TRIPPING ON UTOPIA: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science, by Benjamin BreenHalfway through “Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science," the historian Benjamin Breen presents a tantalizing hypothetical, one that would have had an inestimable impact on culture, medicine and perhaps the whole of civilization had it come to pass: What if, in the mid-1950s, Margaret Mead had publicly endorsed psychedelics? It’s not as outrageous a proposition as it may sound. The pioneering anthropologist “made studying LSD something close to her full-time job” in the summer of 1954. Though we don’t know about her own experience with the drug, Mead was surrounded by researchers and users who enthused about the nonaddictive, liberatory, insight-generating potential of acid and mescaline, and she had written about the “curative properties” of peyote two decades prior while studying the Omaha people.

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Persons: Margaret Mead, Benjamin Breen Halfway, Benjamin Breen, psychedelics, “, ”, Mead Locations: Omaha