Benjamin Breen

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A bold and brilliant revisionist take on the history of psychedelics in the twentieth century, illuminating how a culture of experimental drugs shaped the Cold War and the birth of Silicon Valley.

"It was not the Baby Boomers who ushered in the first era of widespread drug experimentation. It was their parents." Far from the repressed traditionalists they are often painted as, the generation that survived the second World War emerged with a profoundly ambitious sense of social experimentation. In the '40s and '50s, transformative drugs rapidly entered mainstream culture, where they were not only legal, but openly celebrated.

American physician John C. Lilly infamously dosed dolphins (and himself) with LSD in a NASA-funded effort to teach dolphins to talk. A tripping Cary Grant mumbled into a Dictaphone about Hegel as astronaut John Glenn returned to Earth. At the center of this revolution were the pioneering anthropologists—and star-crossed lovers—Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. Convinced the world was headed toward certain disaster, Mead and Bateson made it their life’s mission to reshape humanity through a new science of consciousness expansion, but soon found themselves at odds with the government bodies who funded their work, whose intentions were less than pure. Mead and Bateson's partnership unlocks an untold chapter in the history of the twentieth century, linking drug researchers with CIA agents, outsider sexologists, and the founders of the Information Age.

As we follow Mead and Bateson’s fractured love affair from the malarial jungles of New Guinea to the temples of Bali, from the espionage of WWII to the scientific revolutions of the Cold War, a new origin story for psychedelic science emerges.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: What a complete clusterfuck the right wingnuts made of the 20th century. There were glimmers of a better, more open world that could have been...then the generals and religious nuts got hold of it, and choked it into the pale, selfish idiocy of the New Age.

What did not work for me was the sense that Mead and Bateson were ciphers...what about them made them worth setting at the center of a book, I do not know, because it felt like they were not there. The research, and its aims, are very interesting. The opponents to the use of this research are more carefully, and luckily damningly, limned than the people whose names are on the jacket.

Interesting story with a weird hollow at its core, yet still worth reading for the facts you are very likely not to have known before regarding the US attitudes towards psychedelic drugs and their theraputic uses. A story steeped in tragedy for cures and benefits lost.… (mehr)

In 1673, the days in which Britain is first starting to extend its influence to India, a young Brit named Thomas Bowrey encounters cannabis on the coast of India. His first thoughts are to commercialize the substance:

"Not long after he arrived in Machilipatnam, Thomas Bowrey began to won­der what it was the Machilitipatnamese were smoking. The bustling port city on India's Coromandel Coast felt fantastical to the young East India Company merchant. During the first days of his visit in 1673, Bowrey marveled at wonders like 'Venomous Serpents [which] danced' to the tune of 'a Musicianer, or rather Magician,' and 'all Sortes of fine Callicoes … curiously flowred.'

Above all, Bowrey was most fasci­nated by the effects of an unfamiliar drug. The Muslim merchant commu­nity in the city was, as Bowrey put it, 'averse [to] … any Stronge drinke.' Yet, he noted, 'they find means to besott themselves Enough with Bangha.' They consumed this 'Soe admirable herbe' in many forms, 'but not one of them that faileth to intoxicate them to admiration.' It could be chewed, made into a tea, or mixed with tobacco and smoked (this last technique, as we'll see in Chapter 5, was a recent innovation with far-reaching impact). Whatever the route of administration, Bowrey noted, this bangha was 'a very speedy way to be besotted.'

"Bowrey initially compared the effects of the drug to alcohol. Yet it seemed that bangha's properties were more complex, 'Operat[ing] accordinge to the thoughts or fancy' of those who consumed it. On the one hand, those who were 'merry at that instant, shall Continue Soe with Exceedinge great laugh­ter,' he wrote, 'laughinge heartilie at Every thinge they discerne,' On the other hand, 'if it is taken in a fearefull or Melancholy posture,' the con­sumer could 'seem to be in great anguish of Spirit.' The drug seemed to be a kind of psychological mirror that reflected - or amplified - the inner states of consumers. Small wonder, then, that when Bowrey resolved to try it, he did so while hidden in a private home with 'all dores and Windows' closed. Bowrey explained that he and his colleagues feared that the people of Machilipatnam would 'come in to behold any of our humours thereby to laugh at us.'

"Bowrey's account of the resulting effects is worth quoting at length: 'It Soon tooke its Operation Upon most of us, but merrily, Save upon two of our Number, who I suppose feared it might doe them harme not beinge accustomed thereto. One of them Sat himself downe Upon the floore, and wept bitterly all the Afternoone; the Other ter­rified with feare did runne his head into a great Mortavan Jarre, and continued in that posture 4 hours or more; 4 or 5 of the number lay upon the Carpets (that were Spread in the roome) highly Comple­menting each Other in high terms, each man fancyinge himselfe noe lesse then an Emperour. One was quarralsome and fought with one of the wooden Pillars of the Porch, untill he had left himself little Skin upon the knuckles of his fingers.'

"Reckless self-experimentation with drugs is sometimes assumed to be a modern practice. Accounts like Bowrey's quickly disabuse us of this notion. Bowrey and his merchant friends were plainly interested in bangha (canna­bis) as a recreational intoxicant, even if three of Bowrey's group seem to have found the experience to be less than optimal - to put it mildly.

"Bowrey, who would later author the first English dictionary of the Malay language, was what his contemporaries called a 'philosophical traveler.' His interest in bangha lay not only in its recreational value but also in its 'curiosity' as a wondrous substance with hidden properties. He was also keenly interested in discovering substances with the potential to become commodified. However, converting a drug like bangha into a global com­modity was not easy. "… (mehr)