About this item
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.
About the Author
Benjamin Breen is an assistant professor of history at UC Santa Cruz. Previously he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities, Columbia University.
