Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and a New History of Psychedelics in 20th-Century America

Throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, an international group of scientists brought together in large part by Margaret Mead and her third husband Gregory Bateson began to suspect that the therapeutic use of substances like mescaline and LSD could help push society away from feedback loops of aggression and toward peaceful, even utopian ends. The result was the emergence of a new science of consciousness expansion that focused not just on treating disease or addressing psychiatric symptoms, but on enlarging the limits of human potential itself. In the process, many of the researchers involved became entangled in the espionage and militarism of the Cold War. Their work revealed the transformative potential of twentieth-century pharmacology—and how it can (and does) go wrong. 

About the Speaker

Benjamin Breen is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz specializing in the history of science, medicine, globalization, and the impacts of technological change. and how it can (and does) go wrong.