The Unruly Pharmacy: Expert Opinion and the Management of Public Debate Over LSD

Abstract

The 1966 Senate Hearings on federal funding of LSD research mark the emergence of a set of assumptions regarding the proper use and legal attitude toward drugs that underpins subsequent drug policy decisions in the United States. The hearings exhibit three important argumentative strategies. First, experts, specifically psychiatrists and public health researchers, are given latitude to define the problem as a medical one. The medical model of drug use defines only medical use as legitimate and all non-medical use as pathological. Second, the medical model defines LSD users as pathological. Users appear in the hearings via the idiom of the case study, denying them agency and the power to speak credibly about the effects of LSD. Finally, the medical model uncritically accepts discourse by members of the public as long as it bolsters the expert account of the problem. Using Robert Asen's discussion of the public imaginary, and Darrin Hicks and Lenore Langsdorf's account of the constitution of an ideal arguer in procedural theories of argument, I argue the hearings create an imaginary narrative regarding LSD use, expert credibility, and public reaction to it that underpins the subsequent controversy over LSD. The hearings are of interest to scholars of argumentation because they show how public controversy may be constituted by, rather than merely compete with, technical and disciplinary idioms of argument.