This Is Your Mind on Plants
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author Michael Pollan, a radical challenge to how we think about drugs, and an exploration into the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants -- and the equally powerful taboos.
“In his latest exploration of the enduring relationship between the human and natural worlds, Michael Pollan dives deep into how psychoactive plants—specifically opium, caffeine and mescaline—impact our brains and our cultures. Pollan is a master of breaking down complex science into an engaging story and challenging long-held societal beliefs. His newest offering, which follows his examination of the science of psychedelics in 2018’s How to Change Your Mind, aims to unpack our ideas about what constitutes a “drug” and, fundamentally, why we seek them.” — Time Magazine
“In this paradigm-shifting cultural history, Pollan challenges our ossified taboos about psychoactive plants, charting our powerful attraction to these substances—and exposing the arbitrariness of our self-imposed restrictions….From the war on drugs to cultural appropriation of mind-altering substances like ayahuasca, Pollan deftly explores the links between set and setting.”— Esquire
“The food writer continues his career pivot to controlled substance thought leader. While his previous outing, the immensely popular How to Change Your Mind, made the modern case for psychedelics, Pollan’s latest broadens his focus to include uppers and downers. Pollan examines three psychoactive substances that occur in nature: opium, caffeine, and mescaline. The opium chapter is an amusing tale of Pollan’s attempt to cultivate opium from garden variety poppies, while the caffeine chapter will make you take a hard look at how much coffee you drink. This is Your Mind on Plants evangelizes less than How to Change Your Mind, but it’s just as thought provoking and all the better for it.” — GQ
“The omnivorously curious Pollan pivots off his provocative How to Change Your Mind with an enthralling odyssey into a trio of mind-altering drugs found in plants: opium, caffeine, and mescaline. In this wide-ranging, deliciously written study, he asks, why does one power us up each morning while the other two are shrouded in taboo? You’ll never look at a Starbucks Pike’s Peak the same way again.” — Oprah Daily
“A lucid (in the sky with diamonds) look at the hows, whys, and occasional demerits of altering one’s mind.”— Kirkus Reviews
“Blending artful exposition of the evolution and neurochemistry of botanical drugs, erudite history, and (usually) precise and evocative prose, this is an insightful take on plants’ beguiling sway over the human psyche.” — Publishers Weekly
Of all the things humans rely on plants for–sustenance, beauty, fragrance, flavor, fiber–surely the most curious is our use of them is to change consciousness: to stimulate or calm, fiddle with or completely alter, the qualities of our mental experience. Take coffee and tea: people around the world rely on caffeine to sharpen their minds. We don’t usually think of caffeine as a drug, or our daily use as an addiction, because it is legal and socially acceptable. So then what is a “drug?” And why, for example, is making tea from the leaves of a tea plant acceptable, but making tea from a seed head of an opium poppy a federal crime?
In This Is Your Mind On Plants, Michael Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs — opium, caffeine, and mescaline — and throws the fundamental strangeness, and arbitrariness, of our thinking about them into sharp relief. Exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around these drugs, while consuming (or in the case of caffeine, trying not to consume) them, Pollan reckons with the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants, and the equally powerful taboos with which we surround them. Why do we go to such great lengths to seek these shifts in consciousness, and then why do we fence that universal desire with laws and customs and such fraught feelings?
A unique blend of history, science, memoir, as well as participatory journalism, Pollan examines and experiences these plants from several very different angles and contexts, and shines a fresh light on a subject that is all too often treated reductively — as a drug, whether licit or illicit. But that’s one of the least interesting things you can say about these plants, Pollan shows, for when we take them into our bodies and let them change our minds, we are engaging with nature in one of the most profound ways we can. Based in part on an essay written more than 25 years ago, this groundbreaking and singular consideration of psychoactive plants, and our attraction to them through time, holds up a mirror to our fundamental human needs and aspirations, the operations of our minds, and our entanglement with the natural world.
Press
Reviews
The New York Times Book Review, July 9, 2021
In his new book, “This Is Your Mind on Plants,” Michael Pollan wagers “that the decline of the drug war, with its brutally simplistic narratives … has opened a space in which we can tell some other, much more interesting stories about our ancient relationship with the mind-altering plants and fungi with which nature has blessed us.” Taking this as his cue, Pollan then turns to his own narratives of gardening and self-experimentation. As he does, he also masterfully elevates a series of big questions about drugs, plants and humans that are likely to leave readers thinking in new ways.
Publishers Weekly, May 12, 2021
Pollan (How to Change Your Mind) centers this lucid exploration of the psycho-social impact of mind-altering plants on his personal experiences with opium, mescaline, and, most intensely, caffeine. He starts with an extended version of his 1997 Harper’s piece about brewing opium tea from poppies, which produced mild euphoria—“the tea seemed to subtract things: anxiety, melancholy, worry, grief”—apart from his apprehension over the DEA’s crackdown on poppy horticulture. The second chapter, an expanded version of a piece first published as an Audibles Original, describes a monthslong abstention from caffeine, which precipitated persistent feelings of mental dullness, and his triumphal return to coffee drinking (“Whatever I focused on, I focused on zealously and single-mindedly”).
The Guardian (UK), July 21, 2021
At the root of each case study is a pair of questions: the first asks why, as a species, we have gone to extraordinary lengths to propagate and disseminate these consciousness-changing molecules, and the second is why they are subject to paranoia and regulation in differing degrees.
Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 2021
Building on his lysergically drenched book How to Change Your Mind (2018), Pollan looks at three plant-based drugs and the mental effects they can produce.
The disastrous war on drugs began under Nixon to control two classes of perceived enemies: anti-war protestors and Black citizens. That cynical effort, writes the author, drives home the point that “societies condone the mind-changing drugs that help uphold society’s rule and ban the ones that are seen to undermine it.” One such drug is opium, for which Pollan daringly offers a recipe for home gardeners to make a tea laced with the stuff, producing “a radical and by no means unpleasant sense of passivity.” You can’t overthrow a government when so chilled out, and the real crisis is the manufacture of synthetic opioids, which the author roundly condemns. Pollan delivers a compelling backstory: This section dates to 1997, but he had to leave portions out of the original publication to keep the Drug Enforcement Administration from his door. Caffeine is legal, but it has stronger effects than opium, as the author learned when he tried to quit: “I came to see how integral caffeine is to the daily work of knitting ourselves back together after the fraying of consciousness during sleep.” Still, back in the day, the introduction of caffeine to the marketplace tempered the massive amounts of alcohol people were drinking even though a cup of coffee at noon will keep banging on your brain at midnight. As for the cactus species that “is busy transforming sunlight into mescaline right in my front yard”? Anyone can grow it, it seems, but not everyone will enjoy effects that, in one Pollan experiment, “felt like a kind of madness.” To his credit, the author also wrestles with issues of cultural appropriation, since in some places it’s now easier for a suburbanite to grow San Pedro cacti than for a Native American to use it ceremonially.
A lucid (in the sky with diamonds) look at the hows, whys, and occasional demerits of altering one’s mind.
More Reviews »
Interviews
1A (NPR), July 9, 2021
Michael Pollan is a best-selling author. His latest work looks at three psychoactive plants and has left him making some bold claims. He says it wasn’t just coal that fueled the Industrial Revolution, but caffeine. Alongside opium and mescaline, caffeine features prominently in his new book, “This Is Your Mind on Plants.” This new work is a follow-up to
More »
GQ, July 9, 2021
GQ spoke with the author about his new book, This is Your Mind on Plants, and the rapidly evolving cultural status of mind-altering substances. On the first page of his new book, This is Your Mind on Plants, Michael Pollan poses a seemingly simple question: what exactly is a drug? “All who try to construct a sturdy definition of drugs
More »
The New York Times Book Review, July 9, 2021
“Getting to read fiction purely for pleasure is the carrot I hold out for myself as a reward for the work of reporting and writing,” says the author, whose new book is “This Is Your Mind on Plants.” What books are on your night stand? It’s a hodgepodge of titles, to be read, or skimmed,
More »
The New York Times Book Review, July 9, 2021
In his new book, “This Is Your Mind on Plants,” Michael Pollan wagers “that the decline of the drug war, with its brutally simplistic narratives … has opened a space in which we can tell some other, much more interesting stories about our ancient relationship with the mind-altering plants and fungi with which nature has blessed us.” Taking this as his cue, Pollan then turns to his own narratives of gardening and self-experimentation. As he does, he also masterfully elevates a series of big questions about drugs, plants and humans that are likely to leave readers thinking in new ways.
July 5, 2021
Michael Pollan — This Is Your Mind on Plants (#520)
All Things Considered (NPR), July 5, 2021
NPR’s Sarah McCammon speaks with journalist Michael Pollan about his new book diving into three plant drugs. Listen to the interview here: https://www.npr.org/2021/07/04/1013044454/michael-pollan-talks-new-book-this-is-your-mind-on-plants
More Interviews »
