Book Review: Tripping on Utopia, by Benjamin Breen – The New York Times

TRIPPING ON UTOPIA: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science, by Benjamin Breen

Halfway through Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science," the historian Benjamin Breen presents a tantalizing hypothetical, one that would have had an inestimable impact on culture, medicine and perhaps the whole of civilization had it come to pass: What if, in the mid-1950s, Margaret Mead had publicly endorsed psychedelics?

Its not as outrageous a proposition as it may sound. The pioneering anthropologist made studying LSD something close to her full-time job in the summer of 1954. Though we dont know about her own experience with the drug, Mead was surrounded by researchers and users who enthused about the nonaddictive, liberatory, insight-generating potential of acid and mescaline, and she had written about the curative properties of peyote two decades prior while studying the Omaha people.

These natural drugs were new to the white West, and LSD was new to the entire world, having been (accidentally) discovered by a Swiss chemist in 1943, so these substances were free of criminalization and stigma. Meads blessing might have created a climate in which they still would be.

Tripping on Utopia makes the convincing case that Mead and her cohort were key players in the first wave of psychedelic science, which began not in the 1960s but in the 1920s. Timothy Leary and the baby boomers did not usher in the first psychedelic era, Breen writes. They ended it.

Meads interest in psychedelics stemmed from her lifelong quest to find a way to help humanity design peaceful, culturally diverse societies full of self- actualized individuals in essence, a utopia. For her, the dream only intensified during World War II and the Cold War, when the specter of nuclear apocalypse (and the less totalizing yet still nefarious psychochemical warfare) loomed.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit andlog intoyour Times account, orsubscribefor all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?Log in .

Want all of The Times?Subscribe .

See the rest here:

Book Review: Tripping on Utopia, by Benjamin Breen - The New York Times