Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the troubled birth of psychedelic science By BenjaminBreen. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2024. 384 pp.

With its catchy title, historian Benjamin Breen's Tripping on Utopia brings together controversial findings about the human mind, social engineering, and professional responsibility. He delineates the time frame and focus of an inquiry into psychoactive drug research by stating that “Timothy Leary and the Baby Boomers did not usher in the first psychedelic era. They ended it” (3). The Controlled Substances Act of 1970 placed mescaline, psilocybin, and LSD in Schedule I, making them illegal not only because of health risks but also in reaction to the rising countercultural populism in that fraught era of civil rights and anti-war activism. Meanwhile, federal agencies, including the military, had been supporting clandestine experimentation to weaponize the same drugs for mind-control applications. Congressional hearings in the mid-1970s, for instance, exposed the CIA's MK-ULTRA projects within the United States in violation of its charter. Breen's contextualization of the earlier initiatives is welcome in light of the more recent resumption of officially sanctioned studies of therapeutic possibilities for the drugs in question. Inclusion of Margaret Mead's name in the subtitle signals her significant positioning at the intersection of these concerns, enticing anthropological readers to tease out broader implications explored in other studies of militarized anthropology (Lucas, 2009; Mandler, 2013; McFate, 2018; Price, 2016). Breen barely touches on cross-cultural ethnographic investigations of psychoactive plants, exemplified by Mead's foray into peyote studies through her account of Omaha acculturation in the early 1930s. He addresses neither the innovative peyote research by James Mooney and Paul Radin around the turn of the 20th century nor the fieldwork of Barbara Myerhoff and Peter Furst during the period he covers. Ethnobotanical, ethnopharmacological, and ethnoreligious contributions by Furst and others-such as Richard Evans Schultes, Marlene Dobkin de Rios, and Wade Davis-would also be relevant in a more ethnological approach to drugs, but their scholarship is beside the point here. At stake is the place of anthropologists in this “secret history of the first wave of psychedelic science,” with its “abuses of medical ethics, devil's bargains with militarism, and disillusionment with utopian promises” (3). For an anthropological reading, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson serve as threads to follow through Breen's widely ranging survey. In response to issues raised by the Great Depression, World War II, and the geopolitical and domestic unrest of the immediate postwar period, Bateson, Mead's husband from 1936 to 1950, was in some ways even more influential than she was in generating theoretical insights and empirical findings about psychoactive drugs. Both understood the future of humanity as dependent on making the world safe for diversity, which would require breakthroughs in cultural evolution. Resolutely rejecting mystical interpretations, they envisioned mind-expanding drugs as a catalyst for scientific discoveries. Their documentation of Balinese trances alerted them to the importance of set and setting to derive socially integrative benefits from altered states of consciousness. Both threw themselves into efforts to win World War II. Mead recruited colleagues for government programs to formulate food policies and reinforce morale. She assisted Ruth Benedict in national personality-and-culture studies at a distance (funded by the US Navy), which continued after the war. Bateson joined the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, and served in Southeast Asian combat zones. With lasting regrets, he engaged in what came to be called psyops (psychological operations) to influence an enemy's thinking. Mead and Bateson were the only anthropologists in a series of interdisciplinary gatherings-beginning in 1942 and inspired by the paradigm-changing ideas of Norbert Wiener-which redirected their own thinking and eventually transformed human society at the global level. These Macy Conferences developed a more comprehensive understanding of the universe as comprising not only matter and energy but also information and communication. Bateson continued to pursue Wiener's initial impulse that led to the emergence of the field of cybernetics, encompassing living and cultural systems (and helping him explain the symbolism of Iatmul coming-of-age rituals he had witnessed in New Guinea). In contrast, the mathematicians, engineers, and neurophysiologists directed their efforts to applications of feedback control systems, especially for military purposes, leading to digital computing and launching the Information Age. The effects of psychoactive drugs also were considered. While Mead and Bateson recognized their psychedelic potential for transcending the ways the mind perceives and processes information through temperamentally and culturally shaped preconceptions, others pursued psychotomimetic properties for their capacity to disrupt coherent thought processes. Bateson had moved west by the early 1950s, withdrawing from anthropology and focusing on psychotherapeutic research at the Langley Porter Institute in San Francisco and the Veterans Administration Hospital in nearby Palo Alto. He took LSD himself but became disillusioned by studies frequently producing harmful reactions, not only on unwitting patients but also colleagues and friends among the volunteers. He turned to more basic observations of animal communication but, witnessing the distress and death of dolphins injected with LSD by a colleague, shifted to less intrusive efforts to distinguish the natural mind from the artificial creations of behavioral engineering. Mead at first expressed her willingness to try LSD but eventually declined, at least in part because of the risk of revealing aspects of her personal life she needed to keep private to maintain her status as an influential public figure. Mead never fully dissociated herself professionally or personally from researchers who carried out unethical and harmful drug studies, even after revelations of secret CIA funding of the sponsors (including the Macy Foundation) of their work. Persisting Cold War priorities may have been a factor in the position she took as chair of the AAA committee adjudicating the 1970 controversy over Thai village research which the US military funded for its counterinsurgency potential. She expressed more concern about the ethics of exposing ethnographers’ files than their engagement under those auspices in the first place. Throughout their professional lives, Mead and Bateson shared a vision of human survival dependent on the attainment of a more expansive consciousness, whether or not triggered by psychedelic drugs. Mead continued to exercise her talent for communicating imperatives for cultural reform-decriminalization of marijuana, for one-to the world at large. For Bateson, further insights generated during his years of relative obscurity culminated in a kind of apotheosis. His unifying cybernetic approach to mind, culture, and nature helped to galvanize the environmental and peace activism of subsequent generations. Breen's exploration of the complex and changing motivations underlying these two anthropologists’ commitments should help us reflect on our own.