Neuropsychedelia. Nicolas Langlitz
from people who get tax reductions to fight the system.” With the money it raised, Earth Metabolic Design Laboratories sponsored a toxicity study testing MDMA on dogs and rodents as well as a first preclinical trial on humans (Downing 1986; Frith et al. 1987).
Doblin quickly turned into a psychedelic entrepreneur and lobbyist, speaking out in favor of ecstasy and other psychedelics in TV talk shows and at the World Health Organization in Geneva. When, in 1985, all efforts to prevent the illegalization of MDMA had failed, he abandoned Earth Metabolic Design Laboratories and planned to build a “psychedelic orphan drug pharmaceutical company.” The following year, Doblin established it as another nonprofit organization called Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). It assembled a network of drug researchers and raised funds from private donors to support its work. MAPS also made a sustained effort to develop a respectful relationship with the FDA to improve communication between the psychedelic community and regulators. For this purpose, Doblin enrolled in the PhD program of Harvard’s prestigious Kennedy School of Government, where he wrote a dissertation on the regulation of medical uses of psychedelics (Doblin 2000). Through an internship program for graduates interested in careers in the federal government, Doblin managed to develop strong ties to the FDA officers in charge of hallucinogen studies, and he learned from them how to create admissible research protocols before returning to MAPS. The ultimate goal of his organization was to get MDMA and other psychedelic drugs tested in clinical trials in order to register them as prescription medicines.
But MAPS did not remain the only organization promoting the revival of hallucinogen research. On both sides of the Atlantic, further associations emerged for MAPS to collaborate and compete with. In the United States, the Heffter Research Institute, named after the German chemist who had first isolated mescaline, arrived on the scene in 1993. At the LSD Symposium in 2006, the institute’s president and cofounder, David Nichols, a professor of medicinal chemistry, related how this virtual institution, connecting laboratories and research groups at various universities in America and Switzerland, was conceived:
I began my career in 1969, concentrating on research on psychedelics, and it has been a major focus of my life ever since. [Turning to Hofmann who was sitting in the audience:] Albert, thank you! My life would be very different had LSD not been discovered. And certainly less interesting and colorful. After I got my PhD in 1973, I started thinking about the fact that clinical research had stopped. I thought this was really too bad. I would go to scientific meetings and share beers with colleagues, saying, “You know, there should be clinical research.” And they would say, “No, no, you can’t do it.” And I would say, “Well, you can do it. You can’t get the government to pay for it, but you need private money.” Around 1990, I would be telling the same story to someone, and I thought, “Dave, you gonna be ninety years old sitting in a rocking chair telling the same story.” So I decided to start the Heffter Research Institute.
Holding a so-called Schedule I permit, which allowed him to handle even the most tightly controlled psychoactive compounds, Nichols had been one of the very few people able to pursue their scientific interest in hallucinogens continuously since the late 1960s. In his laboratory at Purdue University, he synthesized a range of new substances and tried them out on animals. As a well-respected chemistry professor, he never experienced any difficulties with government agencies—even after the prohibition of hallucinogens. The red line not to be crossed, however, was human research.
In 1990, Nichols’s colleague Rick Strassman, a psychiatrist at the University of New Mexico, was the first to test the regulatory limits. He was particularly interested in the short-acting but extremely powerful hallucinogen N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) because it was the only psychedelic endogenously produced by the human body and was possibly involved in naturally occurring psychedelic states such as birth, death and near-death, psychosis, and mystical experiences. Strassman believed it was excreted by the “mysterious pineal gland,” which Descartes had taken to be the seat of the soul and where both Eastern and Western mystical traditions had located “our highest spiritual center” (Strassman 2001: xv). In Strassman’s eyes, DMT was the key to our humanity. As a Buddhist, he believed that human life began forty-nine days after conception when the spirit ensouled the fetus. The neurobiological correlate of anthropogenesis, Strassman speculated, was a pineal gland release of the “spirit molecule” DMT (xvii).
Strassman proposed to start off with a randomized double-blind dose-response study. He stuck to the unwritten rules, asking to study DMT as a “drug of abuse” and focusing on its pharmacology instead of psychotherapeutic applications (which would have suggested that there was a benefit to taking an illegal drug). He was backed by Daniel Freedman, one of the most powerful figures in American psychiatry at the time (a former president of the American Psychiatric Association and editor of the highly prestigious journal Archives of General Psychiatry), who had conducted LSD research himself in the 1950s and 1960s. Despite the damaged reputation of hallucinogens, Strassman’s colleagues at the medical school also turned out to be supportive of his project. In 1988, he submitted a research protocol to the Human Research Ethics Committee of his university. In the first phase of hallucinogen research, such institutional review boards had not yet played a major role. Their emergence was part of the institutionalization of medical ethics as well as the establishment of a new regulatory regime in the course of the 1960s (Rothman 1991). Being situated within the research institutions themselves, these bodies were—at least in part—composed of fellow researchers. The underlying idea was to enable scientists to check up on themselves by assigning each other the roles of auditors and auditees (Strathern 2000). Such an autonomous self-regulating apparatus was meant to guarantee, but also to shape and delimit, the freedom of science. In his book DMT: The Spirit Molecule (2001), Strassman provided a detailed account of how the precautionary measures demanded by the ethics committee came to affect the experience of his test subjects. Thus the regulatory apparatus not only constituted the external conditions of research but also entered into the outcome of the experiments by transforming the subjects’ experiences.
Strassman also had to gain approval from the FDA to use an investigational drug and from the DEA because DMT was a controlled substance. This process was greatly complicated by the fact that DMT was not readily available. He contacted various pharmaceutical companies. But they were either unwilling to provide all the information about the manufacturing process required by the FDA, arguing that it was a trade secret, or refused the liability for human use of their product, fearing lawsuits. Others demanded outrageous sums (up to $50,000) to cover their insurance as well as the uneconomical production of small quantities of an obscure drug. Finally, Dave Nichols offered to synthesize the necessary amount of DMT for $300 and the FDA agreed. In November 1990, two years after the application process had begun, Strassman received the go-ahead for what he presented as the first hallucinogen study in more than two decades (Strassman 2001: xv, 108–118).
When Strassman got approval to giving a psychedelic as powerful as DMT to humans, it seemed as if there could be no fundamental obstacles to administering other hallucinogens as well. Thus, Nichols, Strassman, Geyer, Charles Grob, Dennis McKenna, and George Greer founded the Heffter Research Institute in 1993. In contrast to MAPS’ focus on clinical applications of MDMA, Heffter concentrated on psilocybin and, at least initially, emphasized basic research rather than medical applications. Like MAPS, the institute tried to spread a spirit of optimism to attract private funding: “We are at a historic moment. Old social orders are rapidly changing. Economic powers are restructuring for the future. There is widespread popular interest in the brain and the mind as never before. Interest in research with psychedelics seems to be growing, and yet organized financial support for this work is on the wane. The Heffter Research Institute is uniquely poised to be the key player in the revival of psychedelic research” (Heffter Research Institute n.d.: 1).
It is no coincidence that the reinvigoration of hallucinogen research coincided with US president George H.W. Bush’s (1990) announcement of the Decade of the Brain. As in the sixties, the biology of the mind was presented as the last great frontier (Crick 1990: 17; Farber 2002: 29). Psychonautic self-exploration had been replaced (or, as we will see, supplemented) by brain scanners and other new technologies, but drugs continued to serve as probes of the neurochemistry of consciousness. The Heffter members used this opportunity to promote their pet molecules. “Research with psychedelic substances offers an unparalleled opportunity