Mimetics Hostilis: An Assemblage of Law, Psychiatry, and Chemical Artifice

In 1947, a new drug appeared that was said by its pharmaceutical creator to temporarily simulate psychosis. According to the creator, the drug could facilitate psychiatrists who might take it for the purpose of better understanding their "mental patients." As the drug gained wider use, some psychiatrists (and others) reported that the drug elicited "revelation," "great insights," and "experiences of transcendence." But, branded as a "psychotomimetic," the drug's unexpected and apparent power to grant the grace of transcendent experience created a crisis of consciousness. If the drug mimicked psychosis, were the claimed transcendent and spiritual experiences mere simulations of religious experience? How does the First Amendment's guarantee of religious freedom navigate the inner domain of mind and map the gaps between the authentic and the reproduction, the real and the hallucinated? What is to be said of the fundamental right of religious freedom in the age of neuroscience and psychopharmacology? Have we returned to the age of heresy trials, as judges dawn the robes of priests and decree true religion from the so-called artificial?