Chatter: Margaret Mead, Psychedelics, and the CIA with Benjamin Breen

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 
  

Also check out: 

• Ben’s website 
• Ben’s Substack 
• Ben on Twitter