Famed anthropologist Margaret Mead and her third husband Gregory Bateson believed that LSD and other psychedelic substances could enlighten the world and help save humanity from nuclear conflagration during the Cold War.
But their dreams about the potentials of psychedelic research collided with seamier realities, including unethical government testing of these substances on unwitting humans, writes University of California, Santa Cruz Associate Professor of History Benjamin Breen in his acclaimed new book Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, The Cold War, and The Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science (Grand Central Publishing.)
Breen is also the author of The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade, winner of the 2021 William H. Welch Medal from the American Association for the History of Medicine.
Tripping On Utopia delves deeply into the early utopianism of psychedelics researchers including Mead and Bateson, who had strong, idealistic beliefs in the power of altered state