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Author of the book under review here. AMA!

One thing I thought would be helpful is to link to the YouTube video described in the opening paragraph: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMF-cyHAaSs

It's from a 1957 CBS documentary series called "Focus on Sanity" that featured interviews with Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard, among others. I found it fascinating and my questions about it were actually one of the motive forces for why I wrote the book.

I believe the recording was first brought to public attention by Don Lattin, whose books The Harvard Psychedelic Club (2010) and Distilled Spirits (2012) are both great.

5 comments

What does your writing process look like when you set out to write an entire book? I know a lot of HN users have blogs, but the idea of writing a whole book seems daunting. Would love to hear the details of your experience and what it looked like particularly for Tripping on Utopia

I wouldn't recommend my process to anyone, to be honest! I probably wrote a total of around 200k words over a four year period, of which I ended up cutting around 110k. I find it to be very true that you don't know what you actually want to say until you start writing things that aren't what you want to say. Then it's an iterative process of critiquing, rethinking, and starting over. I'm sure some people are able to start with a clear outline and then just plow through to the end, but I'm not one of them.

In terms of research, I used to keep all my photographs of archival documents, PDFs of sources, etc in DEVONThink, but I switched over to using the standard Photos app on Macs. It has automatic OCR now so I'm able to search text that appears in photographs quite easily. I did a lot of oral history interviews to supplement the archival research. This book wouldn't have been possible up until recently because it's only in the past decade that so many historical archives have been digitizing their collections. I was able to visit the key archives in person, but with others, archivists were nice enough to send me scans of key documents. Super grateful to them.

Thanks for writing this up. I’m on my own writing journey and it’s inspiring to hear that its as chaotic to others and I’m finding it (while also being productive). So cheers to that!

Hi author! Given the timeframe of the subject, I was surprised to see no mention in the New Yorker article of Al Hubbard, who was well known to be involved in that early era, both in developing now common therapeutic practices such as the use of the Hubbard Room, and working to expose as many influential cultural, religious, industrial, government, and military figures to the experience as possible.

Was there any collaboration or correspondence between Mead/Bateson and Hubbard? Documentation on Hubbard can be hard to find, and he seems to have preferred it that way.

He's in there! In fact I decided to cut several pages on him, since a lot has already been written. Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Mind, among other books, has a lot of detail that I couldn't add much to.

Hubbard was important, to an extent, but one of the things I'm trying to do is draw out the larger social and intellectual circle that surrounded the more famous names. So to just to take on example, Betty Eisner was (I would argue) significantly more important than Hubbard both in developing the concept of set and setting and in developing psychedelic therapy in general.

She actually released a memoir online before her death, which is fascinating reading and has a lot of quotes from original letters (some of which I consulted at Stanford, which has her archive): https://erowid.org/culture/characters/eisner_betty/remembran...

From reading Michael Pollan, I recall that there was a lot of work being done on psychedelics up here in Canada.

Did you look into that at all? Especially considering the current stance on psychedelics in Canada (essentially decriminalized), and the state of serious research, do you see Canada being a pioneer going forward like it was in the past?

Yes, Canada (and especially Saskatchewan) is very important in psychedelic history. I didn't look into it much personally because it's one part of the story that's been documented very well already via the work of Ericka Dyck, which is excellent. Specifically her book Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD from Clinic to Campus (Johns Hopkins, 2008) but also other articles by her students and collaborators.

Excellent find.

I heard perhaps urban folklore from an old-timer former journalist that the LSD trade was monopolized by a single criminal syndicate in the 50's. There are still some haunts with local regulars not overrun with suits, squares, or tourists.

Why would a criminal syndicate in the 50s monopolize a drug that was not illegal at that time?

Not only was it not illegal, but at that time the patent holder (Sandoz labs) was giving it away for free to basically any researchers who wrote in asking for a sample, in order to try and find a way they could monetize it.

Thanks for the recommendation.

After reading the article, I watched the Margaret Mead bit on “The Rejected.”

Hope your book does well. I’ll buy it on Audible :)