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

by Benjamin Breen

The underlying question was fascinatingly fundamental: are we truly the same person from moment to moment? Almost all of us feel, intuitively, that there is an inner core, a sense of self, that persists across the days, months, and years. But could this be proven? And what about drugs that promised to dramatically alter that sense of self? These questions—along with his reading of Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception—led Block to find some mescaline of his own. In 1956, sitting in an interview room at the Langley Porter Clinic, Block tried the drug for the first time, “observed by Gregory Bateson.” Block loved it. Mescaline “seemed to enrich and remarkably broaden perception, whereas tranquilizers dulled and narrowed perception.” The experience was “profound… something cosmic and religious in a Zen-like way.”