Tripping on Utopia usefully fills in a gap in the literature. The story of psychedelics, as it is often told, begins with LSD revealing itself to the unsuspecting Albert Hofmann in a Swiss lab, and continues with its dissemination into mainstream culture courtesy of pioneers like Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey. Then comes the Nixon-era backlash, propelled by horror stories about bad trips, which pushed the drug back to the margins. Finally, we get to the past five years or so, when a more relaxed cultural attitude to mind-altering substances has made scientific research on psychedelics and their potential medical and therapeutic applications possible again. Just as the ‘60s had Leary and Kesey, the ongoing “psychedelic renaissance,” as it has come to be known, has elevated a new generation of popularizers as varied as Michael Pollan and Joe Rogan.
But just as books like Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind (2018) are newly proclaiming the therapeutic possibilities of hallucinogens, other authors are revisiting the dark uses to which they were put in an earlier era. In the period between Hofmann’s 1943 eureka moment and the countercultural embrace of psychedelics, the CIA undertook its top-secret MKUltra project, under the auspices of which unsuspecting people were dosed with LSD to explore its utility for psychological warfare, brainwashing, and mind control, sometimes with tragic results. Different versions of this story have been told in Errol Morris’s 2017 Netflix docudrama Wormwood, about MKUltra victim Frank Olson; Stephen Kinzer’s 2019 biography Poisoner in Chief, about CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb; and Tom O’Neill’s 2019 book Chaos, which sensationally reconstructs the possible connections between MKUltra and the Manson murders in 1969.
The achievement of Benjamin Breen’s new book is to synthesize these disparate parts of the story — the hopeful and the horrifying — and to demonstrate a key difference between Mead’s and Bateson’s view of psychedelics and the view increasingly in vogue today: Whereas today’s popularizers tend to promote psychedelics as means of individual self-discovery and self-improvement, Breen’s subjects were mainly concerned with the collective predicament of humanity in the modern era. Their concern was that the acceleration of social change was prompting a retreat into rigid cultural norms instead of an expansion of the range of human possibilities. In Breen’s words, they hoped psychedelics could be part of “a new set of tools for reprogramming minds and societies stuck in self-destructive feedback loops.”