Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science

I post this in honor of "Tram Day," celebrating the first woman to take LSD, Susi Ramstein.

"The history of psychedelics in the twentieth century has almost always been told as a story dominated by white American men, and above all by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (Ram Dass)," writes Benjamin Breen in his new book, Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science. Breen's book strives to put the subject in a larger context, as it unveils the largely unknown pre-history of psychedelic science, starting in the 1930s.  

The opening chapter contains one blockbuster revelation after another. It starts with a group of interdisciplinary scientists connected over a span of two decades to study human consciousness by anthropologist Margaret Mead and her third husband and fellow anthropologist, Gregory Bateson. 

Aldous Huxley "read Mead carefully as he wrote The Doors of Perception following his mescaline experiments in the 1950s," Breen writes. Leary's earliest published work as a scientist was inspired by Bateson, and in one of his first speeches about psychedelics, he quoted Mead, while behind the scenes he tried to convince her to take psilocybin with him. Bateson was directly responsible for Allen Ginsberg's first LSD trip and played a key role in the birth of psychedelic psychiatry in the 1950s Silicon Valley, CA. 

Every chapter continues to amaze with eye-popping enlightenments both delightful and diabolical,  and each ends with a cliffhanger that draws the reader to dive into the next fascinating tale, making Tripping on Utopia almost impossible to put down. 

MARGARET MEAD AND RUTH BENEDICT
While a student at Columbia University, Margaret Mead met her mentor and future lover Ruth Benedict, who was working as a teaching assistant. Benedict's "fascination was with cultural patterns that deviated from the norm of American society in the 1920s—and, above al., with forms of sexual identity and altered states of consciousness that her own society rejected as madness," Breen writes. "Benedict saw herself as helping to create a new kind of science that would allow humanity to navigate the challenges of the modern world." 

In the spring of 1923, Benedict studying hallucinatory vision quests on the Great Plains, including those induced by alcohol, Jimson weed, and peyote. By April, Benedict had convinced Mead to become a cultural anthropologist like herself, and by 1925 Margaret was on a steamship heading to Polynesia to study adolescence, leading to her breakthrough book Coming of Age in Samoa (1928). By 1930, on her way to her second divorce, she chose to follow Benedict into briefly studying the peyote visions of the Great Plains, a step towards what Mead "came to see as her life's goal—creating a new culture that expands humanity's collective unconscious." 

Bateson, Mead, and her
second husband, Reo Fortune 

ENTER—AND EXIT—BATESON
Soon she was headed to New Guinea where she would meet Bateson, who, along with the Huxleys and the Darwins, came from "the snobbish pinnacle of Victorian England's scientific elite." His father, William Bateson, was a famed biologist who coined the term "genetics" and sat on the board of the British Museum. As well as a shared scientific vision that "science was somehow tied up with the destiny of the human species," Mead and Bateson shared a "sexual fluidity," with both of them having had affairs with same-sex mentors in college. 

By the 1940s, the couple and those around them were caught up in global politics, with the march of Nazism on the rise. The US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) started with advice from UK intelligence officer Ian Fleming (writer of the James Bond books). The OSS "started to explore the potential of hypnosis and truth drugs as methods for interrogating captured enemy soldiers and agents." In May 1942, Mead and Bateson "anchored a group of attendees" at a conference on altered states held in New York City. 

While Mead "did her best to remain on the side of 'white' (defensive) psychological warfare," Bateson and other anthropologists and psychiatrists joined the OSS in shady covert operations, including dosing unwitting subjects with drugs and poisons, hypnosis experiments, and working with OSS agent Julia Child. A memo Bateson began working on immediately after hearing that the atomic bomb had been dropped in Hiroshima is credited with bring about the CIA and its unconventional means of warfare, against which nuclear force would be powerless. These world events and the debates that followed "linked Bateson and Mead, once again, in a common cause: building a science of human potential that would allow humanity to survive our species' vastly increased capacity for violence," writes Breen. 

By 1949, Bateson had moved to the Palo Alto, VA—the inspiration for Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest—to start a new career as a psychotherapist involved in psychedelic therapy, perhaps as penance for his wartime deeds. He'd had an affair with experimental film maker Maya Deren, who was prescribed methamphetamines by the notorious Dr. Max Jacobson, supplier to the likes of Thelonious Monk, Winston Churchill, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, and the Kennedys. "Jacobson was actually a fairly typical representative of a truly adventurous, and often reckless, era in consumer pharmacology," Breen wrote of the "do it yourself" pharmacological era. (Indeed, an amphetamine was part of the plot of the 1960 musical "Bye Bye Birdie.") 

LSD AND MEAD
"Since at least the 16th century, midwives had been scraping off the reddish powder of ergot from barley and administering it to pregnant women for labor," Breen writes. "Hoffman would claim that LSD had put him in mind of childbirth in a distinctly different way. 'I had the feeling that I saw the earth and the beauty of nature as it had been when it was created, at the first day of creation,' the chemist said in one interview. 'I was reborn.'"

In 1943, when Albert Hoffman discovered LSD, Robert Oppenheimer was appointed director of the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, tasked with developing the world's first nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, Mead was writing about the fate of Pacific Islanders in the "new world society" that would follow World War II. She stressed cooperative models for societies in her work, instead of dictatorial ones. 

By 1949 she became a consultant to the National Institute of Mental Health, which fronted CIA MK-ULTRA experiments that dosed thousands of people with LSD and other drugs, sometimes without their knowledge. That year, she published her book Male and Female, containing the then-radical conclusion that "each sex depends for full functioning upon both male and female hormones" while "jettisoning the concept of binary sex entirely." She also began what was to be a lifelong partnership with OSS officer turned anthropologist Rhoda Métraux. A few days after Mead visited Ruth Benedict on her deathbed in 1948, the FBI began an intensive "loyalty investigation" of Mead as part of the "Lavender Scare" targeting  suspected homosexuals.

"Mead spent most of 1953—a pivotal year for psychedelics—on an island off the coast of New Guinea, where she was studying the development of an apocalyptic religion that she called 'the Noise.' When she returned to New York in 1954 and became involved in LSD research, her perspective was colored by this experience," writes Breen. 

She worked for a few months with an LSD research project in the summer of 1954 with Harold Abramson, taking notes on a trip taken by opera singer Marianne Weltmann, and, feeling "flush with potential" afterwards, began writing a memo about the topic the following day.  Saying that LSD "looks very promising," she spoke of her intent to try it herself, but postponed her "trip" indefinitely and apparently never tried it. Breen speculates that the FBI investigation into her sexuality prompted her to appear to be behaving "normally" in other aspects of her life. 

She speculated at the end of New Lives for Old, written during that time, that "drugs, such as mescal and LSD" could lead to the acceptance of "new patterns." The Noise, Mead wrote, "was just one part of a continuum of 'conversion experiences': others included the altered consciousness of the Balinese trance dancer, the alcoholic's moment of clarity, and the experience 'evoked by drugs.'" But in the same account she compared LSD to brainwashing in the Korean War, something she knew about. Mead believed psychedelics could be "integrative and insight giving" but only if pursued "in a responsible experimental spirit." 

Hate mail sent to Mead after she backed
legal marijuana in Congressional testimony.

"If Margaret Mead had publicly backed psychedelics in the mid-1950s, history would have changed," asserts Breen, noting, "a case could be made that with Einstein's death in 1955, Mead became the world's best-known living scientist." Carl Sagan (who later tried marijuana and wrote about it), "was among Mead's most avid readers" as a young man, when he "dreamed of scoring an interview with her." In SciFi writer Robert Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy (1957), the book's orphaned protagonist is "mentored by a space anthropologist named 'Doctor Margaret Mader' who teaches him how to navigate the cultural shifts he faces as he skips from ship to ship, planet to planet." 

Ten years later, in 1967, Mead inspired a character with her real name who gives men leave to parade their plumage in the musical Hair, with the song "My Conviction." She then opens her coat to reveal she is a man in drag. (That moment, along with the song and the character, are scrubbed from the movie version of the play.)

CODA: MEAD AND MARIJUANA
In October 1969, Mead "experienced what was probably the most violent public backlash of her career" after she gave testimony before Congress saying, "It is my considered opinion that marijuana is not harmful," adding, "If I were young today, I'm sure I would be smoking marijuana."

Public reaction was swift. The governor of Florida called her a "dirty old lady" and she received a thick stack of hate mail. Perhaps this is the reaction she feared she'd get if she endorsed LSD. In the hearing, when asked about LSD, she said she believed it was potentially dangerous, but that within 15 years a similar "mind-expanding" drug with a better safety profile would be developed, and should be accepted. (Predicting the discovery of MDMA?) 

Breen writes of good reasons for the "mass forgetting" of our psychedelic history, including "abuses of medical ethics, devil's bargains with militarism, and disillusionment with utopian promises." He concludes, "But before it became a failed utopia, it was a beautiful dream. Restoring it to view can help guide us in the present, as we confront yet another crossroads between techno-utopian ambition and messy reality."