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

A bold and brilliant revisionisttakeon the history of psychedelicsin the twentieth century, illuminatinghow a culture of experimental drugs shaped the Cold War and the birth of Silicon Valley.

It was not the Baby Boomerswho ushered in the first era of widespread drug experimentation. It was their parents.

Far from the repressedtraditionalists they are often painted as, the generation that survived the second World War emerged with a profoundly ambitious sense of social experimentation. In the 40s and 50s, transformative drugs rapidly entered mainstream culture, where they were not only legal, but openly celebrated.American physician John C. Lilly infamously dosed dolphins (and himself) with LSD in a NASA-funded effort to teach dolphins to talk. A tripping Cary Grant mumbled into a Dictaphone about Hegel as astronaut John Glenn returned to Earth.

At the center of this revolution were the pioneering anthropologistsand star-crossed loversMargaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. Convinced the world was headed toward certain disaster, Mead and Bateson made it their life's missionto reshape humanitythrough a new science of consciousness expansion, but soon found themselves at odds with the government bodies who funded their work, whose intentions were less than pure. Mead and Batesons partnership unlocksan untold chapter in the history of the twentieth century, linking drug researchers with CIA agents, outsider sexologists, andthe founders of the Information Age.

As we follow Mead and Bateson's fractured love affair from the malarial jungles of New Guineato the temples of Bali, from the espionage of WWII to the scientific revolutions of the Cold War, a new origin story forpsychedelic science emerges.