Wealthy patrons and philanthropic attitudes provided crucial financial, legal, and logistical support for Timothy Leary's early research into LSD and psilocybin, as well as his subsequent psychedelic movement. Leary's shift from academic researcher to LSD guru during the 1960s was accompanied by changes in the patterns of this support. His legal troubles later in the decade are linked to the emerging movement to legalize cannabis. The paper also draws historical continuity to contemporary efforts to fund psychedelic research.
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.