Chatter: Margaret Mead, Psychedelics, and the CIA with Benjamin Breen

The Lawfare Podcast

The Lawfare Institute

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4.7 • 6.4K Ratings

🗓️ 14 March 2024

⏱️ 86 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If you’re listening to this podcast, chances are you’ve heard stories about the CIA’s experiments with drugs, particularly LSD, during the infamous MKUltra program. But you may not know that the characters involved in that dubious effort connect to one of the 20th Century’s most famous and revered scientists, the anthropologist Margaret Mead.

Shane Harris talked with historian Benjamin Breen about this new book, Tripping on Utopia, which tells the story of how Mead and her close circle launched a movement to expand human consciousness, decades before the counterculture of the 1960s popularized, and ultimately stigmatized, psychedelic drugs. Mead and Gregory Bateson--her collaborator and one-time husband--are at the center of a story that includes the WWII-era Office of Strategic Services, a shady cast of CIA agents and operatives, Beat poets, and the pioneers of the Information Age.

Psychedelics are having a renaissance, with federal regulators poised to legalize their use - Breen’s book is an engrossing history that explores the roots of that movement and how it influenced and collided with the U.S. national security establishment.

Books, movies, and other points of interest discussed in this conversation include:

Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science by Benjamin Breen
Tripped: Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age by Norman Ohler
MKUltra
The intelligence community’s research on “truth drugs”
The Manchurian Candidate
The Good Shepherd
Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control by Stephen Kinzer
The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson
Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death by Deborah Blum
“Operation Delirium” by Raffi Khatchadourian in The New Yorker

Also check out:

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Transcript

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0:08.0	become a material supporter of Lawfair at Patreon.com slash Lawfair. That's Patreon.com
0:16.4	slash Lawfair. Also check out Lawfair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, lawfare no bull, and the aftermath.
0:30.0	We would like to offer our heartfelt apologies.
0:34.1	It is very regretful. We are profoundly sorry.
0:36.5	If London Luton Airport breaks the environmental limits set out in its expansion
0:40.8	proposal, it won't mean an apology. It will mean further
0:43.9	expansion is stopped and these limits will be independently monitored and
0:47.6	legally enforceable. Find out more about the expansion of London Newton Airport,
0:51.8	the UK's most socially impactful airport.
0:54.6	Visit Lute and Rising.org.
0:56.8	UK slash grow.
0:58.4	That's Lute and Rising dot org.
1:00.4	UK slash grow.
1:10.0	This is Chatter. I'm Shane Harris. This week, historian Benjamin Breen on Margaret Mead, psychedelics, and the CIA.
1:17.0	An internal CIA history about the origins of the agency very early on says Mr Bateson wrote a memo to General Donovan
1:26.1	proposing the creation of an intelligence agency that would be specializing basically in
1:31.1	psychological warfare and which he says would be more important than the traditional military in the atomic era.
1:38.0	They had a real point when they saw this as a battle between good and evil science, you know?
1:43.6	Like I know that sounds so naive now in the aftermath of the Cold War and the 20th
1:47.8	century to see it in those terms, but it was a pretty stark moral choice.
	...

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