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PORTSIDE CULTURE

TIMOTHY LEARY IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS: ON BENJAMIN
BREEN’S “TRIPPING ON UTOPIA”  
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Kim Adams
February 21, 2024
Los Angeles Review of Books
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_ This book's point, writes reviewer Adams, "is to sketch an
alternate history of psychedelic drugs before their adoption by the
counterculture." _

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_Tripping on Utopia
Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic
Science_
Benjamin Breen
Grand Central Publishing
ISBN-13: 9781538722374

IN AUGUST 2005, the Seattle newspaper _The Stranger _ran a story
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about a marching band called the Infernal Noise Brigade. Formed to
protest the ills of globalization_, _the group used sound “to break
police lines” at the 1999 World Trade Organization Conference, and
then at other protests and public events, with the “noise” taking
the form of bass drums, snares, vocalists on megaphones, horns,
cymbals, and an iPod rigged to speakers on a makeshift marching
harness. The band had a “history of freaky shit,” according to the
journalist Christopher Frizzelle. One year, on New Year’s Eve, the
musicians donned “HAZMAT suits, dropp[ed] acid, and climb[ed] into
the back of a Ryder truck.” A young artist riding with the band
recalled: “The truck stops at, like, Spring and Western, and we can
hear the driver saying, ‘No, there’s nothing in the back. You can
search it.’ There’s probably like 25 people in the back.” She
continued: “So the door goes up and there’s at least 15 police in
cars, on horseback, on bikes, and on foot, looking at us, the 25
people in HAZMAT suits, with musical instruments attached to us, on
acid …”
The scene conjures up the performative power of police and
protest—the rituals of surveillance and resistance—that have long
shaped politics and art in American cities. The brigade’s “freaky
shit” was constructed from costumes, sound, and surprise appearances
in suspicious vehicles, and its aim was to provoke. But why were they
on LSD?

In Benjamin Breen’s new book _Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the
Cold War and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science_, psychedelics
belong to government-funded sober science, not renegade art. If the
scientists at the center of the story, Margaret Mead and Gregory
Bateson, had achieved their initial research aims, LSD would have gone
mainstream. It would not have become cool enough to fuel the Infernal
Noise Brigade’s hazmat trip. The point of Breen’s book is to
sketch an alternate history of psychedelic drugs before their adoption
by the counterculture.

Prior to World War II, prominent American anthropologists and
physicians, writes Breen, saw LSD-25 as a powerful new research
chemical produced by the Sandoz corporation. In an era when science
was widely embraced as an engine for positive social change,
psychedelics were a new class of wonder drugs much like antibiotics
and synthetic hormones. Anthropologists studied the peyote rituals of
the Omaha people of Nebraska and the psilocybin mushrooms used by
Mazatec healers in Oaxaca, Mexico. Physicians tested LSD as a
treatment for mental illness alongside early antipsychotic medications
like chlorpromazine. And, perhaps more surprising, some of these
researchers used mind-altering medications to concoct cybernetic
theories of the programmable brain.

The timing of Breen’s book is no accident—psychedelic therapy is
now in its second heyday. It is worth noting that MDMA and psilocybin
have been classified as “breakthrough therapies” in the United
States for post-traumatic stress disorder and treatment-resistant
depression, per a 2020 review paper
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of Psychiatry, _which found research on LSD and ayahuasca to be
“preliminary, although promising.” And just three years later, the
“psychedelic renaissance”
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December 2023 issue of _Drug Discovery Today _included over 350
registered clinical trials of psychedelic substances for psychiatric
disorders, with at least two companies seeking “regulatory approval
of psilocybin for mood disorders.” Acid could have been like Prozac.
Or more proximately, Valium (in which case, as the reader might guess,
the Infernal Noise Brigade would not have been on LSD!).

The typical midcentury psychedelic therapy patient, according to
Breen, was “female, middle aged, white, and haunted by grief or
trauma but not diagnosable with a psychiatric disorder—a
‘neurotic,’ in the terminology of the age.” Imagine, instead of
the Grateful Dead or the Infernal Noise Brigade, a friend of your
mother’s—overdressed, undersexed, anxiously waiting for her
husband to come home—as the iconic drug user of modern psychedelia.
One of the most prominent supporters of LSD in the mid-20th century
was Clare Boothe Luce, the conservative writer, ambassador, and wife
of media magnate Henry Luce. Her signature style was staid: pearls,
pumps, and pillbox hats. Not long after William S. Burroughs turned up
on Timothy Leary’s doorstep in September 1961 to be a guinea pig in
the Harvard Psilocybin Project, Burroughs grew convinced that “The
money comes from Madame Luce and other dubious quarters.” For “a
radical critic of American society and culture” like Burroughs,
Breen writes, “the Luces represented the intrusion of big money and
Cold War politics into Leary’s world.” But _Tripping on Utopia_
suggests that financial and political pressures were a point of origin
for psychedelic science, not a latter-day intrusion.

In 1953, the US Central Intelligence Agency funneled $85,000 through
the Macy Foundation to fund Harold Abramson’s “research on the
effects of LSD on snails, Siamese fighting fish, and his human
psychiatric patients—not to mention himself.” Abramson was an
allergist who had consulted with the US Army on ways to deploy
chemical weapons before turning his attention to “psychochemical
warfare.” Along with Mead and Bateson, he played a key role in the
Macy conferences on cybernetics (a precursor to modern neuroscience
and computing). The Macy conferences pushed psychedelic research away
from salvage anthropology and into interdisciplinary medical science.
The grant Abramson received would be a little less than a million
dollars today, much larger than most humanists can expect to see in
their careers, but hardly enough to run a reasonable clinical trial.
For comparison, the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation gave $2.4
million dollars [[link removed]] to the
Greater Los Angeles VA in 2022 to support one “randomized,
double-blind, placebo-controlled, single-site phase II clinical
trial” of MDMA-assisted therapy for 40 patients with severe PTSD.
Abramson’s woozy snails and “weekly LSD-laced dinner parties at
his palatial home on Long Island” suggest that a rather different
research methodology from that of sober medical science was in play.
Indeed, the snails and parties, according to Breen, had more to do
with Cold War espionage than academic medicine.

Abramson’s research was part of the infamous MKULTRA Project, a
secret CIA program that tested drugs on civilians without informed
consent, as revealed by congressional inquiry in 1977. It funded
questionable laboratory research alongside “real world” testing of
cannabis and LSD on unsuspecting strangers. For “Operation Midnight
Climax” in San Francisco, Bureau of Narcotics officer and CIA
consultant George Hunter White “recruited at least one sex worker to
help him lure ‘johns’ to the 255 Chestnut Street apartment, where
they were surreptitiously dosed with LSD through spiked drinks or
cigarettes, then recorded.” White’s decadent apartments equipped
with two-way mirrors, microphones, and East Asian antiques laced
counterculture aesthetics with government aims. In the words of an
internal report cited by Breen, MKULTRA sought “biochemical controls
of human behavior.” The geopolitical potential of this “profoundly
ambitious” effort to learn how to alter human minds reflected
Mead’s “long-standing dream of a science of expanded consciousness
that would reshape human society.” The CIA’s flagrant violation of
research ethics was not a perversion of psychedelic science, as
Burroughs feared, but rather part of the original utopian scheme.

While the book jacket suggests that the story of psychedelic science
revolves around the “star-crossed lovers” Mead and Bateson, it is
actually Mead’s love affair with a vision of “Science” as
abstract and eternal that centers the book. _Tripping on Utopia_ is a
tapestry of brightly colored minor characters, anecdotes, and chapter
titles—the latter including “Nembutal and Siamese Fighting
Fish,” “Carl Sagan at the Dolphin Lab,” and “The Telephone at
the End of the World”—that evoke the New Journalism of the
counterculture that came after, from Tom Wolfe’s _Electric Kool-Aid
Acid Test _(1968) to Hunter S. Thompson’s _Fear and Loathing in Las
Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream _(1971).
There are scenes straight out of a James Bond movie, from the US
Office of Strategic Services chief of research consulting a hypnotist
on “weaponized altered states” to a secret laboratory in the
Virgin Islands where the man who invented the isolation tank tried to
teach dolphins to speak English. Ian Fleming himself makes a cameo
appearance. Breen doesn’t actually tell the most salacious version
of the dolphin lab story,
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which involves an untrained researcher cohabiting with a dolphin for
three months in 1965, which became a 1978 story about interspecies sex
in _Hustler_. Where other scholars have focused on the human-machinic
assemblage of Norbert Wiener’s failed anti-aircraft predictor
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global culture into the Borgesian filing cabinets
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Breen’s rendition of cybernetics is Gregory Bateson in a Morale
Operations hut in Southeast Asia, in the aftermath of the US nuclear
attack on Hiroshima, typing a memo that predicted the Cold War to
come.

Breen traces the CIA’s drug testing programs through the Macy
conferences to the applied anthropology of the Office of Strategic
Services. In the process, he clears up something that has puzzled me
for years: the Cerebral Inhibition meeting. The first of the
cybernetics conferences, according to Steve Heims,
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was “called Cerebral Inhibition to indicate an emphasis on
neurophysiology.” But why inhibition? According to Bateson, the
title was deliberately vague; “[c]erebral inhibition” was “a
respectable word for hypnosis.” Trance was a long-standing interest
of the Boas school of cultural anthropology in which Mead trained,
which helps explain the connection between cybernetics and chemically
altered states. One could look to the work of scholars Emily Ogden,
Ann Braude, and Jeffrey Sconce to trace a deeper history of trance and
social movements, from 19th-century spiritualism, mesmerism, and
phrenology to the technophilic mid-20th century. In the context of the
United States’ long romance with “Science,” psychedelic
cybernetics is another manifestation of the deeply American impulse to
change the world by altering one’s own mind.

The idea that gets us from “cerebral inhibition” to George Hunter
White’s “pad” where the CIA sponsored “‘real-world’
testing of psychedelic drugs” is a bit of science fiction. If human
consciousness was a pattern of feedback loops, sensory inputs, and
biochemical outputs, then it resembled a computer that could be
programmed, or reprogrammed by one’s enemies. The dangers were
obvious—and terrifying. The “glaze-eyed confession” of Hungarian
dissident József Mindszenty in a 1949 show trial seemed to prove that
mind control drugs were already in use on the other side of the Iron
Curtain. If the Soviets were brainwashing internal enemies, chemically
induced altered consciousness looked less like a psychiatric cure and
more like an atomic bomb. Breen’s account aligns the two-way mirrors
of Operation Midnight Climax with the two-way mirrors of the Mental
Research Institute, where Bateson and his colleagues developed the
“double bind” theory of schizophrenia in which “a paradoxical
communication from an authority figure demands contradictory
responses: ‘I cannot survive if I do not obey and to obey would be
to die.’” One might say that the existential threats of the Cold
War put psychedelic science in a double bind that produced the
schizophrenia of the 1960s, where the utopian Esalen Institute could
coexist with the dystopian MKULTRA, but that would be a generous
reading.

A less generous reading would blame Timothy Leary. Breen’s basic
claim in this book is that the truly wild era of psychedelic
experimentation was not the 1960s but the 1930s, as he asserts in the
introduction: “Timothy Leary and the Baby Boomers did not usher in
the first psychedelic era. They _ended _it.” Leary, in particular,
comes off as awful: alcoholic, megalomaniacal, delusional. He
announced in 1966 that LSD had turned Allen Ginsberg straight. Seven
years earlier, he showed up at Harvard University with a badly healed
broken nose from a drunken brawl with his suicidal wife, who he had
pushed over the edge in 1955 by blaming her for his extramarital
affair. Ensconced in academic privilege, he founded a research program
based on the unacknowledged work of an entire field of anthropology.
Excluding female scholars, seducing students, and violating academic
integrity were the hallmarks of the Harvard Psilocybin Project, which
Breen depicts as “inherently elitist” in its aim of “turning
on” the kinds of people dubbed “key opinion leaders” by our
tech-startup world today—artists, scientists, and politicians from
Mead and Bateson to Dizzy Gillespie and John F. Kennedy. A prominent
Mexican psychoanalyst who tripped with Leary in Mexico City in 1960
called the self-appointed psychedelic prophet a vampire: “He wants
to suck my blood,” the alienist announced at the tail end of the
trip. “I am going to kill him.” In Breen’s telling, Leary
instead sucked the revolutionary potential out of psychedelic science.

The final section of _Tripping on Utopia _is called “The Noise” in
reference to a “religious outbreak” Mead studied on the island of
Manus, New Guinea, “when all the old things had been thrown into the
sea.” Mead describes “The Noise”
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“mystical cult” replete “with its full and familiar
paraphernalia of prophecy and fulfillment, apocalyptic hopes, a utopia
to be immediately established on earth, accompanied by seizures and
quakings.” When the science of mind expansion fractured under the
weight of 1968—student protests, anti-war demonstrations, decolonial
and civil rights actions in the aftermath of the Summer of Love—Mead
backed away from utopian chemistry and Bateson prophesied global
climate change. In Mead’s estimation (and seemingly Breen’s), the
adoption of psychopharmaceuticals by the counterculture was a
disaster: “Psychedelic researchers had sought a shortcut to true
cultural change, and it had backfired.” So much for the scientists.
But what about the hippies? Were chemically induced altered states a
necessary precondition for the sweeping cultural changes that took
place in the mid-20th century? Or were they a distraction, a party
drug, a plaything of the elite, a shortcut to solipsism? Was LSD the
signal or the Noise?

The future so eagerly pursued by the first generation of psychedelic
researchers—now pursued by well-funded research institutes at UC
Berkeley and Johns Hopkins University—would have precluded the
“freaky” cultural mythology we have assembled around acid trips
and other chemically altered states of consciousness, and perhaps, as
Breen suggests, prevented the war on drugs. The global anti-drug
campaign inaugurated by Nixon caused untold suffering to the United
States’ most vulnerable populations, and we would certainly be
better off without it. But is personalized medical mind expansion
really the utopia we want?

The Infernal Noise Brigade held its own funeral
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in a gravel lot near Boeing Field. The crowd of mourners got “their
suits and dresses dirty, drinking whiskey […] rolling cigarettes,
smoking joints, chewing chocolates packed with mushrooms” while
“[s]everal guys with power tools and metal blocks were showering the
crowd with sparks.” A coffin borne through the crowd was doused in
kerosene and set aflame. Mead thought that modern Americans lacked the
kind of social structures used by other cultures to turn hallucinatory
agents into tools of meaningful transformation. The stagecraft of the
Infernal Noise Brigade suggests otherwise. From 1968 on, Americans
have developed a cultural mythology around altered states in which the
practices of pleasure matter to the project of communal liberation. I
would wager that the psilocybin, cannabis, nicotine, and even alcohol
served the same function as the kerosene: accelerants in the drama of
political change.

 

Kim Adams is a postdoctoral fellow at the PennState Humanities
Institute, where she studies critical medical humanities. She co-hosts
the podcast _High Theory_ and is writing a book about electricity and
the body, tentatively titled _Building the Body Electric._

* Science
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* psychedelics
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* LSD
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* Medicine
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* the Cold War
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* the counterculture
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