Margaret Mead believed at that time, in 1955, that mescaline or LSD might allow the user to “reorganize” themselves in such a way that they could better adapt to a rapidly changing social order, heading off the mystical “fanaticism” that so often accompanied transformation experiences. This is what she had meant when, typing her thoughts about LSD late at night in the summer of 1954, she wrote of the “new possibility” that LSD might offer a path “away from mysticism and escape.” And for a brief period of a few years in the late 1950s, this dream still seemed achievable.
