Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science
by
Benjamin Breen
Published 16 Jan 2024
This meteoric rise was due in part to the labors of a New York psychiatrist turned medical advertiser named Arthur Sackler. Along with his 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 being hailed by many—including Bateson’s colleagues at the Palo Alto VA—as a chemical cure for schizophrenia.
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Even as the eyes of the world turned to the cosmos, however, the seeds Mead had planted in helping to originate and plan the Macy “Problems of Consciousness” conference series—the first interdisciplinary scientific forum that featured extended discussion of psychedelic substances—were taking root. Not just Harold Abramson, but half a dozen other 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 named Carlo Henze wrote to Harold Abramson to suggest that Sandoz could sponsor a Macy Foundation conference devoted entirely to the potential of psychedelics for use in psychotherapy.