Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Scienceby Benjamin Breen, New York: Grand Central Publishing. 2024. pp. 369. $3000 (cloth). ISBN 9781538722374
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences December 25, 2024 Rob Schraff
Margaret Mead cultivated a network of anthropologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists who explored psychedelics as tools to reshape human consciousness and build a utopian culture beyond the terrors of modernity and atomic warfare. Benjamin Breen's book traces this network from Mead's early fieldwork with peyote-using Native Americans through the Macy Foundation's 1954 Conference on the Problems of Consciousness, wartime OSS work, and postwar LSD research by figures like Humphry Osmond and Allen Ginsberg. The narrative also covers the turn to dystopia with MK Ultra, Timothy Leary's self-serving promotion of LSD, and the rise of Scientology, arguing that 1945–1960 was one of the most radical eras of social experimentation in history.