One evening in September of 1957, viewers across America could turn on their television sets and tune in to a CBS broadcast during which a young woman dropped acid. She sat next to a man in a suit: Sidney Cohen, the researcher who had given her the LSD. The woman wore lipstick and nail polish, and her eyes were shining. “I wish I could talk in Technicolor,” she said. And, at another point, “I can see the molecules. I . . . I’m part of it. Can’t you see it?” “I’m trying,” Cohen replied.
Were some families maybe—oh, I don’t know—eating meat loaf on TV trays as they watched this nice lady undergo her mind-bending, molecule-revealing journey through inner space? Did they switch to “Father Knows Best” or “The Perry Como Show” afterward? One of the feats that the historian Benjamin Breen pulls off in his lively and engrossing new book, “Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science” (Grand Central), is to make a cultural moment like the anonymous woman’s televised trip seem less incongruous, if no less fascinating.
In Breen’s telling, the buttoned-down nineteen-fifties, not the freewheeling nineteen-sixties, brought together the ingredients, some of them toxic, for the first large-scale cultural experiment with consciousness-expanding substances. The psychedelic flowering of the sixties has, it turns out, a prequel—a rich and partly forgotten chapter before the hippie movement, before the shamanistic preening and posturing of Timothy Leary, and before the war on drugs shut all that down. This earlier history encompasses not only the now notorious C.I.A. research into mind-altering drugs but also a lighter, brighter, more public dimension of better living through chemistry, buoyed by postwar scientific optimism and public reverence for expertise. “Timothy Leary and the Baby Boomers did not usher in the first psychedelic era,” Breen writes. “They ended it.”
So the era we’re living in now is not the first in which LSD and other psychedelics were poised to enter the mainstream. In the twenty-twenties, psychedelics sit comfortably within politely au-courant circles of wellness culture, startup capitalism, and clinical research. Some Gen X-ers are as likely to try ayahuasca for a midlife crisis, or sub out their Lexapro for microdoses of LSD, as they might once have been to troop into the woods behind campus the day after finals with a few friends and a freezer bag full of shrivelled mushrooms. A number of recent studies have shown that psychedelics hold promise for treating depression, easing end-of-life anxiety, and helping people cope with grief. The best-selling 2018 book about this new science and its ramifications, “How to Change Your Mind,” by Michael Pollan, has been so influential in piquing hopes for hallucinogens that scientific papers have identified what they call the Pollan Effect. (It describes the high expectations that some subjects bring to psychedelic studies, which can potentially influence how they report their experiences.) In 2019, Denver became the first U.S. city to decriminalize the use of psilocybin, the psychoactive compound in hallucinogenic mushrooms, and in 2020 Oregon became the first state to legalize it for use in therapy. Voters in several other localities, from Santa Cruz to Detroit to Washington, D.C., have since approved similar initiatives. This year, the F.D.A. will consider approving MDMA, the drug many of us know in its street form as Ecstasy (and may still associate with raves), for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. Even big pharmaceutical companies are looking to get in on the action.
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