This Is Your Mind On Plants by Michael Pollan (Penguin), £20.
Chances are, you’ve taken a drug today. It may have been a short-and-sharp morning espresso, a milky tea, or a cappuccino from your local barista. Still, fundamentally, you have ingested a stimulant that results in a mind-altering effect. For centuries, caffeine has been at the crux of civilisation and has helped shape our history and continues to do so today.
Did you know that our dependency is an accident of history that started with a pack of goats? The legend goes that Kaldi, a goat-herder, discovered coffee after he noticed that his goats were eating berries from a certain tree; they then became so energetic they refused to sleep that night.
Anecdotes like this are peppered throughout the Caffeine chapter in Michael Pollan’s latest book, This is Your Mind on Plants. The book is an exploration into the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants and their equally powerful taboos. For example, caffeine has a mind-altering effect, but we don’t think of it as a “drug” because it is legally and socially permissible. Pollan asks what exactly is a “drug”, and why is making tea from the leaves of some plants acceptable, but tea from the seed of an opium poppy a federal crime?
As well as tackling important questions about ambiguous and arbitrary laws, Pollan links plant chemistries to human consciousness and how they can connect us to the natural world. After all, plants can short-circuit our experience of pain, eradicate a sense of a separate self, and bypass our neurotransmitters to have a deep, profound impact on our way of thinking. It’s no wonder there has been an increase in research about how plants can be used in psychiatry for their therapeutic and social benefits, from treating depression or anorexia.
You may recognise Pollan from his various works on our relationship with food and farming, from his 2008 bestseller In Defence of Food to The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2011). However, since then, he has changed literary tack and turned his forensic eye from food to drugs. In 2018 he wrote the #1 bestseller How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics, which transformed the discussion around psychedelics in the West, acted as a pseudo-handbook for micro-dosing and even helped inspire the “Decriminalise Nature” movement in the US.
As a curious gardener, journalist, and natural storyteller, Pollan has interwoven all his talents to produce This is Your Mind on Plants, his “personal inquiry” into three mind-changing molecules: the morphine found in an opium poppy (a sedative that is illegal in most places), the caffeine in coffee (a stimulant that is legal everywhere), and the mescaline produced by the peyote and San Pedro cactus (a hallucinogen that is illegal in the US unless you are a member of a Native American tribe).
Pollan explains his rationale behind these molecules, writing that he wanted to encompass the broad categories of psychoactive compounds. He wanted to explore a downer (opium), an upper (caffeine), and what he sees as an “outer” (mescaline) and use these three chemicals to put into context our relationship with the natural world.
The first chapter, Opium, is a fascinating, although legally exhausting, read. He includes a previously unpublished section from his article “Opium Made Easy” that he wrote in 1997 for Harper’s Magazine. The article was about Pollan’s risky experience of growing opium poppies in his garden and a report on his harvest’s ethics and subsequent effects. However, this was during the midst of America’s “war on drugs”, and suddenly, many gardeners like Pollan became confused over the ambiguous legality of poppy seeds. “Why is making tea from the leaves of Camellia sinesis uncontroversial?” he asks, “while doing the same thing with the seeds of Papaver somniferum, is, as I discovered, a federal crime?”
Pollan rightfully expresses frustration over how the FDA spent its time and energy focusing on harmless gardeners brewing tea, whilst Purdue Pharma, and members of the Sackler family who own the company, were addicting millions of Americans to its FDA-approved Opiate, OxyContin.
In the end, Pollan tried to fight the law, but the law won. After seeking legal advice over his “simple experiment”, he learnt that if his full-length article was published and his seeds found, he could be charged with: possession of a Schedule II controlled substance, a 20-year jail sentence and a $1m fine, his house would be seized and he would be evicted. He transferred his findings onto a floppy disk and unburied it years later for the readers of this book to enjoy. In this previously unseen extract, Pollan writes lyrically about harvesting the seeds and their subsequent effect.
The second chapter, Caffeine, was, to me, a confessed caffeine junkie, the most interesting. Pollan acts as a tour guide and takes us through thousands of years, from the goats discovering the coffee beans, to how caffeine has changed our sleep and our productivity. The tea from the East Indies and China would go on to fuel our industrial revolution, and the coffee arriving on our shores in the 17th century would sharpen our minds – otherwise clouded by heavy-drinking in local taverns – and gave rise to the age of reason and the Enlightenment, leading to great literary works from de Balzac to Diderot. After all, Pollan writes in This is Your Mind on Plants, “What work of genius was ever composed on chamomile?” This may explain why Voltaire drank up to seventy-two cups of coffee a day.
Nowadays, caffeine is capitalism’s tipple of choice; it has the power to liberate us from our circadian rhythms so we can work longer, harder, and muster the strength to hit slam on that alarm clock.
To put our dependency on caffeine to the test, Pollan conducts a month-long abstention from caffeine, withdrawing rather than ingesting as he does with the other two molecules. Here we learn of its positive and negative effects first-hand. We also hear from experts, which are then contextualised in caffeine’s long and controversial history, from slavery to imperialism to its effect on the workplace. This chapter is a fascinating blend of history, reportage and culture and deserves to be a book in and of itself.
The third chapter, Mescaline, is structured similarly to Caffeine, but it is the weaker counterpart. Here, Pollan traces the roots of mescaline through 6,000 years of indigenous history, resulting in the modern-day development of the Native American Church, which was formed to protect peyote usage. To his credit, Pollan wrestles with important questions of cultural appropriation surrounding peyote and has several emotionally charged conversations with Native Americans who explain how peyote ceremonies have done more to heal the wounds of genocide, colonialism and alcoholism than anything else.
We learn why they are concerned that more will be taken from them under the banner of “discovery”, especially considering the upsurge in the West’s interest in using psychedelics to treat mental illness. “Sometimes the best way to show your respect for something is to just leave it alone,” Sandor Iron Hope, the ex-president of the Native American Church of North America, tells Pollan.
Hope’s wishes fell on deaf ears and Pollan conducts two experiments with mescaline. In the first of these, he tries two capsules of mescaline sulphate where he experiences a “Haiku” state of consciousness that enabled him to escape “the shrunken-world claustrophobia of lockdown”. In the second experiment, he partakes in a much less potent and “covid-safe” Wachuma ceremony. Pollan intertwines the stresses of Covid-19 throughout this chapter, and it will no doubt strike a chord with hundreds of thousands who have been desperate to escape the parameters of reality however they can.
This is Your Mind on Plants is a thought-provoking exploration into the cultural history and implications of these psychoactive plants and how they affect our consciousness. In blending first-hand reportage, history and social commentary, Pollan holds up a reflective mirror to our emotional and physical needs, as well as our goat-like curiosity and entanglement with the natural world. For those seeking an introspective and absorbing account of the power of plants, here it is. Boil the kettle, sit back and enjoy.
