the government to change its scheduling, to move the drug out of Schedule I, which has no medical use, into another schedule that allows physicians to prescribe it. Then it would not be optional on the government’s part to make that change. | |
| NL: | You said that your goal was to end the War on Drugs. On your website, you write about the huge number of people who get incarcerated for drug-related crimes. This might apply to cannabis. But the share of people who go to jail for crimes related to psychedelics in particular is fairly low. So why focus on this class of substances? | |
| JG: | Partly because most other donors in drug policy focus on marijuana. If I depend on them to largely handle marijuana, I can expand the efforts to also include psychedelics rather than psychedelics being left behind when marijuana becomes legal. | |
| NL: | And the substances responsible for the majority of imprisonments, like heroin and cocaine, are off-limits anyway. You won’t get them legalized. | |
| JG: | Right. And opiates are already widely used in medicine. OxyContin, for example, is a prescription drug that is widely abused, but doctors are free to prescribe it. There is nothing to fix there in the legal situation unless you’re aiming at full legalization, which I think is a harder problem than the ones I’m trying to solve. | |
| NL: | Is there no medical use for cocaine in the United States? | |
| JG: | No, there is. It’s in Schedule II. It’s used as an anesthetic for people who have corrective surgery on their noses, for example. | |
| NL: | Yeah, or in eye surgery. But if there was a medical use for psychedelics, they would probably be put into Schedule II as well. However, that would still be restrictive enough to continue to fuel the War on Drugs, just as heroin and cocaine do. The question is whether the approval of a medical use would really end the War on Drugs. | |
| JG: | It wouldn’t end the War on Drugs. Indeed, I don’t think I will end the War on Drugs by 2010, which was my goal. But, like with the Berlin Wall, I’m hoping to take a few big stones out and then it will probably fall on its own accord, but through normal social processes. The medical use of marijuana has clearly improved the public’s opinion of its recreational use. In each state where medical use has been allowed, you can see over the succeeding years more and more support for recreational use among the public in polls and in voting. That’s because the fear factor goes away. When everyone knows somebody who uses marijuana medically, and they don’t turn into a demon and they don’t lose their job and they don’t go out raping small children, then they wonder, what is all this trouble with marijuana about anyway? If they want to use it, let them use it. |
Gilmore’s strategy of ending the War on Drugs by funding clinical research was a response to regimes of government built on the production of knowledge that provided authority to their authority. The rationalization of government brought about a situation in which knowledge was heavily invested with power relations and vice versa. This was especially true in the United States, where the legal system made regulatory agencies vulnerable to attacks from various private interest groups—from transnational corporations to litigious libertarian activists like Gilmore. As a result, there was a high degree of polarization in American science. As Brickman and colleagues (1985: 309–310) point out:
The expansion of the government’s scientific research capacity in response to political pressure is one aspect of a more general phenomenon in the United States. American regulators, being more politically exposed than their European counterparts, have a greater need to support their actions through formal analytical arguments. . . . The structure of the American rule-making process subjects the analytical case for regulation to intense political scrutiny. Any weaknesses are exploited, and the uncertainties and shortcomings of the relevant scientific base are readily exposed. . . . In this adversarial setting, participating scientists often appear as advocates of particular regulatory outcomes rather than disinterested experts. . . . The polarization induced by the U.S. regulatory process has tainted even the federal government’s own research institutions, undermining their credibility as a source of unbiased expertise.
The greatest loss of credibility in US government-funded drug research in the recent past occurred in 2003 when psychopharmacologist George Ricaurte—the colleague who had previously accused Vollenweider of giving dangerously high doses of MDMA to human subjects—had to withdraw his sensational study on the neurotoxicity of the substance published in Science one year earlier (Ricaurte et al. 2002, 2003). Based on primate research funded by the National Institute of Drug Abuse, Ricaurte had postulated such a high degree of neurotoxicity for MDMA in doses regularly consumed at raves that ecstasy users should have died very frequently. Many of those who had seen the drug being used in their own social environment regarded Ricaurte’s claims with suspicion. Eventually, he had to concede that he had actually administered the significantly more toxic methamphetamine (speed) to the monkeys. This mistake had been based on a mislabeling of containers, he claimed.
Such crises of confidence in government-funded research were exactly what Heffter’s competitor MAPS was trying to take advantage of to relegitimize various medical and nonmedical applications of psychedelic drugs. MAPS founder Rick Doblin explained at the LSD Symposium: “The key point here is to build credibility. The government has lost credibility about the risks because they completely exaggerate them. The government has also lost credibility about benefits because they completely deny them. So we need to be at the forefront of looking at risks and at benefits.” The goal was to acquire greater scientific authority than either countercultural propagandists or experts supported by the US government. As an activist organization, MAPS funded both research and lawsuits against the US Drug Enforcement Administration, employing the scientific knowledge it helped to generate to pursue its political goals.
Even though the Heffter Research Institute also had as a goal the registration of psilocybin as a medicine, the organization tried to stay out of the trenches of the drug war. It was key to Heffter’s strategy of depoliticization to support and conduct clinical research and basic science alike—an approach Gilmore criticized as not sufficiently goal-oriented. The tensions manifesting in this situation arose from a regulatory regime in which the supposed value neutrality of science was simultaneously claimed and undermined by the warring parties. The War on Drugs was also a war of knowledge, in which victories were occasionally based on new scientific findings. But the sharpest weapons blunt rapidly when wielded with too much fervor.
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