Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science. By BenjaminBreen, New York, USA: Grand Central Publishing, 2024, ISBN: 9781538722374

Public media attention to psychedelic research in recent years has prompted historians and humanities scholars to re-examine longstanding popular and scholarly assumptions about the history of psychoactive substances. Recent works such as Chris Elcock's Psychedelic New York [1] and Ido Hartogsohn's American Trip [2], for example, revise prior understandings of the central actors, timelines and geographies of global psychedelics research while also exploring the important role these drugs have played beyond medical research in the arts, social sciences and popular culture. Benjamin Breen's Tripping on Utopia is a welcome addition to this new body of literature. This book presents a novel account of the central ideas and actors that shaped the practical and philosophical dimensions of twentieth-century psychedelic science. The book compellingly argues that Marget Mead, her ex-husband Gregory Bateson, and their fellow Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation conference associates believed interdisciplinary psychedelic science might create a new utopian world order by rapidly expanding humanity's collective consciousness. Drawing from wider social and cultural debates about science's relationship with society between 1923 and 1980, their shared convictions infused projects ranging from Mead's examinations of Native American peyote ceremonies to clandestine experiments attempting to teach dolphins to speak in English with idealist goals. Breen's approach is informed by a rich primary source base that includes ‘private photographs’, ‘cryptic diary entries’, ‘forgotten manuscripts’, ‘scribbled letters’ and ‘classified memos’ authored by Mead and her contemporaries over this historical period [3]. The book is organized chronologically and divided into three sections covering unique eras of Mead and the Macy circle's utopian thinking. After conducting research together among the Omaha people in Nebraska and in New Guinea in the early 1930s, Mead and Bateson fell in love; the two were equally convinced that psychedelics, anthropology and science could create a globally shared human consciousness celebrating diversity. However, their idealistic goals took a backseat to geopolitical objectives through the Second World War as Mead and Bateson obsessed over projects aiming to ‘cure’ Nazi psychological manipulation. Bateson began advocating clandestine psychological warfare tactics while working for the Office of Strategic Services between 1943 and 1945, while Mead struggled to hide her queer romantic relationships to maintain delicate security clearances. Although Mead and Bateson's marriage became strained and fell apart through the 1940s and early 1950s, they remained intellectually connected through their involvement in Macy Foundation conferences and in early psychedelic research networks. Bateson's group at the Medical Research Institute began investigating the qualitative role of set and setting in psychedelic research and therapy, laying the foundations for California's insular psychedelic science networks through the following decades. Mead, meanwhile, participated in mid-1950s lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) research and believed psychedelics could help individual users and the entire global population rapidly adjust to geopolitical, social and cultural change. She was likely also connected to the CIA's notorious MKULTRA program in these years. By 1959, psychedelic science had split into two polarizing camps, and although researchers like Timothy Leary boldly claimed to offer a revolutionary new approach to ‘collective transcendence,’ others, like Mead, feared these drugs could destabilize society rather than unite humanity under a common utopian banner [3]. These divisions increased as psychedelics became targets of widespread media panic during the late 1960s. Mead and Bateson each abandoned the field before MKULTRA's harms came to light in the mid-1970s. Although their utopian hopes for psychedelic science never came to fruition, their shared dream of science as a ‘transformative and redemptive’ endeavor has survived into the present day [3]. The title Tripping on Utopia is, therefore, apt in a dual sense as it captures Mead and her circle's deep belief in the power of psychedelic science alongside their stumbling attempts to translate idealistic visions into reality through the twentieth century. Clinicians, researchers, humanities scholars and general readers alike will appreciate Breen's ability to balance intimate personal biographies with intellectual and cultural history in this clear, engaging examination of utopian-minded psychedelic research. Both the publisher and author must be commended for their generous use of visual sources such as maps, photographs and scans of historical documents throughout the text. The book's temporal and topical scope is wider than the title implies. Bateson is an equal protagonist, for instance, and the narrative demonstrates that psychedelic research began in the 1920s rather than the 1960s as commonly believed. Further, although Breen follows Mead's global travels, the narrative is firmly rooted in the United States because of its overall emphasis on American developments and actors. It would be interesting to know if Mead's utopian philosophies were shared among various global contemporaries. Tripping on Utopia nonetheless offers a rich and thoughtful appraisal of how Mead and other historical figures shaped the intellectual foundations of psychedelic science well into our present moment.

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