Benjamin Breen is the author of The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade, winner of the 2021 William H. Welch Medal from the American Association for the History of Medicine. He is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz and was previously a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University.
A brilliant and original history of the chemical dreamscape of American democracy...Tripping on Utopia resurrects the promise, dangers, and sheer weirdness of one of the twentieth century's unsung frontiers of discovery: the quest to change the world by altering humans' perception of it. -- Charles King, author of Gods of the Upper Air and Midnight at the Pera Palace A marvel of scholarship and impossible to put down. -- Fred Turner, author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture In this strikingly original new history of psychedelic science, Benjamin Breen focuses on its origins in the interwar years alongside the expansive utopian projects of that era: anthropologists studying how cultures change, cybernetic dreams of reprogramming the brain, and the fascination with other wonder drugs such as hormones, truth serums and tranquillisers. The result is a thrilling history of ideas...narrated with infectious energy and enthusiasm. -- Mike Jay, author or Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind