Neuropsychedelia. Nicolas Langlitz
the social and political world, Leary (2001) proclaimed: “Your brain is God!” The divine was to be found as inner experience, and psychedelics served as chemical keys to this God within: “Religion is consciousness expansion, centered in the body and defined exactly the way it sounds best to you” (Leary 1965: 9). Antithetical to Schmitt’s authoritarian politicotheological order, Leary called for an anarchist drug mysticism: “You must start your own religion. You’re God—but only you can discover and nurture your divinity. No one can start your religion for you” (7). This was both spiritual and legal advice followed by numerous “dope churches” that quoted the freedom of religion to defend their use of illicit drugs (Leary 1965: 12–15; Miller 1991: 31–34). But only members of the Native American Church and, since 2006, of the syncretist churches União do Vegetal and Santo Daime were granted the right to use peyote and ayahuasca for religious purposes (Stewart 1987: 213–238; Fuller 2000: 177–190; Dobkin de Rios and Rumrrill 2008).3
The attempt to introduce psychedelic drugs as mediators of the divine into the modern world threw 1960s America into a crisis. Eventually, however, this moment of conflict and indetermination was resolved by legislators. The spreading consumption of hallucinogens among white middle-class youth (probably promoted more effectively by Ken Kesey’s hedonistically oriented electric Kool-Aid acid tests than by Leary’s tongue-in-cheek proselytizing [Wolfe 1968]), along with a growing number of drug-related accidents and their scandalization in the media, resulted in the gradual prohibition of this class of drugs between 1966 and 1970. Consequently, the utopian visions of an alternative drug culture, which Huxley’s novel Island had inspired at the beginning of the decade, were shattered.
THE DARK ERA
Even though hallucinogen research was drastically curbed in the late 1960s, it never came to a total standstill. Despite the numerous hurdles and restrictions limiting the freedom of science it was, in principle, still possible to pursue research on psychedelic drugs and, in fact, some scientists did obtain licenses that allowed them to go ahead. Two of them, the chemist David Nichols and the neuropsychopharmacologist Mark Geyer, would later play a crucial role in the resurgence of hallucinogen research. For those holding a special permit, chemical analysis and synthesis as well as pharmacological studies in animals were legally possible throughout the 1970s and 1980s. There were even a very few human studies during the period that Geyer ironically referred to as “the Dark Era” (e.g., Francom et al. 1988; Lim et al. 1988). In Germany and the Netherlands, the psychiatrist Hanscarl Leuner and the psychoanalyst Jan Bastiaans were also allowed to continue using hallucinogens in therapeutic settings until they retired in the mid-1980s (Passie 1996/97; Snelders and Kaplan 2002). Of course, the scale of this medical research was infinitesimal in comparison to the vibrant scientific experimentation in the 1950s, but it was enough to demonstrate that such research was not categorically prohibited. The mechanisms that led to its deterioration were subtler. Scientists were not officially denied their academic freedom and yet they were discouraged, worn down, and guided away from further work on these compounds. A subtle microphysics of power (allocation of funding, having to guard one’s reputation, approval of research projects, recruitment of test subjects, etc.) led to an almost total breakdown of academic hallucinogen research.
At the same time, however, psychedelic science flourished in the underground. The central figure of this nonacademic hallucinogen research was Alexander Shulgin. Invited to a symposium at the University of California, San Diego, in 2006, Shulgin indicated that in the nineteenth century the Western world had only known two psychedelic drugs: marijuana and peyote. By the 1950s, it already knew dozens. And at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the number was about two hundred—many of which Shulgin had invented himself (see Shulgin and Shulgin 1991, 1997). If this logarithmic growth continued, Shulgin calculated, there would be about 2,000 compounds by 2050. Since the birth of the Internet, largely contemporaneous with the revival of hallucinogen research in the 1990s, clandestine psychedelic science has found a highly efficient venue for publication and collaboration (Langlitz 2009). It blossomed in the shadow of prohibition. But this is for another book.4
AFTER THE COUNTERCULTURE: THE REVIVAL OF PSYCHEDELIC RESEARCH
In 2010—by now the revival had been simmering for two decades—I went to visit Rick Doblin, one of its most important initiators, to talk about how this comparatively quiet return of psychedelics into academic science had begun. Together with his wife, three children, and a dog, Doblin was living in Belmont, an affluent suburb of Boston, just a short bus ride away from where Timothy Leary had brought hallucinogen research into disrepute. Some neighbors demonstrated their patriotism by planting little Star Spangled Banners in their well-trimmed front gardens, while Doblin was advocating scientific and recreational drug use. Yet the exuberant outgrowths of the War on Drugs, which President Obama’s newly appointed drug czar had only rhetorically ended, seemed worlds apart (Kerlikowske 2009). And so we spent a peaceful afternoon talking next to a Jacuzzi on the rooftop. The only noise interfering with my interview recording was the soft rustling of leaves.
Asked about the sixties, Doblin stated: “Most people explain the breakdown with psychedelic experiences going wrong in a recreational context. But I would say that it had more to do with psychedelic experiences going right: people having unitive mystical experiences that changed their political perspectives and which got them involved in social justice movements challenging the status quo.” However, he not only held an uptight and anxious American society responsible but also blamed Leary. Doblin (1991, 1998) had conducted follow-up studies on two of Leary’s experiments and had found that Leary had committed scientific fraud. Together with his doctoral student Walter Pahnke, Leary had furthermore concealed the fact that one subject from the Good Friday experiment had become so severely psychotic that he had to be tranquilized with an antipsychotic drug. “Tim justified this in his mind as, ‘The society is demonizing these drugs, so if I fudge things a bit, it’s excusable because I’m fighting a bigger evil,’ ” Doblin explained. On the opposite side, Doblin saw a society not prepared for those “incredible dynamic energies.” In response to the drugs’ gradual association with cultural rebellion, this society equally distorted the facts, exaggerated risks, and suppressed research “to keep the stories going about how terrible these things were.”
But Doblin saw the ostracism of hallucinogens in a much broader temporal framework. Following historical speculations about the use of hallucinogenic drugs in initiation ceremonies at Eleusis in ancient Greece (Wasson et al. 1978), Doblin said: “The Eleusinian Mysteries were wiped out by the Church in 396. That was the last time in Western culture that psychedelics had been integrated in a central way. So our mission is a 1600-year mission to try to bring psychedelics back into the core of our culture.”
For Doblin, however, the escapism of the counterculture—the fantasy of self-actualization on a remote island as envisioned by Huxley’s novel—had turned out to be a dead end. “The self-definition of the counterculture was inherently destructive. If you’re separated from the core of society, you will eventually be overwhelmed. That’s why I have a picket fence, a station wagon, and a boring middle-class life. That’s the route, though. It’s to mainstream these things and take them away from cultural rebellion and use them for cultural renewal. I long for a conventional life that has psychedelics and spirituality as part of it.” Doblin is Jewish, but his this-worldly mysticism is inspired by the Mahayana Buddhist figure of the Bodhisattva who puts off nirvana to help others: “Even the idea that you could be done on Earth and then you’re off the wheel of reincarnation is distasteful to me. It implies that you have no sense of social responsibility and that there is something more spiritual than what we have here on Earth, which I don’t think there is. I think this is it. This is the playground, the proving ground. I don’t believe in heaven.”
Doblin started working toward the mainstreaming of psychedelics in 1984, when MDMA was about to be prohibited as well. A friend of his had founded a nonprofit organization, Earth Metabolic Design Laboratories, dedicated to the development of alternative energy. Since the friend did not use the organization, Doblin took over, reinterpreted its mission as being about “mental energies,” and began working against the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA): “This was about moving from ‘I’m a criminal, I’m a draft resister, I’m a drug user, I’m a countercultural person’ to—wow!—this system has also created a