Margaret Mead, Psychedelics, and the CIA with Benjamin Breen

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

The generation that survived the second World War emerged with a profoundly ambitious sense of social experimentation. In the ’40s and ’50s, transformative drugs rapidly entered mainstream culture, where they were not only legal, but openly celebrated. American physician John C. Lilly infamously dosed dolphins (and 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 centre of this revolution were the pioneering anthropologists – and star-crossed lovers – Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. Convinced the world was headed toward certain disaster, Mead and 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 and Bateson’s partnership unlocks an untold chapter in the history of the twentieth century, linking drug researchers with CIA agents, outsider sexologists and the founders of the Information Age.

Video Title: Margaret Mead, Psychedelics, and the CIA with Benjamin Breen. Source: Lawfare. Date Published: March 14, 2024. Description:

If you’re listening to this podcast, chances are you’ve heard stories about the CIA’s experiments with drugs, particularly LSD, during the infamous MKUltra program. But you may not know that the characters involved in that dubious effort connect to one of the 20th Century’s most famous and revered scientists, the anthropologist Margaret Mead. 

Shane Harris talked with historian Benjamin Breen about this new book, Tripping on Utopia, which tells the story of how Mead and her close circle launched a movement to expand human consciousness, decades before the counterculture of the 1960s popularized, and ultimately stigmatized, psychedelic drugs. Mead and Gregory Bateson–her collaborator and one-time husband–are at the center of a story that includes the WWII-era Office of Strategic Services, a shady cast of CIA agents and operatives, Beat poets, and the pioneers of the Information Age. 

Psychedelics are having a renaissance, with federal regulators poised to legalize their use – Breen’s book is an engrossing history that explores the roots of that movement and how it influenced and collided with the U.S. national security establishment.  Books, movies, and other points of interest discussed in this conversation include: Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science by Benjamin Breen Tripped: Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age by Norman Ohler MKUltra The intelligence community’s research on “truth drugs” The Manchurian Candidate The Good Shepherd Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control by Stephen Kinzer The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death by Deborah Blum “Operation Delirium” by Raffi Khatchadourian in The New Yorker