Read Part One of this post here!
Benjamin Breen’s meticulously researched book Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Meade, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science adds another layer to the story, examining the social history of LSD through the utopian goals of famed social anthropologist Margret Meade and her fellow travelers. Most prominent of these is Mead’s third husband Gregory Bateson, a serious and tweedy scion of British scientific royalty, a family that for generations had been peers and pals with the Darwins and the Huxleys. Gregory’s father William Bateson was a biologist with a seat on the board of the British Museum and the distinction of being the first to coin the term “genetics”; Bateson fils worked on a secret Sri Lankan psychological warfare project with a young OSS field operative named Julia Child and later gave Alan Ginsberg his first controlled therapeutic experience with LSD.
Bateson and Meade shared an interest in the role of trance states and altered consciousness in so-called “primitive” societies that led to research on hypnotism and psychoactive drugs, and a queer sort of partnership with postwar military intelligence and their investigations into psychological warfare and interrogation. Mead and Bateson were members of the first wave of psychedelic researchers, a tight if incestuous circle of intellectuals, academics, and physicians who went about their work quietly and scientifically. But by the 1960s the LSD genie had made its way out of the bottle.
First-wave researchers strongly opposed the second wave of LSD proselytizers and publicists, most notably a widowed and half-deaf former personality-test administrator turned professor with a wandering eye, a taste for booze, an unfinished book and a stalled career. Timothy Leary was late to LSD, and never particularly scientific about it. To paraphrase one of the few female acolytes ever allowed into Leary’s tripping boys club, a bunch of beaded and barefooted middle-aged Harvard professors cross-legged in a yurt were not the scientific ambassadors that psychedelics needed at that historic moment. If anything, the shortcut to enlightenment promised by Leary and his contemporary, L. Ron Hubbard, led to a cultural backlash.
Leary comes off poorly in both Breen’s and Ohler’s accounts—dosing his students, throwing raucous house parties with illicit acid bought in Harvard Square, confusing his science with spiritualty and his ego with everything. Leary brought the power of this new drug to the public’s attention, then failed to represent seriously its unexplored medical potential. Breen deftly describes a public debate on the merits of psychedelics held at MIT in May of 1967, a moment when the press was linking a single dose of LSD to “retardation” and “worse deformities than Thalidomide” and a federal prohibition was on the table. On one side was Jerome Lettvin, a soft-spoken neuroscientist trained by first-wave psychedelics researchers. On the other was Leary, barefooted and beaded and lit by his own trippy multicolored lightshow. Lettvin cautioned that “utopia cannot be found in a chemical” but argued that psychedelics had an important unstudied value to humanity and science and should not be made illegal; Leary countered that “the real goal of the scientist is to flip out.” Soon afterwards the drug was banned, Schedule 1.
Both books plow their well-researched fields while popping in a few fresh details: Ohler, for instance, with a first-person visit to the oddly defensive staff of the Sandoz archive, Breen with several fascinating burrowed-away CIA-backed initiatives, including a shockingly misguided attempt to use LSD to communicate with dolphins. The effort did not end well for any of the mammals involved.
Two other new books take aim at the forces behind the public’s experience of intoxicants. Amitav Ghosh’s Smoke and Ashes is a revelatory journey through identity and colonialism, power and class, appetite and addiction in all forms. The subject is opium, as a stuff and also as a vehicle for examining everything caught up in the smoke of that ancient narcotic from teacups to empires—including, the author discovers, his own family history and sense of identity. The dried latex of the Papaver somniferum flower was once medicinally important as a painkiller and paregoric (basically, a constipating agent—critical at a time when unchecked diarrhea could lead to death by dehydration). While the poppy itself is now Schedule 1, we continue to live in a world defined by its pharmacopeial cousins. Ghosh is generous with his acknowledgement of opiates’ perennial attraction: they bring, if not pleasure, then a release from the pain of being.
Ghosh remembers his own first taste of a pharmaceutical opiate when a child, awakening after surgery, as “euphoria,” a Proustian moment that dovetails neatly with George Fisher’s dense thesis on the historical social attitudes and legal status of various intoxicants from booze to hashish. Beware Euphoria: The Moral Roots and Racial Myths of America's War on Drugs is thick with historical documentation, and readers like me will delight in flipping through the pages to discover, for example, the eighteenth-century moralizing British allegories of naughty “Gin Lane” (a place of ruin, danger, and bestiality) and proper “Beer Street” (a bustling byway of industry, health, and wealth). It’s no secret that laws around intoxication have forever served as a fig leaf for prosecution and harassment of minority groups targeted by race, class, or ethnicity. Beware Euphoria additionally traces American prohibitions back to ascetic Christian attitudes toward sex and pleasure. The result is a surprisingly nuanced take on our relationship with intoxication.
In recent years there has been some relenting in experimentation with LSD for relieving mental illness: in March the FDA granted an LSD formulation “Breakthrough Status” after demonstrating significant potential for treating generalized anxiety in early-stage clinical trials. If the history of LSD offers any lesson though, it’s that there are no silver bullets in medicine or shortcuts to enlightenment. If we want to avoid repeating the mistakes of our past, a little intellectual neuroplasticity wouldn’t hurt.
Charles Graeber is a journalist and the author of The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder and The Breakthrough: Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer. He has received an Overseas Press Club Award for Outstanding International Journalism and a New York Press Club Prize for reportage.
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Excellent. Both full and compact.