Consciousness as a domain of extraterritoriality

ABSTRACT

Traditional understandings of extraterritoriality have overlooked human consciousness as an intimate province of territorial governance. Whereas traditional approaches to extraterritoriality often adopt a modernist understanding of territory, this article expands on the concept by referring to extraterritoriality as the process and practice of discovering, reifying and intervening in new domains of territorial governance. Insofar as territorial practices adapt in accordance with emergent knowledges and technologies, the realm of human consciousness appeared as an object of governmental interest during the mid-twentieth century alongside advances in neuroscience and psychopharmacology. Through the subsequent illegalisation of psychedelic plants and fungi, in combination with the hegemonic norms established through disciplinary institutions, the full spectrum of human consciousness has since become territorialised as a new domain of governmental intervention and management. As such, this article argues that the regulation of cognition enforced through drug prohibitions and sanctions enfold human consciousness as an extended domain of extraterritoriality.

KEYWORDS:

• Biopolitics
• consciousness
• drug prohibition
• extraterritoriality
• psychedelics
• territory

Introduction

To understand why some people take certain substances, and why others declare these substances ‘unlawful’ and savagely punish those who take them, we must begin at the beginning, with the basic principles of social congregation and social control. (Szasz 1974: 22)

This article argues that the regulation of psychoactive substances enacted through the United States’ war on psychedelic drugs constitutes a form of extraterritoriality. By expanding on traditional understandings of both territory and extraterritoriality, this work conceives of extraterritoriality as a practice and process through which new domains not previously territorialised become objects of territorial governance. When viewed in such a way, traditional understandings of extraterritoriality that centre on juridico-legal notions of rights and sovereignty can therefore be considered as one particular form of territory that exists alongside an array of territorial practices. Expanding on the concept of extraterritoriality in this way entails recognising how practices of state territoriality adapt in accordance with epistemological and technological advancements. As such, practices of extraterritoriality may refer to the processual discovery and capture of new domains of governance which persistently arise in conjunction with scientific knowledge production and technology. Insofar as an intimate connection between psychoactive drugs and human consciousness has been established through the disciplines of psychopharmacology and neuroscience, the management of human cognition has thereby become enfolded as a novel site of territorial reign. As this article will argue, the prohibition of certain psychoactive drugs has delimited the states of consciousness that are otherwise potentially available to humans; states of consciousness which carry with them their own modes of perception, behaviour, subjectivity and capacity to form relations.

To approach the subject of extraterritoriality from such a vantage point, however, requires understanding extraterritoriality in a non-traditional way from the first. The term ‘extraterritoriality’ has customarily been evoked to denote the extension of a government's laws unto territories which are not its own (Colangelo 2013). Traditionally, then, extraterritoriality refers to the ways in which states may claim ‘exclusive jurisdiction’ over their citizens in other states, thereby extending the scope of their legal authority beyond the borders of their corresponding nation-state (Kayaoglu 2010: 2). Although extraterritoriality is regularly understood in this manner – from a modernist understanding of territory wherein a person moves from one territorial boundary to another (Larsson 2007: 778) – extraterritoriality can also be conceived of in a more subtle and pernicious sense in which the state extends control unto new domains which lie outside of those already territorialised, such as the body of the individual. The latter sense of extraterritoriality as an extension of state power resonates with non-modernist approaches to the concepts of territory and territoriality themselves, wherein they are also expanded to include domains such as subject formation as a form of territorial practice (Brighenti 2010).

In fact, to approach extraterritoriality in a non-traditional manner is contingent upon expanding on the concepts of territory and territoriality themselves in a way that goes beyond their conventional juridico-legal framing. In turning to critical social theory as a guide, human geographers have shown that modernist approaches to the concept of territory often refer to notions of the territorial state. The territorial state itself, however, is ‘a highly specific historical entity’ that emerged during the end of religious wars in Europe and therefore does not capture how practices of territoriality have arisen in particular sociohistorical configurations (Gregory et al. 2009: 746; see also Elden 2010a). As Agnew (1994) has further argued, theoretical discussions on territory are rife with modernist assumptions, such as the idea that the state has always been territorially bound. Moving beyond a modernist understanding, territory can be understood as both a practice and an effect which expresses a ‘certain relationship with a world’ through organising social relations and shaping forms of identity (Brighenti 2010: 64). As a practice and an effect which includes managing subject-formation and social relations, territoriality also refers to a process which works to make individuals subjects through their psychic attachments to various social and environmental phenomena. Territoriality therefore denotes ongoing practices, or territorialising schemes, that seize human capacities to form social relations while also channeling these relations and capacities in certain ways rather than others (Hardt and Negri 2000).

To further illuminate just how territoriality, and extraterritoriality by extension, can be understood as a process and practice that involves capturing and managing new domains of governance, I turn to critical social theorists who have demonstrated how state control is extended onto the human body and its manifold forms of expression (Foucault 2007; Butler 1990). Not only have feminist geopolitical theorists stressed the political importance of the human body in terms of the encroachment of state power, but they have also shown how the body can be considered a territory its own right (Hyndman 2003; Gilmartin and Kofman 2004; Dowler and Sharp 2010). In addition, critical thinkers drawing on Foucauldian biopolitical theory have argued that both disciplinary and biopolitical technologies have worked their way into the most intimate areas of human life, including human physiology, genetic makeup, subjectivity, and capacity to form relations with other material bodies (Rose 2001; Braun 2007; Coleman and Grove 2009; Anderson 2012). By regarding territoriality as a process and a practice which centripetally works across myriad domains of life through biopower and other means, extraterritoriality can therefore be conceived of as the process through which new domains not previously territorialised become objects of governance.

To illustrate how the concept of extraterritoriality can productively be expanded on in this way, I argue in this article that the United States’ war on drugs encompasses a new domain of territoriality and, as such, constitutes a form of extraterritoriality in a non-traditional sense. The war on drugs here refers to the multifaceted educational, military and legal campaign against narcotic and hallucinogenic drugs originally launched by President Richard Nixon over fifty years ago in the US. Although the groundwork for the contemporary war on drugs enterprise was established through the Harrison Act of 1914 and the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, with the rise of the scientific disciplines of psychopharmacology and neuroscience during the mid-twentieth century, a newfound knowledge of the biochemical physiology of human consciousness set the stage for the governmental intervention into the management of consciousness.

By taking ‘classic psychedelic substances’ as a case in point, I argue that the illegalisation and persecution of psychedelic drugs, including those individuals who cultivate, sell, or otherwise utilise them, has effectively limited the conscious states that would otherwise be available to individuals and thereby constitutes a form of extraterritoriality. To support this argument, I draw on the contemporary resurgence of scientific research on the ‘classic psychedelics’. Within roughly the last two decades, an overwhelming amount of new scientific evidence has been amassed which attests not only the medicinal and spiritual import of ‘psychedelic experiences’ (Griffiths et al; 2008; Nichols, Johnson, and Nichols 2017), but also to their capacity to allow individuals to form new relations with themselves and others while also provoking novel modes of thought (Watts et al. 2017; Carhart-Harris et al. 2018). Insofar as contemporary scientific evidence on psychedelics contradicts the US Drug Enforcement Administration's (DEA) classification of them as having no medicinal value and a high potential for abuse, further investigation into both the illegalisation and the effects of psychedelic substances is warranted.

This article aims to add nuance to our understanding of extraterritorial spaces by considering consciousness as an underexplored domain. I develop this argument by bringing together critical social theory on territoriality and biopolitics to illustrate how the war on drugs in the United States constitutes a form of extraterritoriality. To validate this argument, I begin the article with a review of traditional understandings of the concepts territory and extraterritoriality, followed by an overview of how these concepts can be expanded through drawing on theoretical developments from the discipline of human geography. Once the concept of extraterritoriality is expanded on to refer to the process and practice of discovering new domains of governance which lie outside of those spheres already territorialised, I proceed to illustrate how work on biopolitical theory further illustrates how practices of territoriality have worked in centripetal fashion to even draw in the human body and biology as political spaces to be managed. In the subsequent section, I extend biopolitical theory to human consciousness as a space of extraterritoriality by arguing that consciousness became an object of knowledge and governance through the convergence of epistemological and technological advances in the sciences of psychopharmacology and neuroscience. By drawing on contemporary scientific evidence on what are known as the ‘classic psychedelics’ as a case in point, the final section concludes by arguing that since classic psychedelics can potentially confer a wide range of physiological and psychosocial benefits to individuals who utilise them, their illegalisation constitutes a form of extraterritoriality that detrimentally regulates human consciousness, experience and affectual capacities.

Territory, territoriality and extraterritoriality

Traditionally, the concepts of territory and extraterritoriality are understood in terms that are associated with the modern period. From a modernist perspective, territory is a concept that is coupled with notions of sovereignty and jurisdictional practices within a juridico-legal framework. Considered in such a way, modern approaches to territory appear to fall within the context of Westphalian sovereignty wherein territory entails ‘the exclusion of external authority structures from domestic authority structures’ (Kayaoglu 2010). Whereas a number of theorists have sought to examine how territorial sovereignty has been developed and mobilised in diverse sociohistorical and geopolitical contexts (Slaughter 2004; Ong 2006; Vandergeest and Unno 2012), critical geographers have troubled modernist understandings of territory, including the equivocation of territory and sovereignty (Agnew 1994; Elden 2009). As Agnew (1994) has shown, at least three erroneous assumptions are habitually made about territory: (1) the idea that foreign and domestic spaces are separable and distinct; (2) that nations are clearly bounded territories which demarcate spaces of sovereignty; and (3) that society is contained within the territorialised sovereign state (Reid-Henry 2010: 753). Furthermore, Agnew (1994) suggests that modernist approaches to territory regularly assume that territory refers to a physically delineated space.

However, according to critical geographer Stuart Elden (2010a: 801; 2010b), the emergence of territory within modernity also refers to both a particular configuration of territory and a territorial practice; it carries with it a specific form of calculative rationality that is characteristic of the modern state insofar as it defines a space over which the state has the right and responsibility to develop and grow. Understood in this light, modernity ushered in a unique form of territory which necessarily coincided with technical achievements having to do with geometry, surveying and mapping, in addition to political-legal developments such as jurisdiction and sovereignty. What Elden (2010c: 426) brings to the fore is the importance of historical analysis in recognising that the modern configuration of territory denotes a word, a concept and a practice. Following Elden's historical approach, it would be erroneous to import concepts such as territory into disparate sociohistorical contexts when either the concept did not exist, or when its meaning has changed. Accounting for territory in such a way illustrates that while territorial practices exist in pre-modern and post-modern formulations, calculated practices of design and demarcation are key features of territory during the modern period.

What Elden's historical approach brings to the inquiry at hand is the idea that territorial practices differ depending on different sociohistorical and geographical contexts. If, from modernity onward, territory is understood as a practice which attempts to stabilise objects of governance for political intervention, then it can be argued that territorial practices therefore tend to adapt to particular spatiotemporal contexts and are configured in accordance with them as such. In taking such a view on territorial practices in the United States for example, one finds a centripetal channeling of power directed towards micropolitical domains such as the household, education and knowledge production to name a few. Borrowing from geographer Richard Hartshorne (1950: 109), centripetal forces refer to those forces which operate in the interest of the state and which gravitate towards a centre while unifying groups of people together as a means of creating solidarity for the state. Since newfound micropolitical domains of governance have been targeted through new forms of territorial practice in their own right, this can be understood as a modification of territoriality which begins to move beyond its modernist understanding. As the subsequent section will make clear, the human body and cognition are among the domains that become caught within the web of centripetal territorialisation.

Apart from Elden, other social theorists have also drawn attention to how territorial practices differ according to particular sociohistorical contexts and adapt in accordance with epistemological and technological developments. Brighenti (2010: 54), for instance, has noted that ‘the demise of one specific historical territorial formation does not mean the end of territories as such’. On this account, territories are reconfigured and can replace or overlap with other existing forms of territoriality. In the process, social relationships and actors are thereby territorialised in particular ways. As opposed to viewing territory as an object or space, Brighenti (2006) instead suggests that territory be understood as spaces that are defined through certain relations of power. Insofar as territories are constituted through rhythms and patterns that organise social relations in particular ways, they are also expressive of a particular way of relating to the world (Brighenti 2010: 63; Brighenti and Kärrholm 2018). Territorial regimes may become fixed over time, or they may extend into new domains previously unterritorialised, such as seizing individuals’ affectual capacities, or their ability to enter into relation with other material bodies (Brighenti 2010: 65). By adopting Brighenti's approach to territoriality, one can begin to conceive of the ways in which the myriad domains of life become territorialised to serve different ends according to different configurations of power. With new knowledges and technological apparatuses come new forms of territorial practice, each of which serves a particular function for the state.

Since territorial practices operate as mechanisms that express certain relations of power, then traditional notions of extraterritoriality must be reconsidered in light of this newfound understanding of territory and territoriality. However, in discussions of law, international relations and political science, extraterritoriality is yet another term, like territory and territoriality, that is regularly evoked in terrain-based terms. The term extraterritoriality in this sense refers to both a theoretical concept and a legal sanction which has been operative in an official capacity since at least the colonial period until today. While numerous forms of extraterritoriality have assuredly preceded the creation of modern nation-states, from the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 onwards, extraterritoriality has taken on a more formal dimension. Traditionally, extraterritoriality refers to ‘the application of a state's laws to conduct occurring outside its territorial borders’, where its application may extend to include persons, property, or conduct (Bradley 2015: 169; Veneziano 2019: 347). It is considered to be a ‘legal regime’ which allows states to claim, in territories outside of their own, the right to oversee jurisdiction over citizens from their own territory (Vandergeest and Unno 2012: 359). Extraterritoriality in this regard is frequently rendered as a neocolonial and imperial geopolitical strategy, often utilised by European and American nations as a means of continuing dominance in foreign states after they have claimed independence. Examples of this include the US and Great Britain's extraterritorial presence in Borneo (see Liu 1925), France's extraterritorial excursions in Egypt (Todd 2018), the presence of US troops in China (Zheng 2015), and Great Britain's extraterritorial occupation of Thailand (Larsson 2007) to name a few. Still others have elucidated on extraterritoriality as it relates to global finance and human rights violations (Bernaz 2013; Lehmann 2017).

In following critical social theorists who have analysed territory and territoriality beyond the ‘juridico-political theory of sovereignty’ (Foucault 2003: 34), it appears that extraterritoriality must also be reconceptualised in non-traditional terms. For if territoriality signals a process and a practice that produces certain patterns of power through its arrangements of disparate material elements and social relations, then the ‘extra’ in extraterritoriality which refers to territories ‘outside’ the state may come to be understood as the process and practice of discovering, reifying, and territorialising new domains which lie outside of those previously territorialised. It helps to recognise that given the changing nature of reality, in combination with evermore technological and epistemological developments, new domains of territorialisation perpetually emerge. Furthermore, there are multiple ways in which an object of governance can be territorialised which provides the impetus for evermore forms of territorialisation to arise. As this process can potentially continue ad infinitum, working with this conception of extraterritoriality can foreground a process-oriented form of analysis which takes disparate knowledges and practices into account. In addition, working with this process-based notion of extraterritoriality helps to not only understand traditional forms of extraterritoriality as an earlier form of territorialisation that emerged within a particular sociocultural, historical and political context, but it also turns analytic attention towards other emergent forms of territorialisation.

Although the extension of state control into aspects of everyday life is something that has been widely addressed by social theorists (Foucault 1977; Butler 1997; Althusser 2006; Painter 2006; Collier 2009), the territorialisation of consciousness is an area of inquiry that has gone largely underexplored. Since the emergence of neuroscientific and psychopharmacological knowledges and technological apparatuses during the mid-twentieth century in the United States, there has been a newfound scientific understanding of the intimate relationship between human consciousness and psychoactive substances. As such, the prohibition of drugs in the United States can be considered an extraterritorial practice which has regulated human consciousness, experience, subjectivity and social relations. As a means of providing further validation of this claim, the following section will illustrate how the management of human biology through biopolitical measures provides the foundations for understanding drug prohibition as a form of extraterritoriality that regulates human consciousness.

The body, biopolitics and the seizure of affect

When it comes to considering the human body as a political domain, feminist geographers have long been vanguards in arguing that the body is an often-overlooked site of political struggle. In feminist engagements with geopolitics, for instance, the body has been analytically mobilised as a means of reorienting the researcher's foci by way of foregrounding analyses of scale to more grounded, affectual and everyday practices (Hyndman 2003; Gilmartin and Kofman 2004; Dowler and Sharp 2010). Regarding theoretical engagements with the body and its relationship to territory, political geographers have made significant contributions insofar as they have considered the body to be a territory in its own right which itself maintains contested and porous political borders (McKinnon 2016; Smith, Swanson, and Gökarıksel 2016). While these advancements have undoubtedly enriched critical theoretical approaches to territory, their analytic attention has largely been focused on the ways in which territories are formed or contested, in part, through embodied practices (Swanson 2016). Taking an alternative approach to the body-power relationship, wherein the body is understood as a political site of governance, this article takes after Michel Foucault’s (1990; 2003, 2007) theorisations on biopower.

According to Foucault (2007: 1), the population and its biological management emerged as a newfound domain of governmental intervention during the eighteenth century in European societies. The biological management of humans as a ‘species’ came about by way of new governmental technologies that developed alongside mathematical advancements in statistics and advances in the biological sciences. These novel technical advancements took political interest in both the ‘population’ and the ‘human-as-species’ as a means of managing the social body. Foucault (2007: 10) describes these measures of social control in two ways, the first of which refers to biopolitical ‘technologies of security’ that were developed for the purpose of ‘modifying something in the biological destiny of the species’. Biopolitics, for Foucault, was but one strategy in a series of mechanisms aimed at the normalisation of society. Disciplinary techniques constitute a second form of biopower which dovetails with biopolitical mechanisms, albeit operating at a different scale of subjection. Whereas biopolitics targets the population and aims at making it operate in productive ways through biological means, discipline – also referred to by Foucault (1990: 139) as ‘anatomo-politics’ – works through surveillance, training and punishment and is therefore directed at control of the human body. Biopolitics and disciplinary mechanisms align themselves in different political contexts to achieve different ends, and taken together strive towards controlling all dimensions of human life, from the body at one end, to the population on the other (Foucault 2003: 242; Coleman and Grove 2009: 493).

Political geographers Rose (2001), Braun (2007) and Anderson (2012) have drawn on Foucault's remarks on biopower to investigate contemporary phenomena that can be productively analysed in biopolitical terms. Rose (2001) for instance, has suggested that recent advances in biotechnology, the life sciences and biomedicine signal new forms of biopower which have morphed from their initial concentration on the population to the management of each individual's genetics. Braun (2007: 23) highlights the concept of ‘biosecurity’ as a global set of political technologies that not only seek to ‘govern the disorder of biological life’, but which further set out to determine ‘biomolecular futures’ through the reconfiguration of social and environmental relations. Similarly, Anderson (2012) has focused on the relationship between power and life by investigating how disparate forms of biopower aim at seizing and directing human affectual capacities. According to Anderson (2012: 28), biopower refers to the way in which ‘life has become the object-target for specific techniques and technologies of power’. Following this line of thought on the relationship between biopower and affect, Anderson draws on Clough’s (2008) notion of the ‘biomediated body’ to argue that human affectual capacities, or, the capacity to enter into relations with other material bodies and affect or be affected by them, have been territorialised through the management of human neurochemistry by the use of ‘affective psychopharmacologies’ (Anderson 2012: 31). Here, Anderson (2011: 218) echoes Foucault's remarks on ‘psychopower’, where psychopower refers to both a technology and a knowledge that works to productively regulate perception, memories, attitudes, emotions and affectual capacities.

Anderson’s (2012) observations on biopower are significant for the inquiry at hand insofar as he proposes that new forms of biopower have been redeployed and intensified as new technologies and knowledges have emerged. These transformations in biopower have created novel alignments of disciplinary and biopolitical mechanisms that work to regulate and govern new domains of life in disparate sociohistorical contexts (Anderson 2012: 32). Following Anderson's remarks, it becomes clear that the targeting and management of human affectual capacities may include the management of human biochemistry, and therefore signals the regulation of human consciousness through both the prohibition and cultural integration of psychoactive drugs. While the connection between power, drugs, and affect may seem to be a novel contribution, critical drug theorists have long warned us of the ‘medicalisation of everyday life’ through the pharmaceutical industry (Szasz 2007). De Sutter (2018), for example, has traced the emergence of psychopharmacology to demonstrate just how significant a role it has played in the biological management of the population and individuals in contemporary times. For De Sutter (2018), the management of affect, and the sedation of desire, are the hallmarks of our ‘age of anesthesia’, in which indifference is cultivated through psycho-political means of chemical stimulation and regulation.

As I argue in the following section, the United States’ war on psychedelic drugs in particular signals a form of biopolitical extraterritoriality which seizes human consciousness. With the emergence of psychopharmacological and neurological sciences during the mid-twentieth century, along with the newfound technologies and knowledges which accompanied their practice, the management of human perceptions, experiences and affectual capacities appeared as newfound objects of territorial governance. Given the novel understandings that these new sciences afforded on the relationship between psychoactive drugs and human consciousness, the regulation of drugs was developed as a mechanism for managing both the population and individuals through biochemically regulating the substances which alter consciousness in particular ways.

Drug politics, psychedelics and consciousness as a domain of extraterritoriality

Because we are creatures with a certain kind of body and nervous system, a large number of human potentials are in principle available to us. But each of us is born into a particular culture that selects and develops a small number of these potentials, rejects others, and is ignorant of many. We are at once the beneficiaries and the victims of our culture's particular selection. (Tart 2000: 4)

In order to appreciate how consciousness constitutes a domain of extraterritoriality, the intimate relationship between human consciousness and psychoactive substances must first be recognised. Human beings have not only maintained an intimate relationship with drugs since prehistory (Guerra-Doce 2015), but certain psychoactive substances such as ‘psychedelics’ are thought to have played an indispensable role in the development of certain cognitive capacities and enhancements in human evolutionary fitness (Sullivan and Hagen 2002; Sullivan, Hagen, and Hammerstein 2008; Samorini 2019). Although psychoactive drug use is nearly a universal phenomenon across human societies, anthropologists have observed that the types of drugs and the purposes to which they are used are relative to each society (Blätter 1994: 123; Schultes, Hofmann, and Rätsch 1998; Rätsch 2005; Miller 2015). Critical theorists have further argued that while culturally promoted and accepted drugs such as alcohol are legal and tend to represent competence and maturity in the contemporary US, an array of other drugs are culturally and legally condemned and tend to signal incompetence, mental illness and moral degeneracy (Szasz 1974: 53; Szasz 1992; Lovering 2015). On these grounds, the rejection or acceptance of a given drug, such as alcohol, is not based on logic, science, or truth, but on the membership in a particular community, for ‘the very identification of a substance as a drug or not a drug is not a matter of fact but a matter of moral attitude and political strategy’ (Szasz 1974: 54). Insofar as psychoactive drugs intimately influence human moods, perceptions, behaviours and experiences, it warrants a critical examination into the rationale which justifies the illegalisation of certain types of drugs and the states of consciousness they provoke.

The further one probes this line of inquiry, such as through the examination of a subgroup of psychoactive substances known as the ‘classic psychedelics’, the more one begins to find a panoply of evidence which contradicts the US Drug Enforcement Administration's (DEA) rendering of these drugs, as well as the governmental rationale which undergirds the categorisation of these substances as harmful and therefore illegal. What are referred to today as the ‘classic psychedelics’ – namely, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), dimethyltryptamine (DMT), mescaline and psilocybin – are all psychoactive substances which cause changes in human brain chemistry, consciousness and experience while also affecting moods, behaviours and perceptions (Rätsch 2005: 9). Each of these psychoactive substances endogenously occur in many species of plants and fungi, and there is record of their use in traditional contexts across many ancient, pre-modern, and even contemporary societies (Ott 1993; Luna and White 2016; Jay 2019; Torres 2019; Muraresku 2020). It was not until the end of World War II and up through the mid-twentieth century, however, that scientific knowledge began to amass on psychedelics in Europe and the United States. As the second world war waned, the US military became intimately involved in research into ‘psychochemicals’ that could potentially render an enemy docile while minimising destruction and casualties, or alternatively be used as a method of interrogation (Lieberman 1962: 13).

The discipline of psychopharmacology subsequently emerged as field of interest to the military insofar as the US was concerned with all aspects of psychochemical warfare, including the ways in which its own captured soldiers might be interrogated, and how sensitive information could be extracted from seized enemies (Smith, Raswyck, and Davidson 2014: 4). After learning about the German use of mescaline as a potential ‘truth serum’ during the 1940s, the US military began its own investigations on LSD and other psychedelic substances to better understand what role they might play in ‘drug-assisted interrogation and behavior manipulation’ (Passie and Benzenhöfer 2018: 1). It was in this particular sociocultural and political atmosphere of paranoia that the US government's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) spawned a multipronged investigation into the effects of psychoactive substances and other technologies on human cognition and behaviour for the purposes of ‘mind control’ (Price 2007a: 8).

Project MK-Ultra, which commenced in 1953, was one of many research programmes created by the CIA during the 1950s and 1960s in the US. The project involved investigating the most effective means of controlling human behaviour, and either directly or indirectly funded a range of interdisciplinary studies ranging from the fields of psychology and psychiatry to anthropology and sociology (Price 2007a: 9). The areas of interest included, but were not limited to, transcultural models of responses to stress, finding the most effective means of interrogation and torture, the discovery and testing new psychoactive substances on knowing or unwitting and vulnerable human subjects, and learning about the effects of other technologies and practices such as electroshock. isolation, and hypnosis on human behaviour (Price 2007a; 2007b; Pawiński 2018: 120). By 1973, the MK-Ultra project was officially disbanded and the majority of its documentation was destroyed (Frost 1994: 21; Price 2007b: 18). Some maintain that while the CIA ultimately failed in its search for ‘esoteric means’ of interrogation through the use of psychedelics, hypnosis and other methods, it nevertheless succeeded in finding more effective means of interrogation and torture through physical procedures, and thereby shifted away from drug research by 1963 (Price 2007b: 19). At the same time, scientific research on LSD and other psychedelics at prestigious universities in the US inadvertently led to the release and widespread use of psychedelic substances in the wider American culture (Marks 1979: 121).

In response to the popularisation and growing use of psychedelics from the 1960s onward, combined with the pressure being put on the government from other social movements of the time such as civil rights and protests to the Vietnam War, the US government passed the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) of 1970 which both included and expanded upon existing federal drug sanctions. The CSA categorised all known and regulated psychoactive substances under five different schedules based on criteria ranging from their medical use to their potential for abuse. Although over one thousand scientific articles had already been published on the medicinal import of LSD by 1961 (Dyck 2005: 383), with psilocybin also showing promise in both religious and medicinal contexts (Metzner 2005), the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) nevertheless categorised all psychedelics under the Schedule 1 classification that is reserved for the most dangerous substances on the grounds that they have both a high potential for abuse and no known medicinal value (Drug Schedules 2020). In addition to passing the CSA, President Richard Nixon subsequently spawned a ‘war on drugs’ biopolitical enterprise that was later fortified by the Reagan administration and continues to be federally funded today.

Although the history of drug prohibition in the US is long and variegated, one recurring theme has been its strategy of targeting drugs as a scapegoat in place of blatantly targeting certain communities. The historical precedents for the United States’ war on drugs can be traced to the beginning of the twentieth century, when the federal government first targeted cocaine and opiates. As a response to the use of opium and cocaine, the US government passed the Harrison Act in 1914 which worked to tax and regulate the importation, production and distribution of coca and opiate-based substances that were associated with Chinese immigrants and people of colour (Szasz 1974: 79; Hart 2013: 5). Less than ten years after its passing, the Harrison Act increased the federal prison population by over two hundred percent by corralling a new influx of drug-related offenders; a trend which has since continued, making the US the current world leader in incarceration (Kuzmarov 2018). While the Harrison Act and subsequent legal measures such as the Marihuana Tax Act (1937) were in part economically driven and preceded without knowledge derived from neuroscience and psychopharmacology (Frydl 2013), these regulations also indirectly targeted drugs as a means of managing and persecuting certain groups of people through enforcing these laws on select communities. By the mid-twentieth century, however, as the blanket ban on narcotics and psychedelics was imposed when the Controlled Substances Act went into effect in 1971, the disciplines of neuroscience and psychopharmacology had already begun to develop a scientific understanding of the link between human consciousness and psychoactive drugs, and thereby set the stage for the nation's decision to enter the territory of consciousness.

It is important to mention that the racist and sinister history of drug prohibition in the United States has been widely addressed (Szasz 1974; Bobo and Thompson 2006; Provine 2008; Hart 2013), as have the harmful reverberatory effects the war on drugs has on minorities in the United States (Nadelmann, Kleinman, and Earls 1990; Nadelmann 1991; Singer 2008). While the illegalisation of psychedelic drugs does not fall along the same lines as the prohibition of cocaine, opiates and cannabis, it is nevertheless recognised that the Nixon administration referred to drug abuse as ‘public enemy number one’ and created a range of enduring programmes designed to harshly persecute certain communities of drug users. According to an interview with John Ehrlichman, Nixon's chief of domestic policy, the war on drugs enterprise targeted two groups in society: ‘the antiwar left and black people’ (Baum 2016: 22). By indirectly targeting substances such as marijuana and psychedelics, the DEA could selectively enforce these laws on the communities it perceived as threats. As a result, the US war on drugs worked to disrupt the activist social movements of the time by first associating certain groups with particular substances, and then criminalising these substances heavily, capturing community leaders, breaking up community meetings, raiding homes, and vilifying both certain drugs and members of these communities through the media. In addition to its domestic operations, the war on drugs is also international in scope, leading some scholars to regard it as an anti-communist trojan horse designed to militarise US foreign policy in other countries (Bullington and Block 1990; Kuzmarov 2009; Weimer 2011).

In the United States, however, knowledge derived from the fields of neuroscience and psychopharmacology led to key insights with respect to how drugs influence human behaviour, thereby creating the conditions for the psychochemical governance of consciousness to emerge as a new domain to be intervened in and managed. Contemporary scientific evidence on psychedelics lends itself to this line of thought insofar as the effects of psychedelics are largely incompatible with both the cultural stigma associated with them as well as the DEA's classification of them. For instance, classic psychedelic substances appear to contradict to the DEA's rendering of them as highly addictive drugs insofar psychedelics can actually be used to effectively combat substance addiction (Johnson et al. 2017; Garcia-Romeu et al. 2019; Garcia-Romeu et al. 2020). Additionally, the DEA has classified psychedelic substances as having no known medicinal value or application; however, a growing amount of evidence has reaffirmed the therapeutic potential of psychedelics (Nichols, Johnson, and Nichols 2017; Johnson et al. 2019; Kuypers 2019). In fact, today an array of pharmaceutical and venture companies are vying for patents on psychedelic substances given the medicinal potential they are exhibiting as revolutionary treatments in mental health (Psilocybin Alpha 2021). Psilocybin, for instance, has shown remarkable efficacy in treating depression as well as anxiety related to end-of-life (McCorvy et al. 2016; Palhano-Fontes et al. 2019, Davis et al. 2020). On these grounds alone, it appears that human health and wellbeing have been deprived of access to certain natural substances with healing potential such as psychedelics; however, matters become further complicated since psychedelics also exhibit prosocial effects on behaviour and even have religious import as well (Smith et al. 2004; Richards 2008).

Beyond their medicinal effects, classic psychedelics not only promote divergent modes of thought while also allowing for rigidly held beliefs, thought patterns and dysfunctional behaviours to become more malleable (Miller 2017: 25; Carhart-Harris and Friston 2019, 336), but they also promote neuroplasticity and lasting, positive changes in brain structure and personality (Catlow et al. 2013; Bouso et al. 2015; Ly et al. 2018). At high doses, psychedelics such as psilocybin and LSD also tend to provoke experiences referred to as drug-induced ego dissolution (DIED) that are often phenomenologically associated with religious and mystical experience (Millière 2017). It is believed that since one of the primary neural networks that maintains ordinary waking consciousness known as the ‘default mode network’ (DMN) has reduced activity under the effects of psychedelics, that one's sense of self, or ego, is diminished, leading to experiences wherein there is a phenomenological merging of self and environment (Carhart-Harris et al. 2014: 6). The dissolution of self-other boundaries is often considered the hallmark of mystical experience (Pollan 2018: 305), leading researchers to establish links between psilocybin-induced mystical experiences and a panoply of long-term changes in behaviour and values. Not only are the therapeutic effects of psychedelics positively correlated with mystical experiences (Griffiths et al. 2008, 631), but these experiences have also increased altruistic tendencies (Griffiths et al. 2006; 2008; 2011: 658) and led to persisting changes in major personality traits such as ‘openness’ (MacLean et al. 2011: 1453). More provocative studies have shown that psychedelic use may also increase nature-relatedness (Kettner et al. 2019), pro-environmental behaviours (Forstmann and Sagioglou 2017), enhance emotional empathy (Pokorny et al. 2017), and potentially even decrease authoritarian political perspectives (Lyons and Carhart-Harris 2018). Furthermore, classic psychedelic substances have reliably shown to increase both physiological and phenomenological connectedness (Carhart-Harris et al. 2018), thereby leading to ameliorations in one's ability to form new and meaningful relations with oneself, others and the world (Watts et al. 2017).

The significance of these findings for the argument at hand is that the effects of psychedelics overwhelmingly prove that their illegalisation is unwarranted. When taken in combination with the history of the war on drugs and the role of psychedelics in governmental experimentation, it adds further credence to the idea that their banning was based on ulterior motives. Furthermore, all of the classic psychedelics have a history of being revered in certain traditional and Indigenous contexts, for millennia in some cases, before they became an object of scientific knowledge and their active psychoactive compounds were isolated and synthesised. Upon reviewing the contemporary literature on the effects of psychedelics which include healing benefits, increased prosocial behaviours, and enhancements in one's capacity to form relations with oneself, others and with nature, I maintain that the US war on psychedelic drugs has territorialised the domain of human consciousness by delimiting the states of consciousness that are potentially available to individuals. The outlawing of psychedelic substances has thereby restricted human perceptions, behaviours, affectual capacities and subjectivities insofar as psychedelics show remarkable potential in diluting the boundaries of individuality and enforcing stronger links between one's sense of self and one's environment (Tagliazucchi et al. 2016). The significance of these findings is that while socially and physiologically dangerous drugs such as alcohol are legal and promoted within the US, psychedelics substances and experiences have been both stigmatised and illegalised through disciplinary and biopolitical measures, thereby denying the wider population access to their potentially positive effects which include an expanded sense of self.

Given that I have defined extraterritoriality as the process and practice of discovering new domains of governance which adapt in accordance with emergent technologies and knowledges, I maintain that consciousness emerged as a novel domain of governmental intervention and management based on findings drawn from the newfound disciplines of neuroscience and psychopharmacology. The extraterritorial extension of biopolitics into the realm of human consciousness falls in line with Brighenti’s (2006) assertion that territories are spaces defined by certain power relations. As such, the delimitation, or governmental designing of conscious states brought about through drug prohibition renders normal waking consciousness a space which reflects certain relations of power. Furthermore, the extension of biopower into the realm of human consciousness resonates with the observations made by Rose (2001), Braun (2007), and Anderson (2012) regarding how biopower has worked its way into the most intimate domains of human experience. In the same way that other territorial regimes signal particular configurations of power that can become fixed over time, the regulation of human consciousness through drug prohibition has fixed human cognition and subjectivity in certain ways by restricting the states of consciousness that individuals can experience. Although psychedelic experiences are constrained by a panoply of factors which significantly influence their effects (Hartogsohn 2017), they nevertheless afford a window into the ways in which new forms of healing, thinking, being and relating are delimited through the biopolitical territorialisation brought about by drug prohibition. Beyond illustrating how consciousness constitutes a domain of extraterritoriality, however, psychedelic substances and experiences may also afford a possible means of deterritorialising the rigid thought patterns, behaviours and forms of subjectivity that have become concretised over time (Falcon 2020).

Conclusions

This article aimed to add nuance to traditional understandings of extraterritoriality by examining how the management of human consciousness through drug prohibition constitutes a domain of extraterritoriality. I maintained that since new domains of territoriality emerge alongside epistemological and technological developments, extraterritoriality signals the process of discovering, reifying and intervening in new territorial domains as novel objects of governance. Insofar as from the mid-twentieth century onward, developments in neuroscience and psychopharmacology have afforded new insights into the manipulation and control human behaviour, I argue that these disciplines have provided the foundations for the biological management of human consciousness. Through examining the war on drugs and the illegalisation of psychedelic substances as a case in point, I demonstrated how human behaviours, affectual capacities, socioenvironmental relations and subjectivities have become territorialised through the enfolding of human consciousness as a new biopolitical domain. Not only has the illegalisation and stigmatisation of psychedelic substances denied US citizens the ability to benefit from their therapeutic effects, but it has also shunned the population from significantly personal and meaningful experiences that are often associated with mysticism and religiosity. Furthermore, the states of consciousness and experiences provoked by classic psychedelic substances have led to lasting changes in one's sense of self, personality and values, including increases in openness, empathy and relatedness to nature. As such, the prohibition of psychedelic substances has delimited the spectrum of conscious states that are otherwise available to the population, and in doing so, has constricted each person's ability to form new relations with themselves, with human and nonhuman others, and with the world at large.

Although the scope of this article has been to demonstrate how consciousness can be understood as an extraterritorial realm, I nevertheless envision this article as providing the groundwork for further inquiries into how the concept of extraterritoriality can productively be expanded upon. Beyond the case of the classic psychedelics, it warrants further investigations into both the effects and rationale underlying the illegalisation of other psychoactive substances that have been prohibited in the United States. This article therefore not only argues that human consciousness is biologically managed through the regulation of psychoactive drugs, but it invites further research into how human consciousness has become coopted by particular territorial regimes. In building on the idea that territoriality refers to a process and a practice of creating spaces which reflect certain relations of power, and further arguing that extraterritoriality involves the discovery and capture of new domains not previously territorialised, my hope is that these theoretical innovations can serve as analytic tools to examine other emergent domains of extraterritoriality, and other ways that human consciousness has become circumscribed.

Acknowledgements

I would first like to thank Kevin Grove for providing me with extensive feedback on the first draft of this manuscript. I am also sincerely grateful for the meticulously detailed suggestions that Zachary T. Androus, Magdalena Stawkowski and Robert Kopack provided which improved the coherency my argument a great deal. I would also like to thank Dr. Androus and his colleagues for not only organising this special issue, but for being open to the nuanced contribution that my article brings to the discussion of extraterritoriality. Finally, I am greatly indebted to the anonymous reviewers of this manuscript whose comments helped me fortify my argument with historical evidence.

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Joshua Falcon

Joshua Falcon is a Ph.D. candidate of anthropology in the department of Global and Sociocultural Studies at Florida International University. While his interests centre on philosophically and critically exploring cross-cultural understandings of human-nature relations, his research focuses on psychedelic states of consciousness and the effects of drugs on cognition, perception and behaviour. Currently, Josh’s work is concentrated on the ethics and politics of drug use, including issues related to religious freedom and cognitive liberty, as well as the relationship between psychedelic experiences and lasting changes in human-environment relations.