UCSC’s Benjamin Breen illuminates history of psychedelics before the boomers began tripping

In the cultural imagination, the history of LSD begins with “Bicycle Day.” That’s the date — April 19, 1943 — when Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann ingested a tiny amount of a chemical compound he had synthesized some years earlier, and, soon after, experienced the first “acid trip” while riding his bicycle through the streets of Basel, Switzerland. 

 But then, at least in the popular narrative, the story leapfrogs nearly 20 years, to 1961 when renegade Harvard University professors Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert began experimenting with the drug on themselves, leading to their famous dismissal from Harvard. Following in short order, of course, were “Yellow Submarine” and Jimi Hendrix and the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, etc. 

That’s all good and well, but that story elides a giant swath of post-war psychedelic history, as if LSD had been forgotten and abandoned on some shelf during the sleepy, conformist Truman and Eisenhower years. 

With psychedelics now undergoing a broad cultural reassessment as a tool for therapeutic use, UC Santa Cruz associate professor of history Benjamin Breen is filling in the colors on a crucial period in psychedelic history with his new book, “Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science” (Grand Central Publishing). Breen comes to Bookshop Santa Cruz on Jan. 23 to talk about the new book and the history it unfolds.

I caught up with Breen shortly after he had sat for another interview, from NPR’s famed “Fresh Air” host Terry Gross (he was told that interview would air Jan. 16, the date of the book’s official publication). He told me that the history of psychedelic research in “Tripping on Utopia” pays little heed to Albert Hofmann’s fabled bicycle ride.

“LSD is not the only psychedelic,” he said. “There’s many older ones that have been used for thousands of years. So what I was interested in zeroing in on is the time when Western medicine and when scientists first begin experimenting with and exploring the psychedelic state.”

Of course, psychoactive agents such as peyote and psilocybin have been part of the human experience for centuries, used widely in ritualistic and religious contexts in cultures around the world. The “accidental” discovery of LSD only gave these substances a new relevance after World War II. But the roots of the modern viewpoint on psychedelics — that they are powerful, potentially life-changing tools in the fight against many of humanity’s most crippling psychological ills — can be traced to points much earlier than Bicycle Day.

“This is such an interesting period in the ’30s and ’40s,” Breen said. “And on into the ’50s, people didn’t really know what to make of these substances. Scientists — some of them — are very interested in their potential. Others are afraid of them. Others think of them potentially as weapons. And so there’s like this huge range before we start to actually consolidate around the current consensus.”

Breen’s book focuses on two important figures in the early days of modern psychedelic thought. (The term “psychedelic” itself wasn’t coined until 1957, so many of the early pioneers of its study wouldn’t have even recognized the word.) Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist whose work “Coming of Age in Samoa” (1928) was the most widely read anthropological work in the world for decades and made her an internationally famous figure. (Coincidentally, Mead’s groundbreaking book just this year enters the public domain.)

Gregory Bateson was a British anthropologist and intellectual whose ideas led to new ways of thinking about psychology and consciousness after World War II, and was a primary influence on Stewart Brand’s “Whole Earth Catalog” and the West Coast-based counterculture. He was also on the faculty at UC Santa Cruz and even served for a few years on the University of California board of regents.

While Bateson’s renown was mostly within academic and intellectual circles, Mead’s work made her into a more mainstream personality and familiar face on the lecture circuit and even late-night talk shows. Long before all that, however, in 1936, Mead and Bateson were married and pursued their interests in cultural anthropology together, most famously in the highlands of Bali. During the years of their marriage — they divorced in 1950 — Mead and Bateson also were exploring what Breen calls in his book “the science of consciousness expansion.”

“They were studying hypnosis, meditation, trance states,” he said. “But Margaret Mead also did fieldwork at a reservation, the Omaha reservation, in 1930, where she studied the use of peyote as part of the Native American church. She was interested in all of it.”

The book also traces how the couple explored many of the earliest experiments with LSD, in the 1950s, long before Leary. The baby boomer narrative, in fact, squarely places psychedelics on one side of the generation-gap divide, but the story of LSD in the ’50s comes without that cultural overlay, putting acid in the hands of people like movie star Cary Grant and Republican congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce. 

“This is one of the things I liked the most about researching this stuff,” said Breen. “It was before people started forming assumptions about these substances. There was all these interesting people who got really into it, who didn’t have any sense that this was a countercultural thing. Clare Boothe Luce, for example, was very, very well-connected. She was a playwright on Broadway. She was a close friend of Richard Nixon. And she was actually one of the most ardent participants in psychedelic therapy in the 1950s. She loved LSD. She encouraged her friends to try it. She credited it with helping her come to terms with the midlife crisis she had gone through. At one point, I was looking at one of her ‘trip reports,’ you know, a transcript of what she was saying while tripping on LSD. Richard Nixon called her once on the phone while she was tripping on LSD. And he wanted to talk about his upcoming run against JFK. The note just said that she would have to call him back.”

Like much engaging writing about history, Breen’s story of pre-1960s research into psychedelics poses several what-might-have-been questions. Chief among those in his mind was Mead’s thoughts about presenting herself as a kind of public guinea pig on the effects and potential of LSD in a clinical setting. 

“One of the most interesting things I found for the book,” he said, “is that in her archives, which are at the Library of Congress, there’s a memo entitled ‘LSD Memo from 1954.’ That’s her writing a note to herself about her intention to take LSD. And it’s really interesting, because if you read the letters she was sending others at the same time, she actually wanted to be a public guinea pig for it. She actually wanted people to study her publicly, to write it up and publish the results. And if she had done that, I think she [would] be today a Timothy Leary-like figure.

“This is 1954, way before Timothy Leary had done any drug at all, besides alcohol. And she’s one of the most famous scientists in the world at this time. She’s thinking about going public not only with her interest in LSD, but her intention to use it. And then she pulls back from that. So I nearly titled the book ‘The Future That Never Arrived,’ because you can see an alternate path for the whole history of psychedelic medicine, if that had happened.”

Benjamin Breen will discuss his book “Tripping on Utopia” on Tuesday, Jan. 23, at Bookshop Santa Cruz. The event is free and begins at 7 p.m.