LSD history: A new book documents Margaret Mead’s consideration of psychedelics.
11 months ago

LSD history: A new book documents Margaret Mead’s consideration of psychedelics.

Slate  

Margaret Mead was among the most famous scientists of the 20th century. Booth reminded her, she wrote, of “my earlier refusal to take Mescal, said I’d said it while we were going somewhere in a taxi, must have been early 40’s,” after which he explained “he HAD taken mescal in experiments in Germany, and thought he owed much of his insight to it.” With Booth, Mead thought more about LSD and “began to evelop idea of who should and shouldn’t take it.” And then came a friend of her daughter’s named Ralph Blum, who had participated in one of the earliest experiments with LSD ever conducted in the United States: a series of trials led by the psychiatrists Robert Hyde and Max Rinkel at Boston Psychopathic in 1949. Mead also brought along a powerful funder, John Eberhardt, the director of NIMH’s extramural research, who hovered in the background as an “interested observer.” Weltmann remembered it as an experiment organized by Mead, whom she found impressive but “too serious.” As for Mead, her notes described Weltmann’s trip this way: “Graceful dark little German Jewish girl … studying to be an opera singer … wonders if it is wrong to try to be a dead and gone culture … likes her job but feels that the people given shock aren’t really psychotic, talks to them when acting as assistant and feels contact with them … is concerned with keeping control, will keep it, brought up rigid German, her parents now know better, look what happened.” Abramson was not present. “Drugs, such as mescal or LSD,” could, she speculated at the end of New Lives for Old, which she wrote during the period of her involvement in Abramson’s psychedelic research, lead to the acceptance of “new patterns.” The Noise, Mead wrote, was just one part of a continuum of “conversion experiences”: others included the altered consciousness of the Balinese trance dancer, the alcoholic’s moment of clarity, and the experience “evoked by drugs.” All involved “the complete destruction of the past.” These moments of rupture would be the defining experiences of the 20th and 21st centuries. “Since Ruth Benedict died there is no one alive who had read everything that I have written … Since the break up of my marriage, far less of my life has been shared with one person … It has not been by my choice of concealment that anyone of you have been left in ignorance of some part of my life which would seem, I know, of great importance.” Instead, this concealment had been “only from the exigencies of the mid-twentieth century when each one of us—at least those of us who are my age—seems fated for a life which is no longer sharable.” Her daughter, Mary Catherine, wrote that her mother kept a great many secrets, and “she clearly believed that the keeping of these secrets was correct and responsible behavior, a precondition to her availability to do the work that she felt was important.” Margaret Mead took LSD seriously as a potential pathway for cultural evolution.

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