LSD, the CIA & the History of Psychedelic Science

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode. And please tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too. In the first few weeks of 2024, the news has been filled with stories of psychedelics, with headlines like, "Your employer may be adding another health benefit to its roster: psychedelic drugs," and "11 best psychedelic stocks to buy in 2024."  Human use of psychedelics is nothing new of course. In spring of 2023, researchers announced that analysis of 3000 year old human hair, preserved in a burial site in Spain, showed that the person whose hair it was had partaken of psychoactive compounds on a regular basis prior to death. Use of the hallucinogenic cactus, peyote, by Indigenous people, in what is now the United States and Mexico, has been estimated to go back over 5000 years. In 1930, anthropologist Margaret Mead, who had recently earned her PhD under the mentorship of Franz Boas, travelled to Nebraska, with her second husband, fellow anthropologist, Reo Fortune, to study the Omaha tribe. In her research, Mead interrogated her subjects about their use of peyote, provoking somewhat ambivalent responses. Mead saw what she called the peyote cult, not as a holdover from the past, but rather as an attempt to create the future. It wouldn't be her last exposure to psychedelics. In 1938, a 32 year old chemist named Albert Hofman working at a Swiss Chemical Company, Sandoz accidentally developed a potent psychedelic, although he wouldn't realize it until years later. What Hofman was attempting to do was to create a drug that would stimulate respiration and circulation, and he was doing so by combining the active ingredients of the ergot fungus with a number of different organic molecules. On his 25th attempt, a combination of lysergic acid with diethylamide, a derivative of ammonia, he again failed to produce a stimulant. The lab animals who took it became excited, but the substance, "aroused no special interest in our pharmacologists and physicians. Testing was therefore discontinued." Five years later, in April, 1943, Hofman decided to synthesize experiment number 25 again. This time, despite his careful attempts to avoid exposure, he somehow managed to ingest a trace amount of LSD 25. It was enough to send him home feeling intoxicated, and experiencing,  "an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors." A few days later, he purposely ingested the substance, the first but certainly not the last self experimentation with LSD. During World War II, Mead's third husband, another fellow anthropologist, Gregory Bateson, had worked in the field with the Office of Strategic Services, OSS, on psychological warfare scenarios. The OSS folded at the end of the war, but in 1947, President Harry S. Truman signed into law the National Security Act of 1947, which established the Central Intelligence Agency, within the executive branch. At its founding, a third of the personnel within the CIA were veterans of the OSS. In April, 1953, Allen Dulles, then director of the CIA, approved a top secret project called MK Ultra. The goal of MK Ultra, which was spearheaded by chemist, Sidney Gottlieb, was to continue the wartime work of psychological warfare by studying, "the use of biological and chemical materials in altering human behavior," according to later testimony by CIA director Stansfield Turner. In other words, they wanted to create mind control drugs, operating under the belief that such practices were already in use by their Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean counterparts. Under Gottlieb's direction, MK Ultra experimented extensively with LSD. Although some people voluntarily participated in the research, many, including military personnel and CIA employees, were drugged without their consent, and in some cases without their knowledge. As Ido Hartogsohn described it, "Surprise acid trips became somewhat of an occupational hazard among CIA operatives." While CIA employees and active duty military personnel could be ordered to maintain secrecy, unwitting experimental subjects who were members of the public, could not. To ensure that the project remained hidden from public view, the CIA targeted people who would be too embarrassed to discuss their experiences. As one example, the CIA employed women escorts to lure men to agency safe houses that were set up as brothels. There, they would dose the men with LSD and record their reactions without their consent. The CIA funded much of the research on LSD that was happening around the United States. It's possible that some of the researchers didn't even know the true source of the funding. In the summer of 1954, Margaret Mead signed on as a consultant with physician Harold Abramson's LSD experiments, whose CIA funding was being funneled through the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation. Mead was excited by the drug's possibilities, writing, "I am tending to label any new good ideas as associated with the project, because I am watching my dreams, and my dreams are being theoretically fertile at the moment." Writer Ken Kesey voluntarily participated in the MK Ultra LSD program at the Veterans Hospital where he was a night aide. His work there along with his participation in the program inspired his novel, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." Kesey later threw LSD parties for his friends, that he called acid tests. Kesey wasn't the only member of the counterculture movement who took part in scientific experimentation with LSD. The first time poet Allen Ginsberg tried LSD was at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto in 1959, where he was invited to participate in an LSD therapy session by Gregory Bateson. Eventually, the MK Ultra researchers decided that LSD was too unpredictable to use in counter intelligence work. After the public finally learned about MK Ultra in late 1974, the US Senate held hearings. However, the destruction of much of the project's records in 1973 means that we may never know the full extent of the experimentation with LSD and other mind altering substances.

On October 27, 1970, President Richard Nixon signed into law the Controlled Substances Act, which regulated the manufacture, importation, possession, use, and distribution of certain substances. Under that act, LSD was classified as Schedule1, meaning it was deemed to have a high potential for abuse, with, "no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States." In recent years, there has been a growing movement to decriminalize the use of psychedelic substances, especially psilocybin, but as of this recording, the use of LSD is still fully criminalized everywhere in the United States. Joining me now is Dr. Benjamin Breen, Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of, "Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science."

Hi, Ben, thanks so much for joining me today.

Dr. Benjamin Breen  11:30  
Thank you for having me. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  11:31  
Yeah. So, I want to hear a little bit about how you started writing this book. Your earlier book is an earlier time period, and I think you said you're trained as early modern historian. So this is more recent, this is 20th century. So tell me a little bit about how you got interested in this and started writing this book.

Dr. Benjamin Breen  11:49  
Yes, I'm an historian of mostly the 17th and 18th centuries. So it's definitely a departure for me. "Tripping on Utopia" more or less begins in the early 30s, and ends up, the conclusion of the book is about 1980. So that was new. But thematically, I've been interested in the history of how we define and think about drugs for a long time. Part of that is because drugs are ever present in our culture. You know, I think a lot of people hearing this have had a drug this morning called coffee or tea. And those were once controversial substances, which were, in fact banned in some places. And so that was, that was the initial interest for my first book was how do we define what is sold by a drug dealer versus what's what's sold in a drugstore, or by a drug company? Like, what where did this term come about? Where do we start to draw the limits between illegal and legal drugs, between medicine and recreation, and also the sort of more nebulous cultural associations we have with different substances, you know, coffee, tobacco, and also psychedelics is something I looked at in my first book. But I couldn't find very much in in the archive. I found references to psilocybin mushrooms and peyote in early Spanish sources from colonial Mexico in particular. And I actually found a couple of references to ayahuasca, which is a compound that contains DMT, from Jesuits in 18th century Brazil. And so that always, as I was writing that first book, "The Age of Intoxication," I, that those were, like lingering questions I had. I was always wondering, like, "What's the larger history of psychedelics? Can I trace it further back in time, and also connect it to the present?" And that became really important to me recently, because psychedelics are, I think, really promising compounds in contemporary medicine. You know, I, I think a lot of my students, and a lot of people I know suffer from anxiety, PTSD, depression, and I do think, and this is just to lay my cards on the table for why I wrote this book, "Tripping on Utopia." I think there's a lot of promise in contemporary psychedelic medicine. So that was my initial interest. But also, it's an archive story. I am speaking to you from the campus of the University of California, Santa Cruz. And when I started teaching here, in early 2017, I started going to the archive that we have on campus. And to me by far the most interesting thing in it is the papers of Gregory Bateson, who was Margaret Mead's, third husband. He became an important person in my book. And as I started reading them, I saw a new angle on psychedelic history and specifically the the origins of psychedelic science in the 20th century. So it was it was combination of pre existing interest, and then just finding this interesting breadcrumb trail in the archive. That then led me to Margaret Mead as well.

Kelly Therese Pollock  14:44  
So let's talk some then about sources and archives. And you did some oral history for this book as well, which I assume you did not get to do when you were doing early modern history. So can you talk a little bit about that? Like where where did that take you the papers of Gregory Bateson, then where do you go? Like, how do you pull this story together?

Dr. Benjamin Breen  15:06  
So I spent a lot of time with Bateson's papers because they made no sense to me at first. I didn't know any of the names practically. And they're very eccentric. He was he was a fascinating man. He was also a deeply eccentric man. And then his papers reflect that. His archive is not particularly organized, although the Special Collections librarians here at UCSC have done an amazing job of organizing it after the fact. But you can see that in his own life, it was not organized. And he was I just thought he was a fascinating mind, a really compelling human being. And I became very interested in his relationship with Margaret Mead, because there were so many question marks around it, you know. They didn't stay married for that long, you know, they were they were together for between roughly 1933 and 1948. But the legacy of that relationship echoed throughout the rest of their lives. And I came to see it as a very important relationship, not just in the history of psychedelic science, but in the history of science in the 20th century. There's a utopian element in early 20th century science and medicine, this idea that technology and new scientific discoveries could prevent world war, because that's, of course, the pressing question of the 20th century is how to prevent world wars from happening, and awful things resulting from them. How do we find a pathway toward peace as a species? And that way of thinking, that science could help find an answer, in some ways, feels quaint today, I think, to a lot of people, and it feels kind of, like maybe a wrong turn. But I also found it kind of compelling, I found a lot of hope, actually, in their writings from this period. And so I went to mark just kind of following the thread of some of the things I was finding, here at UC Santa Cruz, I went to the Library of Congress in 2019, and looked through Margaret Mead's papers, which were just astonishingly organized, diametrically opposed from Bateson's. She was an incredibly organized person. And there was so much there, that it was almost like too much material. And then so that's, that's when I started doing oral history interviews, to try to contextualize things I was finding in her papers. And speaking to people who knew her, I spoke to a few dozen people in all, and it was just, it was a fascinating experience. Most of this was during the beginning of COVID, so people were at home, and wanted to talk to me. And I learned a great deal from those interviews. What came together was this. Basically, the argument of the book is not that Mead and Bateson were the most important people in psychedelic science. In fact, it wasn't actually a central aim of their life to be involved in it. But almost by accident, because they were so invested in this utopian project of science as a potential cure for the ills of the modern world, it was very foundational to the thinking of early psychedelic researchers. This utopian element in psychedelics that has been there for almost from the beginning, I think was was something that Mead and Bateson helped create, and so that was that ended up being the argument of the book as I started reading through their papers. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  18:07  
Can you talk some about the the type of anthropology that Mead and Bateson are doing, the places they're going and the way that leads them to be thinking broadly about this idea of Utopia, about this idea of higher consciousness kind of project? What what does that look like for them?

Dr. Benjamin Breen  18:27  
So there's, maybe you've read this book, it's a great book that I recommend to anyone listening to this called, "Gods of the Upper Air," by Charles King. And that's a really good introduction to the larger intellectual world of Mead in particular.  Charles King calls it the  Boasian anthropologist. They were all trained by Franz Boas at Columbia. So Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Zora Neale Hurston was trained by him as well, the writer, really fascinating group of people. And one of the things that brought them together was this idea that science should be applied and should be practical, it should have an effect on the world. Franz Boas himself has a sort of troubled legacy as a scientist. Early in his career, he was, you know, kind of invested in like a 19th century imperial scientific project of sort of what's been called salvage anthropology, the idea that as empires are invading every corner of the world, the scientist's job was to kind of preserve things, relics, and put them in a museum, sort of like Indiana Jones. And that had a lot of negative consequences that are now being kind of unraveled as we repatriate remains and artifacts that were basically stolen in the late 19th century. But the generation after Boas, the people he trained, had a really, I think, a different perspective, that's much more attuned to modern day sensibilities and that's, I think King in "Gods of the Upper Air," does a really good job of arguing that and showing how the idea of science as a tool for uncovering the common threads of human nature and for kind of gathering collective wisdom of humanity that will be useful for everyone. I think that was really the intellectual undercurrent of Margaret Mead's training and the people she was with in the 1920s and 30s. What's different is I think she, she is truly an applied scientist. She was not just making this argument in scientific papers, she was both very, very significant public intellectual writing best selling books, I think you can make an argument, very strong argument that she was the world's most famous female scientist in the 1940s and 50s. She may have even been probably, I think, I would say, the most well known American scientists in the mid 1950s, period. So she was virtually unique in terms of public outreach. And she was also very, very ambitious when it comes to being involved in government work, the war effort in World War II. Working with the State Department, she saw herself as someone who could really make an impact on the future course of humanity. And that had some positive elements and some negative elements. You know, she was she was almost absurdly ambitious. And that, I think, was an outgrowth of that Boasian world of cultural anthropology early on in the 20th century, but also was distinct to her. She was just a very unique personality.

Kelly Therese Pollock  21:22  
You talked earlier about optimism. And really, Mead has this kind of very optimistic view of at least long term where humans can get to, and it seems like Bateson has that as well until World War II, or maybe after still, but World War II  really seems to change him because he has to do the applied science in a even more troubling kind of way. Can you talk about that, and how that kind of then leads us you know, the work with the OSS, leads us to the kinds of stuff that the CIA is doing in the sort of darker version of that psychedelic science.

Dr. Benjamin Breen  21:59  
Yeah, I definitely see a real split between them during World War II, but even before that. One, I think, probably the most important thing to know about Gregory Bateson, who was born into the somewhat kind of intellectual upper crust of England in the very beginning of the 20th century, you know, his grandfather was a Cambridge don. He was the leader of a college at University of Cambridge. His father was a famous geneticist, but his two older brothers both died tragically. One brother, John Bateson, died in World War I, and his other older brother, Martin, actually committed suicide on the anniversary of John Bateson's death, four years later. So that's unbelievably traumatizing, and just horrific for a young person to go through. That happened to him in his teens. And so I think, from that point onward, he was shaped by that for the rest of his life. You know, he was a sufferer, we would say now of PTSD, for sure. You could I mean, it's impossible not to be if you go through that. But he always had, I think, a darker view of human nature, due to his family background. He was, for a time, I think, energized with the same utopian, if not optimism, that Mead had, the sense that science was doing something fundamental for the future of humanity, something which could prevent conflict. He worked on this idea for a long time, which he called schismogenesis, like the study of how conflict emerges out of interpersonal relationships and feedback loops. And he definitely in the 30s, was optimistic that by studying that you could help prevent it. And even after World War II, he's advocating for disarmament of nuclear weapons, the creation of a sort of a more elaborate version of the United Nations, which would prevent nationalism and wars. But at the same time, his work in World War II, which was in some ways, the continuation of the war that killed his brother, marked him for the rest of his life. He became deeply cynical, and I think rightfully cynical about the role of the US military in the early Cold War period, the war of psychological warfare warfare, the idea that it was no longer a battlefield, which would be fought only by soldiers. But now the battlefield was culture and society, that you through psychological manipulation in mass media or propaganda campaigns, future wars would be fought literally in the realm of psychology, like in people's actual lived experience of the world. And the reason he was aware of that is because he had helped participate in it, early in World War II. He was involved in the psychological warfare, work of the Office of Strategic Services, which was the predecessor to the CIA. And at the time, you know, he's fighting the Nazis, so it was justifiable. Then after World War II, Bateson comes to realize that it's not going away like that. That whole apparatus that he witnessed the creation of, continues, and it begins to be used in ways that he deeply disapproves of. And so Bateson becomes, I think, a very principled advocate against militarism, and against the psychological manipulation of both the Soviets and the United States in the early Cold War. But it leaves a very bad taste in his mouth. And I actually, I think that that was part of it. Not the only reason. But as part of the split between Mead and Bateson, and after World War II, was his disapproval, in his mind of the fact that she was continuing that collaboration with the military and with the US government.

Kelly Therese Pollock  25:29  
I wanted to talk a little bit about the way that social science and science are done in this time period. You know, we're talking now in the 21st century, when we've got like institutional review boards and ethics panels and everything for any kind of research you might want to do. But these early people with LSD, especially are experimenting on themselves. They're giving drugs to like their fish and their dolphins and random strangers and their friends who don't know they're getting drugs. So could you talk a little bit about that, and the way that all of this is wrapped up in they think they're doing you know, they're trying to achieve something for science. They don't see this as some nefarious project, but that's how we might look back on it.

Dr. Benjamin Breen  26:12  
Yeah, I've been thinking about this a great deal. It's changed a huge amount since the 40s, and 50s. That's just the nature of how we do scientific studies. One fascinating thing is that the origins of institutional review boards, and the whole idea of bioethics actually partly lies in the social world of psychedelic scientists. People who Margaret Mead knew quite well, were actually directly involved in the formation of bioethics as a field. So the people who were commenting on and laying the foundation for this new way of thinking of ethical scientific practice, were, in some degree, reacting to their own regrets about their participation in studies in the 50s, which did not have those ethical safeguards. People like Henry Beecher, or there's another scientist who did psychedelic research in the 50s, who worked with Beecher and who knew Margaret Mead, named Louis Lasagna, who was called before a congressional committee, I think, in the 1990s, about this, about ethical violations of science related to psychedelics and human experimentation in general. And his quote was, "It's not like we were Nazis." You know, so that generation lived through World War II, and they had seen there a very polarized world, you know, because the Nazis were, in fact doing absolutely awful, horrifying experiments with psychedelics and with other drugs, for instance, on concentration camp inmates, and also prisoners, specifically with mescaline. And that came to be known to the Americans and so they had this horrifyingly cruel world of scientific practice that they saw themselves as, as enemies of enacting an opposition to, but to a certain extent, that polarizing worldview of World War II, when it carried over to the Cold War, allowed a lot of ethical lapses by modern standards, because they thought they were fight, they're, they're still the good guys. And they were fighting this epic battle of good and evil. So a lot of what was done in psychedelic research in the 50s, was I can just say, by my standards, and by the standards, I think of most scientists today, unethical involved people who did not give consent. It involved mental patients, people in prisons and jails, enlisted members of the military who were not fully informed of what they were doing. And even just ordinary civilians, people off the street in certain MK Ultra studies were just literally basically kidnapped and brought to safehouse, and then given LSD without their without their knowledge. And so those, those were crimes, basically. But in the 1950s, it really was framed as a battle of good and evil and exceptions had to be made to certain ethical standards in their mind. So it's a very tangled story. And it's one that we have to look on with an awareness of the context of the period, but also one that I think we can learn important lessons from today, just to understand that psychedelic science has a really dark side to it. I said at the beginning of this talk, that I'm personally quite optimistic and hopeful about the future of psychedelics as a as a medicine. But that legacy is important for anyone interested in the subject to remember. And Margaret Mead, even though she wasn't directly involved in the worst of it, was kind of surprisingly involved in specific MK Ultra experiments, especially ones involving Harold Abramson, who, who she worked directly with, who was probably, I would say, among the most important participants in MK Ultra and in the 1950s psychedelic research in general. She worked directly with him on a study of LSD. You mentioned dolphins on LSD. Gregory Bateson was involved directly in that. He was the assistant director of a of the communications research institute in the Virgin Islands, which was run by John C. Lilly, who later became a famous writer on psychedelics. He was a physician and a very respected scientist at the time. But he did in fact end up giving LSD to his dolphins in 1964-65. Now Bateson was against it. He again took a principled stand and left the institute, but it's almost like his world kept intersecting in strange ways with psychedelic science even when he didn't want it to, because that was just, it completely blindsided him.

Kelly Therese Pollock  30:29  
So one person who did not experience LSD was Margaret Mead, who at one point says she's going to try it, and then for some reason, does not. Can you talk a little bit about that, like, do you think that would have made any difference, if she had? Why didn't she? 

Dr. Benjamin Breen  30:46  
Well, I should say, I don't know for sure if she did or didn't. It's unclear from the documentation. I suspect she did not, and that's partly from interviews I did with people who knew her. Two different people said that she told them, she had not used LSD. On the other hand, she was a very secretive person who was very good at keeping secrets. So I don't think it can be ruled out. She definitely says she intends to. That's in writing in her archive. She has a memo from 1954, where she directly says, "decided I would take the drug," in the memo. It's titled "LSD Memo." So that's pretty clear. I suspect and I actually think there's very solid evidence that the reason she decided not to do it was because she became more aware of the LSD research that studied it, it was what was called a truth drug at the time, or a drug in a psycho therapy framework, a drug that would surface repressed memories, or allow you to kind of speak publicly about things that you found difficult to talk about. And that's part of why LSD specifically, but other psychedelics were thought of as very promising in therapy in the 50s, and to a certain extent, it's still the case today, that they may have that use. The thing to understand about Margaret Mead in 1954, is that she was bisexual. And she had entered into a relationship with Rhoda Metraux, a female colleague, who she was in love with and who she lived with, actually, for two decades after that point. They were life partners, but it's 1954. And she's currently in 1954, being actually in the midst of an FBI investigation of her personal life. This is the McCarthy era. And she I think, became worried that if she was on LSD and said something that would reveal this secret about her life, it could end her career. I mean, it's not impossible to imagine that if that became public, her career would be over in the 50s. This is the world like I said, one of the world's most famous scientists, and homophobia was rampant in the 50s. It was it was very common story for government employees and others in the 1950s, to lose their livelihoods and in some cases, even go to jail for relationships with people of the same gender. So that was a real threat to Margaret Mead's life and livelihood that she had to take seriously. And she pulls out of this planned experiment where she would take LSD within a few months. And in fact, that coincides both both with the FBI investigating her and her decision to move in with Rhoda Metraux soon afterwards. So I don't think that's a coincidence.

Kelly Therese Pollock  33:26  
If I understand correctly, the LSD was never something that was sort of publicly available. But these researchers and scientist and maybe psychiatrists could get licensed to have it to use it. So what what happens then to make it a Schedule 1 drug, so that is currently not legally available.

Dr. Benjamin Breen  33:48  
So it's kind of unclear, like how much LSD specifically was available in the 50s, because I found a lot of, in some cases, direct letters sent to Sandoz, the company that makes LSD, where people who were even vaguely associated with a research study or with a medical doctor, were able to get it. So it wasn't quite like a drug, you would go to a pharmacy to get. You'd have to write to the manufacturer in Switzerland, and asked for sample doses. But it seemed fairly easy to get. You needed to know a doctor, but you could ask for a large amount, like 1000s of doses, and they were pretty ready to go with sending it to you, it seems. I've been kind of surprised by how easy it actually seems to get in the 50s. Likewise, mescaline was widely available. Peyote was widely available if you knew the right people. So one of the key things that happens is that LSD in particular in the late 1950s gets a lot of media attention. Cary Grant, the actor famously starts using LSD in a therapeutic context and gives a lot of interviews praising the drug, including in like magazines with readership in the 10s of millions. There's also people Like Clare Boothe Luce, who is a very well known playwright, also a member of Congress for a period of time and also married to Henry Luce, the founder of the Time Life media empire, who begins publicly speaking about her usage of psychedelics. So there's a lot of attention directed towards psychedelic substances, right around 1959, 1960. And at the same time, soon after that there's a rising perception that the youth generation and young people are, there's something wrong with them, basically. It's the beginning of the baby boomers rising to prominence. There's a lot of anxieties, you know, this is the era that's actually thought of as the age of anxiety by the people living through it. That was a term Margaret Mead actually wrote about in a widely read New York Times op ed in the late 50s. So this idea that there's kind of cold war anxiety and this emerging youth culture, and that also these substances, which some people think, are, are quite damaging to your mental health, you know, they're, they're, they're both coinciding at the same time. And then it actually takes quite a bit longer for them to actually be banned. But the beginnings of a backlash emerge right around 1960-1961, I think. The ban comes late. The ban is a sort of a staged ban that comes in different states at different times, and then federally in the late 60s. That's well after the era of Timothy Leary, and a lot of negative publicity around LSD and psilocybin in particular, that's associated with, you know, legitimate research improprieties and personal improprieties of Timothy Leary and his circle, but also, I think, a bit of a moral panic about young people. And that was very different thing. Cary Grant is not a baby boomer, right. He's a totally different generation. And Clare Boothe Luce, likewise is a was a Republican member of Congress. So there is a very different group of people taking psychedelics in the 50s, an older generation of people. Then as it moves into that 1960s generation that changes. However, there's also a, I think, a very compelling argument made by a historian named Ido Hartogsohn, that it's not really a cultural backlash, or at least not entirely. There's also legitimate scientific objections to the scientific work being done with psychedelics. So in the 60s, it becomes clear that a lot of the most outlandish and most utopian claims about the impact of psychedelics on mental health and on people's experience of the world had been overstated. You know, it's, it's there not like a magic bullet that fixes anxiety, or depression or PTSD. And so there's also a backlash just on the level of the science, which was, I think, legitimate. A lot of overstated claims were made. But of course, it goes way too far the other direction, at least, in my opinion. The decision to ban these drugs and schedule them as Schedule 1, lumping them together with heroin was a huge mistake. It had to do with the sort of Nixon era and the, you know, this anxiety about young people. And it set not just the field of psychedelic science back, but it actually I think, set back the entire field of pharma, psychopharmacology. The whole idea of banning this entire category of substances with really promising potential, simply because they're associated with, you know, behaviors that were outside the norm of American society, was was a was a real wrong turn in the history of medicine.

Kelly Therese Pollock  38:23  
So we're facing a different technological challenge today that you've written some about and that's AI, generative AI. I wonder if you could talk just a little bit, you've been writing about it in substack, about the ways we can use generative AI in history, history research.

Dr. Benjamin Breen  38:41  
Yeah, I'm, I'm really interested in this topic. I partly became interested in it because of the research for "Tripping on Utopia," actually, because, interestingly, the same group of scientists that Margaret Mead helped bring together which I call the Macy circle because they were centered on these conferences funded by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, this foundation that today mostly funds medical research, there was a there was a series of conferences called "The Problems of Consciousness Conferences," which brought together a lot of the leading psychedelic psychiatrists. The Macy Foundation also funded the first international conference on LSD in 1959. So it's very important in that story, but it's mostly famous today for the cybernetics conferences that that it also funded, which Margaret Mead was a central part of as well. And that's one of the points of origin of modern artificial intelligence research, actually. They didn't use the word artificial intelligence yet. They called it cybernetics. But it was very much the same idea of sentient or thinking machines and the implications of automation and the rise of computers. That's the beginning of the information age, in the early 1950s. And the people involved in these conferences were really the center of that story, people like Claude Shannon, John von Neumann, and actually, I would say, Margaret Mead was very central to that. So it got me interested in the history of AI. And I'm also just interested in experimentation with history. I think history is a is, in some ways, kind of a conservative discipline. But there's a lot of scope for thinking about the ways we can do history differently, different methodologies. Again, I think that's partly an influence from Mead and Bateson, because they were very experimental anthropologists. They adopted what was in their time, a very new technology, the film camera, like using motion picture film, as a research tool was very innovative in the 1930s. It was like a central part of what they did. So I think I've been interested, by the way they adopted emerging technologies in their time. And I think that, you know, it's part of our toolkit now, AI, or specifically, large language models that let you summarize or translate or analyze texts. You know, it's, it's a bane of our existence as teachers, because students do it, basically, you know, to cheat. However, there's a lot of interesting potential for other use of these tools, you know, to, to help with translation, to kind of be like almost like a feedback to get to get ideas to get bounce thoughts off of. And as they get new capabilities, I think rather than seeing them as, you know, again, polarized terms is like, evil technology, technology is what you make of it. That's one of the main lessons I got from researching this book, just like psychedelic drugs can be used as a weapon by a CIA doctor, or Soviet doctor, or they can be tools of personal insight. So too, AI tools can be both good and bad. It really depends on the ways they're deployed in a society. And it's important to actually pause and think thoughtfully about how we want to do that. But at the same time, it's also important not to just have a knee jerk rejection of them, in my opinion.

Kelly Therese Pollock  41:55  
I want to encourage everyone to read, "Tripping on Utopia," which includes people like Julia Child that we didn't even get to. So how can people get a copy of the book? 

Dr. Benjamin Breen  42:03  
It's coming out from Grand Central. It should be available in bookstores everywhere. You can find it online. And I would love to hear from people who read the book when it comes out. It's it's always a thrill to hear from readers and to talk to them. So please feel free to contact me. My website is BenjaminPBreen.com. And, yeah, I'd love to hear from people about the book.

Kelly Therese Pollock  42:26  
Well, Ben, thanks so much. This was it was a really fun, scary fun, depending on where I was in time, read, and I really appreciated speaking with you.

Dr. Benjamin Breen  42:35  
Thank you, Kelly. I appreciate it.

Teddy  42:57  
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app. You can find the sources used for this episode, and a full episode transcript @UnsungHistorypodcast.com. To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on twitter or instagram @Unsung__History, or on Facebook @UnsungHistorypodcast. To contact us with questions, corrections, praise, or episode suggestions, please email Kelly@UnsungHistorypodcast.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know. Bye!

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