Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science
by Benjamin Breen · 16 Jan 2024 · 384pp · 118,573 words
two brothers, Raymond and Mortimer—who would later helm Purdue Pharma, the developer of Oxycontin—Sackler developed an innovative approach to selling anti-anxiety drugs: direct-to-physician marketing. Miltown, Librium, and Valium, not LSD, became the first breakthrough psychiatric drugs directly targeted at “normal” people. Meanwhile, a so-called major tranquilizer, chlorpromazine, was
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participants in that series were, by 1958, deeply engaged with psychedelic science. And the Macy Foundation was planning its first conference devoted entirely to LSD. Direct-to-physician marketing—the extraordinarily lucrative advertising strategy that the Sackler brothers were perfecting—did not go unnoticed by Sandoz Pharmaceuticals. In 1958, a vice president at Sandoz