Neuropsychedelia. Nicolas Langlitz
as such an invaluable source of inspiration, care, and love that mentioning her in an acknowledgment must appear to be a preposterously scanty gesture. But what else can I do here?
To conclude this acknowledgments section (by now of American proportions), I also wish to thank the publishers of the following articles for allowing me to use these previously printed materials in revised and expanded form in this book: “Ceci n’est pas une psychose: Toward a historical epistemology of model psychosis,” BioSocieties 1 (2) (2006):158–180; “The persistence of the subjective in neuropsychopharmacology: Observations of contemporary hallucinogen research,” History of the Human Sciences 23 (1) (2010):37–57; “Political neurotheology: Emergence and revival of a psychedelic alternative to cosmetic psychopharmacology,” in Neurocultures: Glimpses into an Expanding Universe, edited by Francisco Ortega and Fernando Vidal, 141–165 (Frankfurt/M.: Peter Lang, 2011); “Delirious brain chemistry and controlled culture: Exploring the contextual mediation of drug effects,” in Critical Neuroscience: A Handbook of the Social and Cultural Contexts of Neuroscience, edited by Suparna Choudhury and Jan Slaby, 253–262 (London: Wiley, 2012).
Introduction
Neuropsychopharmacology as Spiritual Technology
Neuropsychedelia is about the revival of psychedelic research since the “Decade of the Brain.” When US president George H. W. Bush (1990) dedicated the 1990s to neuroscience, he paid tribute to the unprecedented public valorization of this prospering branch of medicine and the life sciences. By contrast, the investigation of hallucinogenic drugs had enjoyed less government support in the preceding two decades. Most academic and corporate research projects had been closed down or run out of funding after the clash between the “counterculture” and the “Establishment” in the 1960s. Only in the underground had experimentation with this class of substances continued to flourish. But, as the twentieth century was coming to an end, some of those who had been young during the so-called psychedelic era and who had subsequently chosen not to “turn on, tune in, and drop out,” but to pursue careers in medicine or science, were running their own research groups and sensed that the time was ripe for a second attempt to introduce hallucinogenic drugs into the academy and the Western pharmacopoeia. The growing public esteem of brain science helped them to relegitimate their research interest in psychedelics, not as symbols of social dissent or as magic drugs, but as tools to study different neurotransmitter systems, the neural correlates of consciousness, or the biological substrates of schizophrenia.
The two neuropsychopharmacological laboratories at the center of this anthropological inquiry have played key roles in the revival. Franz X. Vollenweider’s lab in Zurich has arguably been the most important research facility studying the effects of hallucinogens on human subjects, while Mark A. Geyer’s animal lab in San Diego developed an important and widely used experimental paradigm taking hallucinogen-intoxicated rodents as a model of schizophrenia to screen for new antipsychotic drugs. Even though the current renaissance of psychedelic research has emerged from many countries simultaneously, this study’s focus on Switzerland and the United States also sheds light on the central transnational axis of this process connecting American psychedelic culture with the home country of LSD. The ethnographic investigation of the two laboratories, mostly conducted during nine months of fieldwork in 2005 and 2006, followed by many visits, interviews, telephone conversations, and e-mails, sheds light on the scientific practices and the ethos informing the scientists’ work. This close-up perspective reveals that the current resurgence of psychedelic science is not just another story of disenchantment (from magic mushrooms to 5-HT2A receptor agonists) but has produced a form of laboratory life that continues to be suffused with the peculiar kind of mysticism that emerged from the psychedelic culture of the 1950s and 1960s. Rather than presenting one more case study of the biologistic reduction of the human to “bare life,” Neuropsychedelia explores the assemblage of a precarious : gure of anthropos as a being situated between animals and gods, between the bestial and the divine. From the thick of anthropological fieldwork, it generates a meditation on spiritual venues open to those living under conditions of late-modern materialism.
LISTENING TO MOKSHA IN THE AGE OF SOMA
As the Decade of the Brain and of the Human Genome Project, the 1990s saw countless media reports about just discovered genes for this and brain centers for that human trait or state. The sociologist Nikolas Rose (2007: 188–192) identified this period as the turning point when a neurochemical understanding of human mental life became hegemonic, flattening out the deep psychological space that had dominated Euro-American conceptions of the mind since the days of Freud. What distinguishes these rearticulations of naturalism and materialism from their nineteenth- and early twentieth-century predecessors is that biology is no longer accepted as fate but has been made into an object of biotechnological and psychopharmacological intervention. A prominent event in this transition was the introduction of the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor Prozac, which was soon reported to not only restore the premorbid self of patients suffering from depression but to make healthy people feel even “better than well.” Some claimed that the drug had allowed them to finally become their “true selves” (although they had never experienced anything comparable before). By “listening” to the drug, the American psychiatrist Peter Kramer (1993: xi, xv) and his patients came to rethink what was essential and what was contingent about people’s personalities, “what in them was biologically determined and what merely . . . experiential.” Kramer’s account of so-called cosmetic psychopharmacology set the terms for the ensuing discussion of the use of drugs for nonmedical purposes such as the enhancement of mood and cognition.
Consequently, in contrast to the 1960s, not hallucinogens, but antidepressants and stimulants dominated the popular problematization of psychopharmacology at the time of the revival of psychedelic research. As Prozac prescriptions skyrocketed, the drug was first hyped and then demonized for increasing the risk of suicide and murder and for robbing its consumers of authenticity. The physician and philosopher Carl Elliott (2004) read the case histories surrounding Prozac as indicating a sense of spiritual emptiness and existential alienation, which psychiatrists treated as if they were purely internal neurochemical matters, whereas they actually pointed to a mismatch between the ways people were living their lives and the structures of meaning that told them how to do so. But not only were they disoriented, they also did not know what could possibly provide an ethical orientation. In the conventional accounts of modernity, such nihilism is associated with the grand narrative of the disenchantment of the world. The psychopharmacological response to this conundrum, Elliott (2004: 129) argued, made the situation even worse by overlooking the fact that “alienated people are alienated from something—their families, their cultures, their jobs, or their Gods.”
During the presidency of George W. Bush Jr., this cultural critique was shared by the President’s Council on Bioethics, which the physician and public intellectual Leon Kass chaired from 2002 to 2005. Kass (2002, 2008b) and another prominent member of the council, the political economist Francis Fukuyama (2002), emphasized the analogies between this historical diagnosis and the dystopian future envisaged in Huxley’s Brave New World (1932).1 The novel describes a totalitarian social order preventing political unrest, among other things, by controlling its subjects’ brain chemistry. Citizens are urged to use the fictive drug soma, which makes them content and docile. It lulls them into a false sense of happiness and imprisons their minds in a gilded cage. “Religion, Karl Marx declared, is the opium of the people. In the Brave New World this situation was reversed,” Huxley (1959: 100) commented. “Opium, or rather soma, was the people’s religion. Like religion, the drug had power to console and compensate, it called visions of another, better world, it offered hope, strengthened faith and promoted charity.”
In Kass’s and Fukuyama’s readings of Huxley, two peculiarities were striking. First of all, both ignored the fact that Brave New World describes a totalitarian system. They presented the novel as a mirror of bioethical developments in liberal democracies. Unlike Huxley, they did not warn against the emergence of a particularly perfidious regime of mind control by the state but against the temptations of new technologies (Fukuyama 2002: 5–6; Kass 2002: 9; Morgan et al. 2005). The citizens of Kass’s and Fukuyama’s Brave New World were present-day Americans seduced by the most recent advances of biotechnology—from genetic engineering to brain implants and from cloning to neuropsychopharmacology.