When America First Dropped Acid

In Breen’s telling, the buttoned-down nineteen-fifties, not the freewheeling nineteen-sixties, brought together the ingredients, some of them toxic, for the first large-scale cultural experiment with consciousness-expanding substances. The psychedelic flowering of the sixties has, it turns out, a prequel—a rich and partly forgotten chapter before the hippie movement, before the shamanistic preening and posturing of Timothy Leary, and before the war on drugs shut all that down. This earlier history encompasses not only the now notorious C.I.A. research into mind-altering drugs but also a lighter, brighter, more public dimension of better living through chemistry, buoyed by postwar scientific optimism and public reverence for expertise. “Timothy Leary and the Baby Boomers did not usher in the first psychedelic era,” Breen writes. “They ended it.”