When America First Dropped Acid

One evening in September of 1957, viewers across America could turn on their television sets and tune in to a CBS broadcast during which a young woman dropped acid. She sat next to a man in a suit: Sidney Cohen, the researcher who had given her the LSD. The woman wore lipstick and nail polish, and her eyes were shining. "I wish I could talk in Technicolor," she said. And, at another point, "I can see the molecules. Were some families maybe--oh, I don't know--eating meat loaf on TV trays as they watched this nice lady undergo her mind-bending, molecule-revealing journey through inner space? Did they switch to "Father Knows Best" or "The Perry Como Show" afterward? One of the feats that the historian Benjamin Breen pulls off in his lively and engrossing new book, "Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science" (Grand Central), is to make a cultural moment like the anonymous woman's televised trip seem less incongruous, if no less ...