Neuropsychedelia. Nicolas Langlitz
n.d.: 1). Heffter used the neuroscience hype of the 1990s strategically to relegitimize human research with hallucinogenic drugs (Grob 2002: 280).
Even though MAPS and Heffter were pursuing different scientific and political agendas, one of the things both organizations agreed on was that hallucinogen research should not lapse back into the antagonism between “culture” and “counterculture.” As the consequences of sixties radicalism continued to unfold and resurge in civil society (O’Donnell and Jones 2010), their common objective was to return this class of drugs to mainstream science and society. In this respect, the psychedelic revivalists managed to break out of the Huxleyan framework, which has shaped so much public debate around psychopharmacology. For them, the choice was not between societal repression and lulling (Brave New World) on the one hand and a freedom that could only be found faraway from modern society (Island) on the other. They wanted to transform Western culture with its own means, bringing psychedelic perennialism into the twenty-first century.5
THE POLITICS OF DISENCHANTMENT AND SPIRITUALIZATION
The Heffter Research Institute was working toward this goal by pursuing what Mark Geyer, in a conversation with me, called “the dispassionate approach of mainstream science.” The Heffter researchers presented themselves as free of religious and political fervor. Founder Dave Nichols (2004: 168) emphasized the disenchantment of hallucinogenic drugs through neuropsychopharmacological research: “The tools of today’s neuroscience, including in vivo brain imaging technologies, have put a modern face on the hallucinogens. Scientists can no longer see them as ‘magic’ drugs but rather as 5-HT2A receptor-specific molecules that affect membrane potentials, neuronal firing frequencies, and neurotransmitter release in particular areas of the brain.” The message was that psychedelics were ready to inconspicuously join the modern psychotropic pharmacopoeia.
In its mission statement, the Heffter Research Institute (2001: iv) declared that it would “neither condemn psychedelic drugs nor advocate their uncontrolled use. The sole position of the Institute in this regard will be that psychedelic agents, utilized in thoughtfully designed and carefully conducted scientific experiments, can be used to further the understanding of the mind” (Heffter Research Institute 2001). Dare to know! This sense of value neutrality was incompatible with the religious zeal that had dominated the public perception of psychedelia in the 1960s. A pharmacologist from the Heffter lab in Zurich told me that his generation differed from Leary’s in that they had lost a sense of mission. They had given up the hope that mind-altering drugs would revolutionize society. The psychedelic experience was no longer presented as a catalyst of nonconformism and rebelliousness. If, as anthropologists have shown, the ritual use of hallucinogens in tribal societies could also serve to “validate and reify the culture” (Furst 1976: 16), then, another Heffter member argued, Westerners should also be able to use them to reinforce “cultural cohesion and commitment” (Grob 2002: 283). Following these cues, it was the neuroscientific disenchantment and depoliticization of hallucinogen research that rendered its revival possible. Such a narrative of the psychedelic revival—from the idealistic and revolutionary 1960s to the pragmatic and civil 1990s—would affirm historian of science Michael Hagner’s (2009) diagnosis of a “neuroscientific Biedermeier.”6
But the moral terrain of contemporary hallucinogen research is too rugged to fit into any epochal zeitgeist diagnosis. First of all, like Leary’s withdrawal from politics into the spiritual realm, the alleged depoliticization qua scientification was itself a political maneuver. In an ideologically charged field like hallucinogen research, professions of soberness and the display of dispassionate objectivity were used rhetorically to reinstate the legitimacy of scientific and therapeutic uses of psychedelics. The intended rapprochement between these ostracized drugs, biomedicine, and the authorities was supposed to change the legal status and the social acceptability of hallucinogen use. Thus, instead of abandoning the psychedelic revolution for good, it was rather transformed into a reform movement, in which Heffter was playing a cautious role as well.
MAPS, on the other hand, presented itself as avowedly political but aimed at translating its enthusiasm not into another cultural civil war but into civic engagement. In a special issue of the MAPS Bulletin dedicated to the organization’s vision, Rick Doblin (2002a) first laid out a five-year, five-million-dollar plan for developing MDMA into a prescription medicine to assist the psychotherapeutic treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. MAPS was particularly interested in the treatment of soldiers and police officers: “We want to show that MDMA can be helpful for people in the heart of the power structure, in the mainstream,” Doblin (2007) explained their strategy in an interview. A second article of the special issue represented MAPS’ politicospiritual vision. Significantly, the latter was not written by Doblin or any other member of the psychedelic community. To emphasize the reconciliation of psychedelia with “the Establishment,” MAPS reprinted a speech delivered by a member of the US House of Representatives. “Though definitely not written as a psychedelic manifesto,” MAPS introduced Dennis Kucinich’s piece as “one of the clearest examples of the political implications of mystical experience,” also reflecting MAPS’ own utopian hopes: “There is an idealism at the core of the psychedelic community that is difficult to explain. It’s based in part on the conviction that even partial unitive mystical experiences, whether or not catalyzed by psychedelics, can have a transformative effect. The hope is that the lasting effects of these experiences include more tolerance and appreciation of diversity of all kinds, enhanced environmental awareness, solidarity with the poor and oppressed, and a willingness to work through difficult emotions rather than project them onto an external enemy or scapegoat” (MAPS’ lead-in in Kucinich 2002: 19). Thereby, MAPS took up Leary’s psychobiologization of political problems and his advocacy of the psychedelic experience as contributing to their solution. Pharmacospirituality was meant to promote peace: “Societies more open to psychedelic experiences are likely to be less blind to their own demons and prejudices, and perhaps less likely to wage wars of all types” (Doblin 2003).
However, Doblin refrained from reducing the political spirituality associated with psychedelics to a potentiality lying within the drugs themselves (an essentialist perspective that Richard DeGrandpre [2006] termed “pharmacologicalism”). Even though Doblin told me that “of all psychedelics, MDMA is the most inherently therapeutic, the most inherently warm and loving,” he also knew that “Charlie Manson used LSD for brainwashing and to get people to kill”; and he referred to an article in the Israeli press that reported on Hamas fighters using ecstasy from Tel Aviv as “go pills” for their night missions (the anthropological literature is full of examples of hallucinogen use for bellicose purposes [Dobkin de Rios 1984: 213]). “It’s not about the drug,” Doblin concluded. “It’s how you use it. The context is more powerful than the drug.”
Despite this more cautious attitude, it is certainly questionable whether MAPS’ politicized drug mysticism harmonized with either mainstream science or society. But the casting of psychedelia’s countercultural identity engendered a new ethos less antagonistic toward the Protestant ethic of capitalism. It was a this-worldly mysticism that no longer required “dropping out” of society. Instead it tried to translate the experience of unity and transcendence into forms of “active citizenship” (Kucinich 2002: 19). Rather than rejecting the entrepreneurial spirit and wealth generated in the American economy, this new stance sought to enlist the resources of capitalism in the service of advancing the psychedelic agenda. MAPS presented itself as a “membership-based non-profit pharmaceutical company” (Doblin 2002b: 3) and raised money for its projects from successful business people. In this respect, the culture vs. counterculture conflict had indeed been overcome.
When the revival began, drug mysticism could also connect more easily with elements of the Protestant ethic because, in the wake of the 1960s, American Protestantism had changed as well. The discrepancy between the Protestant focus on the scriptures and the drug mystics’ emphasis on intense spiritual experience was less pronounced than thirty years earlier. Not just the counterculture, but also the baby boomer generation more broadly had turned toward experience-centered forms of spirituality shared, for example, by evangelical Christianity and the New Age movement (Luhrmann 2003). In his book on the impact of the counterculture on mainline denominations, Mark Oppenheimer (2003: 6) goes so far as to argue