Mead’s most important source for information about psychedelics at this time was Dr. Harold Abramson, an allergist and expert in “psychosomatic” illnesses. Among other things, Abramson had shared with her the results of an LSD trial that resulted in what he called “loss of fear of homosexuality”: a woman racked by anxiety over her suspicion that she might be a lesbian had, under the drug, resolved her fears. Mead, who was in a committed, yearslong relationship with fellow anthropologist Rhoda Métraux by this time, absorbed this information with great interest. Perhaps LSD could speed up the rate at which global culture adapted to rapid change. Perhaps, as she wrote to herself in June 1954, the drug could be a “short cut” for pulling society “away from mysticism and escape.”
It is worth pausing on this. If Mead had publicly backed psychedelics in the mid-1950s, history would have changed. A case could be made that with Einstein’s death in 1955, Mead became the world’s best-known living scientist. In that year (by one measure) her name appeared in print more frequently than that of any other scientist alive at the time. Among dead ones, remarkably, she was within shooting distance of Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton. Even science-fiction novels were not free of her. In Robert Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy (1957), the book’s orphaned protagonist is mentored by a space anthropologist named “Doctor Margaret Mader” who teaches him how to navigate the cultural shifts he faces as he skips from ship to ship, planet to planet.
What drove Mead’s popularity was her ability to wed an urgent call to action—humanity needed to expand its “awareness,” its collective consciousness, in order to survive—with an implicit optimism. A young Carl Sagan was among Mead’s avid readers. As a student at the University of Chicago, he became fascinated with the ways her work “gave you a view of the arbitrariness of cultural mores, cultural systems.” Sagan was drawn to the “tremendous optimism” of “the idea that you weren’t jostled about by the winds of the world. That you could do something” to change the future. When an 18-year-old Sagan wrote his first piece of popular science writing, a radio script called “Ad Astra,” he dreamed of scoring an interview with Mead.
If a figure such as this had embraced psychedelics before they acquired their social stigma and legal restrictions—before the advent of tranquilizer drugs and antidepressants, before the triumph of a hypercapitalist global pharmaceutical industry—it is possible to imagine a very different history of drugs in the 20th century. In fact, it may have even led to a different world.