Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the troubled birth of psychedelic science By BenjaminBreen. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2024. 384 pp.
American Anthropologist August 19, 2024 Jim Weil
Historian Benjamin Breen's "Tripping on Utopia" argues that the first psychedelic era ended with Timothy Leary and the Baby Boomers, not began with them. The book traces a secret history of psychedelic science from the 1940s through the 1970s, revealing how federal agencies like the CIA conducted clandestine mind-control experiments with drugs later made illegal by the 1970 Controlled Substances Act. Anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson serve as central figures, having participated in the Macy Conferences that birthed cybernetics while pursuing psychedelics as tools for cultural evolution. Breen exposes abuses of medical ethics, militarism's influence on research, and the disillusionment with utopian promises that accompanied early psychedelic science.