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

by Benjamin Breen

By the fall of 1980, it was not just Bateson and Mead who had died. So, too, had the ideas that inspired and drove the first generation of psychedelic science. Yet something of their sense of science as transformative and redemptive—and yes, even utopian—did survive. In September 1980, for instance, two months after Bateson’s death, Carl Sagan and his wife, Ann Druyan, premiered the first episode of their television documentary Cosmos. In the years to come, it would go on to be viewed by over five hundred million people, a sizable percentage of the world’s population. “So much of what we did—Cosmos, Contact, and so many books—was stimulated, inspired, by many psychoactive substances,” Druyan told me, relaying her experiences using substances from cannabis to MDMA to ayahuasca with Sagan. In 1964, Sagan had visited Bateson and Lilly at their dolphin lab, fascinated by their work, but in the end also troubled by it. Sagan’s regard for Margaret Mead never faded, however. They were “kindred souls,” Druyan said, because they were both “realistic utopians.” And their shared credo, she said, could be summed up quite simply: “Life is not perfectible. But it could be so much better.”