Tripping On Utopia Margaret Mead The Cold War And The Troubled Birth Of Psychedelic Science 1st Edition Benjamin Breen by Benjamin Breen 9781538722398, 1538722399 instant download after payment.

"It was not the Baby Boomers who ushered in the first era of widespread drug experimentation. It was their parents." 

Far from the repressed traditionalists they are often painted as, the generation that survived the second World War emerged with a profoundly ambitious sense of social experimentation. In the '40s & '50s, transformative drugs rapidly entered mainstream culture, where they were not only legal, but openly celebrated. American physician John C. Lilly infamously dosed dolphins (& himself) with LSD in a NASA-funded effort to teach dolphins to talk. A tripping Cary Grant mumbled into a Dictaphone about Hegel as astronaut John Glenn returned to Earth. 

At the center of this revolution were the pioneering anthropologists—& star-crossed lovers—Margaret Mead & Gregory Bateson. Convinced the world was headed toward certain disaster, Mead & Bateson made it their life’s mission to reshape humanity through a new science of consciousness expansion, but soon found themselves at odds with the government bodies who funded their work, whose intentions were less than pure. 

Mead & Bateson's partnership unlocks an untold chapter in the history of the twentieth century, linking drug researchers with CIA agents, outsider sexologists, & the founders of the Information Age. As we follow Mead & Bateson’s fractured love affair from the malarial jungles of New Guinea to the temples of Bali, from the espionage of WWII to the scientific revolutions of the Cold War, a new origin story for psychedelic science emerges.

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Benjamin Breen is the author of The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade, winner of the 2021 William H. Welch Medal from the American Association for the History of Medicine.