Neuropsychedelia. Nicolas Langlitz
Ascona defied “society”: they advocated anarchy and pacifism, practiced free love, attempted to square individual self-liberation and the renewal of deeply rooted group bonds, rebelled against science and medicine, and sought to experiment with the potential of their own and each others’ bodies. They longed for a return to nature while devising this-worldy forms of religiosity that reconciled monism and mysticism. Like their successors half a century later, some of these spiritual dissidents experimented with drugs. Especially after a young woman died of an overdose of cocaine, the Swiss authorities considered the Asconan milieu to be highly undesirable and dangerous and began to take legal action against its most exposed members. But eventually this early counterculture did not disappear due to police action. When the First World War broke out, many members of this scene were drafted for military service, persecuted for refusing to fight for their country, or were simply no longer able to cross borders to travel from their home countries to the Swiss resort. The spirit of Ascona, however, lived on and manifested itself in very different forms as the twentieth century began to take its course (Green 1986).
One of these recurrences involves the events called to mind by the year 1968. Like their counterparts in other Western countries, the Swiss protest movements of the late 1960s revived many of the Asconan ideas by associating them with the political order of the day: protests against the Vietnam war and imperialism, challenges to technocracy, and advocacy of Maoism, feminism, environmentalism, and libertarianism (Linke and Scharloth 2008; Studer and Schaufelbuehl 2009). These ideological currents connected countercultural rebels from San Francisco to Zurich and from Berne to Berlin. While American hippies dropped out to live in small communes in rural California, Swiss youth, most prominently the so-called Bärglütli, sought harmonious relations to nature, fellow human beings, and themselves in the Alps, where they practiced herbal medicine, organized workshops in Sufi dancing, and took LSD together (Bittner 2009). As elsewhere, these protests against the established social order resulted in violent clashes between rebellious youth and police forces (Zweifel 1998).
But there was also a distinctly Swiss flavor to the revolts in this part of the world. On the one hand, in Switzerland 1968 was a less apparent historical break than in other countries. In contrast to France, a political takeover did not even seem a faint possibility. Unlike Italy, no sustainable alliance emerged between students and workers. The Swiss government and bureaucracy were not laced with former Nazis and no leftist radicalization gave rise to terrorism as happened in Germany. Having grown up in a notoriously neutral country, Swiss youth were not at risk of having to serve in Vietnam, nor did their society experience the kind of racial tensions that brought together black civil rights activists and the student movement in the United States. Thus, in the case of Switzerland, the historical continuities were as significant as the caesura of ’68 (Schär 2008).
On the other hand, the Swiss suffered from what, in 1964, was first diagnosed as the “Helvetic malaise.” The term was coined by a member of the Free Democratic Party, classically liberal in its political orientation, who was soon seconded by intellectuals such as the writers Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt who sympathized with the nonconformist youth. They all expressed a growing discontent with the “spiritual defense” of Switzerland: a political and cultural movement that had emerged in the early 1930s to protect values and customs perceived as genuinely Swiss against the totalitarian ideologies of national socialism, fascism, and later on communism. In the 1960s, however, both liberals and leftists came to experience this political culture as intellectually suffocating and as an impediment to an open democratic society flourishing by way of permanent self-reflection and self-critique (Färber and Schär 2008).
This convergence of liberal reform and radical protest movements led the Swiss historian Bernhard Schär (2008) to interpret 1968 in Switzerland—despite the Marxist self-conceptions of many of its leftist actors—as a revival of the values of the failed liberal bourgeois revolutions of 1848. Like their nineteenth-century predecessors, Schär argues, this generation of activists fought for more inclusive democratic participation and emphasized individual freedom. The quest for consciousness expansion was not so much about a return to the ecstatic communion of a premodern collective as it was about mental self-determination and the fulfillment of one’s own potential. This reading seems further justified—and maybe even applies beyond the borders of Switzerland—when considering the unintended economic effects of 1968: the experimentation with alternative lifestyles facilitated the transition from industrial to consumer capitalism, new markets came to cater to the demand for self-realization, and, certainly in the United States, the counterculture gradually merged into a lucrative cyberculture. Hence, it was also the tranquil history of Switzerland, especially the relative tameness of its sixties, that predisposed the country to helping alleviate the conflict between culture and counterculture.
COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
The fact that, in the 1990s, Switzerland came to be at the forefront of the revival of hallucinogen research was not only because it was the homeland of LSD but also because this small country, at the heart and yet outside of Europe, had a history of resisting the internationalization of drug policy. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the problems and conflicts caused by the global opium trade led to the emergence of drug control as an issue of international concern. In 1912, the Hague Convention was passed as the first international drug policy treaty, even though it did not become operational until after World War I (McAllister 2000). The cause was subsequently adopted by the League of Nations (which would be replaced by the United Nations in 1945). However, Switzerland refused to enter into the convention. In part, this might be explained by the nation’s long-standing reservations toward international involvements (Suter 1998). Additionally, the Swiss pharmaceutical industry served as one of the world’s biggest suppliers of heroin. Its successful lobbying prevented Switzerland from ratifying the Hague Convention until 1925, when the Swiss government finally gave in to massive international pressure from the United States and the League of Nations (Tanner 1990; Boller 2005: 145–146).
Although Switzerland did not become a member of the United Nations until 2002, it signed the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs in 1961 and the Convention on Psychotropic Substances in 1971. The latter was presented as ushering in a new age of drug control and included the international prohibition of hallucinogens. But this gradual surrender of Swiss neutrality to the US-driven War on Drugs only occurred reluctantly. The Swiss historian Jakob Tanner remarked: “Generally, one can say that the power of the United States to define what is and what is not a drug has been crucial. Particularly the Single Convention of 1961, which replaced or abolished almost all previous agreements had a very characteristic trademark. I think that it wouldn’t have occurred to Switzerland to prohibit opiates. Probably, one would have continued to manage this by way of laws regulating the manufacture and distribution of medicines [Arzneimittelverordnungen] as had been the case before the Narcotics Law” (quoted in Vannini and Venturini 1999: 266).
Regarding the prohibited substances listed by this law, Tanner told me that “in general, one wanted to keep the list short or at least one wanted a list that did not restrain the innovation potential of the chemical and pharmaceutical industry.” While in the United States a problematization of drug use had already set in around the turn of the century, the isolationist mountain state deemed itself immune from the world’s drug problems. Even in 1967, the writer Frank Arnau still claimed that intoxicants of any kind were foreign to the Swiss national character (Boller 2005: 151). But, however grudgingly, Switzerland eventually decided to join the international community in adopting a more repressive drug policy. By the late 1960s, Swiss policy makers had to acknowledge that their citizens were not as impervious to the temptations of inebriants as once thought. In a major revision of the Narcotics Law of 1951, LSD was prohibited in 1975 (in comparison with 1966 in the United States and 1967 in neighboring Germany), and for about fifteen years Switzerland adopted a primarily repressive course. As in the American case, the illegalization of hallucinogenic drugs seriously hampered their scientific investigation even though half a dozen researchers continued to work in the field (Vannini and Venturini 1999: 285–305).
A second and more momentous parallel to the development in America was the exacerbation of the “drug problem” despite—or maybe because of—these repressive measures. Paradoxically, the availability and consumption of cocaine increased as the American drug war grew fiercer during the 1980s (Davenport-Hines 2002: