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

by Benjamin Breen

By this time, even media outlets that had formerly shown interest in the potential of psychedelic science now filled their pages with accounts of psychedelic users who threatened civilization itself. Mead could easily have followed suit. But she didn’t. Though LSD’s users could be “solipsistic” and overly inward-focused, Mead wrote, she defended the use of psychedelics as tools of spiritual insight. The trouble was that the United States of the 1960s did not have a cultural background that allowed these insights to be meaningfully integrated into society at large. In the Balinese trance tradition, she explained, “people take a great many precautions in selecting and ritually training those who will engage regularly in trance and in controlling where and under what circumstances trance may be induced.” To properly guide psychedelic users, she wrote, “very careful disciplines and rigorous forms of training would have to be developed.”