In Tripping on Utopia (Grand Central, Jan.), Breen charts the role married anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson played in mid-20th-century psychedelic research.

How did you first come to this topic?

I was looking through Bateson’s archive, and I realized that in the story of Mead and Bateson, there’s an alternative history of the origins of psychedelic science. It wasn’t just this little subset of medicine; it was a reaction to the trauma of World War I and World War II. This feeling that there was a new kind of medicine that might heal trauma was very present in the archives.


It’s surprising that anthropologists were pioneers in the field.

Mead was a forceful personality who was very sure of herself. She was extremely optimistic and was convinced that she was going to help the world create a new global culture that would allow people to express themselves more fully. That would prevent war, that would combine all human cultures. It sounds outlandish, but, you know, utopian science is coming back now, and in ways she was also talking about at the time, like the effects of automation and AI. It was continually surprising to me as I researched this book, the many ways she seems relevant today. Bateson, on the other hand, was deeply unsure of himself and jumped around. But he could blend together all these different ways of thinking.

Many readers won’t realize psychedelic research preceded Timothy Leary by decades.

Yes, in the 1950s Cary Grant took psychedelic therapy and talked about it in interviews. He felt that LSD changed his life. And Clare Booth Luce took LSD to recover from her daughter’s death in a car accident. But that open era of the ’50s ended with Nixon’s war on drugs, which reshaped the historical memory of the moment. Timothy Leary was a regressive figure compared to Mead. He was basically a leader of a group of Harvard men who thought that they were going to be scientist priests who would lead a new form of culture. Margaret Mead had many faults, but she knew that it had to be a broad-based social movement that would affect cultural change. And Leary fundamentally didn’t connect with what she was trying to do.

How heavily was the CIA involved in psychedelic science?

What I didn’t realize was that it was even more shaped by the Office of Strategic Services, in the early ’40s during the war, and that those same people came back to do the psychedelic research for the CIA. Bateson was involved in the ’40s group, but later he was anti-war, and saw himself as having accidentally contributed to this escalation of what I call the Psychedelic Cold War.

What about psychedelics now?

I think that we will be seeing FDA approval of psychedelic medication soon. I spoke to many people who foresee a huge advance in this type of therapy.