Cary Grant, congresswoman were tripping on acid years before Timothy Leary’s hippies
Turns out, it’s a longer, stranger trip. While LSD is often associated with 1960s hippies and Timothy Leary, that’s not the whole story. “The first era of global experimentation with consciousness-expanding substances took place much earlier than commonly thought, in the 1920s through the 1950s, rather than the 1960s and 1970s,” Benjamin Breen writes in his new book, “Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, The Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science” (out Tuesday). “Put another way: Timothy Leary and the Baby Boomers did not usher in the first psychedelic era. They ended it.” In this excerpt, Breen, an associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, writes of actor Cary Grant — who reportedly tripped on LSD 100 times — and Connecticut Congresswoman Clare Booth Luce experimenting with psychedelics well before hippies got trippy. Throughout 1959, psychedelic therapy captured the public’s attention in a way it would not again until the 2020s.