Benjamin Breen’s TRIPPING ON UTOPIA

A Review

TRIPPING ON UTOPIA: Margaret Mead,The Cold War and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science by Benjamin Breen (Grand Central Publishing, NY) 2024

Benjamin Breen is a history professor at UC Santa Cruz who specializes in the history of pharmacology. His first book, THE AGE OF INTOXICATION: Origins of the Global Drug Trade, won a prize from the American Association for the History of Medicine.

I learned about his new book about LSD when he called to ask about my father’s relationship with Margaret Mead while he was writing it.

Breen had a found a memo about Mead’a participation in LSD the research of Dr. Harold Abramson, for whom my father had worked as a researcher. It detailed a session at which my father was present and named by Mead.

Abramson later became notorious for his role in the mysterious suicide (or possible murder) of Frank Olson after he had been unknowingly dosed with LSD as part of project MK-ULTRA. Subsequently, Olson jumped (or was pushed) from a hotel window, and the case was covered up. Abramson had been the doctor Olson consulted after taking LSD, due to his CIA clearance. My father told me he believed Olson committed suicide due to complications from a very bad trip (LSD sometimes leads to suicide in users). His family believed he was murdered because he knew too much. Whichever it was, it wasn’t something to be proud of. And one of my father’s jobs as a researcher for Abramson was to give patients LSD to study their reactions—although under controlled experimental scientific conditions. Breen had found a memo about LSD written by Mead with my father’s name on it.

So Breen asked me: Had my father given Margaret Mead LSD?

I told him that I had no idea, but certainly would like to find out myself.

To do so, I would have to wait until Breen finally published ‘Tripping on Utopia’ earlier this year.

The secretive Mead never documented her taking acid, although she did attend sessions at which others took LSD. She was friendly with Abramson and she advocated LSD use. I personally would guess she did try it, but didn’t write it down. However, perhaps she got cold feet, after canceling one documented appointment. Breen leaves the question open in his book—as a good scholar should. His ‘just the facts’ approach is exemplary.

Readers may decide the question for themselves, based on circumstantial evidence of her involvement with Dr. Abramson, his circle, and her work as a consultant to CIA-linked organizations listed in the book.

Whether she did or didn’t actually take the drug herself, she definitely did approve LSD use as well as other psychedelics (as well as marijuana)  in a quest to fundamentally transform American culture in the midst of the Cold War.

Breen has the background necessary to tackle the complex intellectual origins of psychedelia. Unlike writers who are cheerleaders for Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg Ken Kesey, Stewart Brand, Baba Ram Dass, Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley and other advocates of drug experimentation as a pathway to expanded consciousness, Breen takes an analytical approach to the development of psychedelia in terms of Cold War psychological warfare research sponsored by the Department of Defense and Central Intelligence Agency, relating it to progressive concerns over the dangers of Atomic War and confrontation with the USSR.

Unlike Stephen Kinzer, John Marks, and other CIA critics, he goes beyond simply blaming mad scientists or Cold War dirty tricks for the psychedelic revolution, giving readers substantantial intellectual background that indicates it was part of a progressive movement to reshape Ameican consciousness, rather than the more usual approach which blames reported Chinese brainwashing during the Korean War and the CIA response.

Breen focuses his case study on the documented record of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, who saw the potential of psychedelic drugs as a pathway to prevention of nuclear war, generation of racial harmony, and bringing about of world peace—through altered states of consciousness. LSD and other psychedelics such as mescaline and magic mushrooms would enable Western societies to transcend ingrained prejudices that were blocking progress towards good relations with the USSR and World Federalism, as well as ending repressive attitudes towards unconventional sexual morality. To that end, Mead and Bateson both advocated the creation of what we now call the “Swinging Sixties.”

They did this privately, officially, in memoranda, and unofficiallly among their friends and acquaintances at the pinnacle of trans-Atlantic intellectual life. Mead and Bateson were missionaries for psychedelics before Timothy Leary, alongside elite socialites like Claire Booth Luce. However, while Luce promoted acid for treatment of personal psychological problems, Mead and Bateson took an anthropological approach—advocating LSD as a cure for what they saw as a sick society.

Their views were influential beause both had connections to Anglo-American intelligence organizations as well as cultural and educational elites. Bateson had worked for Allied intelligence in the India-Burma-China theater of World War II, while Mead consulted with CIA leadership in the postwar period. In addition both had careers as public intellectuals, and Mead enjoyed additional authority of positions at Columbia University and the American Museum of Natural History.

As mentioned earlier, Mead was involved with LSD experiments conducted by Dr. Harold Abramson under CIA contract, and wrote in at least one memo that she intended to experiment the drug herself. However, Breen could find no documentation that she had actually followed through. Nevertheless, she was an enthusiast, advocate, and one might even say a prime mover of the psychedelic revolution, by granting LSD her seal of approval in the 1950s.

In other words, the 1960s counter-culture appears not to have been the anti-establishment movement many assumed it to be at the time, rather one aspect of a plan by the American Establishment to prepare the next generation of Americans for global leadership.

Incredible as it may sound, drugs were seen as a way to open the minds of of what people like Mead thought were parochial Americans to accept her classes views. Persuasion would take place not through reasoned debate, rather through pharmaceutical interventions intended to change consciousness. The roots of wht we think of as today’s cultural controversies may be found in Mead and Bateson’s writings from the1920s onwards—including issues of transgenderism, homosexuality, racism, white supremacy, colonialism, imperialism, globalism, feminism, etc.

This makes Breen’s choice of title for his book particularly meaningful. On its most obvious level, ‘Tripping to Utopia’ refers to Mead and Bateson’s better living through chemistry approach to bring about another Golden Age through psychedelics. On another, it indicates their quest may have been nothing but a hallucination, a pipe dream fantasy. On a third, and in my opinion most significant plane, it suggests that the quest itself may have been a dreadful mistake, a stumbling, bumbling, walk down an intoxicated path leading only to a painful fall.

Breen has made an important contribution to scholarship of the psychedelic era, free of cliches, which raises important questions for the next generation of psychedelic drug policies.