Michael Pollan - This Is Your Mind on Plants
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This Is Your Mind on Plants: summary, description and annotation
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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 dont 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 thats 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.
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How to Change Your Mind
Cooked
Food Rules
In Defense of Food
The Omnivores Dilemma
The Botany of Desire
A Place of My Own
Second Nature
PENGUIN PRESS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
penguinrandomhouse.com
Copyright 2021 by The Judith Belzer and Michael Pollan 2014 Revocable Trust
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams, from The Collected Poems: Volume I, 19091939, copyright 1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. and Carcanet Press, UK.
Opium, Made Easy was originally published in Harpers Magazine, April 1, 1997.
Caffeine: How Coffee and Tea Created the Modern World was originally released as an audiobook by Audible Originals, January 30, 2020.
library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Names: Pollan, Michael, author.
Title: This is your mind on plants / Michael Pollan.
Description: New York: Penguin Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021003519 (print) | LCCN 2021003520 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593296905 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593296912 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Psychotropic plants. | Opium. | Mescaline. | Caffeine.
Classification: LCC RS164 .P764 2021 (print) | LCC RS164 (ebook) | DDC 581.6dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021003519
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021003520
Designed by Amanda Dewey, adapted for ebook by Cora Wigen
Cover design: Evan Gaffney
Cover images: (cactus) Paul Starosta / Getty Images; (cactus flower) Federica Grassi / Getty Images; (coffee bean) Westend61 GmbH / Alamy; (poppies) Mandy Disher Photography / Getty Images
This book relates the authors investigative reporting on, and experimentation with, the opium poppy plant (Papaver somniferum) and mescaline in the form of mescaline sulfate, the San Pedro cactus (also known as Wachuma) (Trichocereus pachanoi), and the peyote cactus (Lophophora williamsii). It is a criminal offense in the United States and many other countries, punishable by imprisonment and/or fines, to manufacture, possess, or supply opium (or opium derivatives from opium poppy plants or opium straw), mescaline in any form including mescaline sulfate, San Pedro (Wachuma), and peyote, except (i) in connection with government-sanctioned research, (ii) in the case of opium or opium derivatives by legally sanctioned prescription, or (iii) in the case of the peyote cactus, as permitted by the American Indian Religious Freedom Act Amendments. You should therefore understand that this book is intended to convey the authors experiences and to provide an understanding of the background and current state of research into these substances. It is not intended to encourage you to break the law and no attempt should be made to use these plants or substances for any purposes except in a legally sanctioned clinical trial or by legally sanctioned prescription or as permitted by the American Indian Religious Freedom Act Amendments. The author and the publisher expressly disclaim any liability, loss, or risk, personal or otherwise, that is incurred as a consequence, directly or indirectly, of the contents of this book.
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
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For Judith, for sharing the journey
Of all the many things humans rely on plants forsustenance, beauty, medicine, fragrance, flavor, fibersurely the most curious is our use of them to change consciousness: to stimulate or calm, to fiddle with or completely alter, the qualities of our mental experience. Like most people, I use a couple of plants this way on a daily basis. Every morning without fail I begin my day by preparing a hot-water infusion of one of two plants that I depend on (and dependent I am) to clear the mental fog, sharpen my focus, and prepare myself for the day ahead. We dont usually think of caffeine as a drug, or our daily use of it as an addiction, but that is only because coffee and tea are legal and our dependence on them is socially acceptable. So, then, what exactly is a drug? And why is making tea from the leaves of Camellia sinensis uncontroversial, while doing the same thing with the seed heads of Papaver somniferum is, as I discovered to my peril, a federal crime?
All who try to construct a sturdy definition of drugs eventually run aground. Is chicken soup a drug? What about sugar? Artificial sweeteners? Chamomile tea? How about a placebo? If we define a drug simply as a substance we ingest that changes us in some way, whether in body or in mind (or both), then all those substances surely qualify. But shouldnt we be able to distinguish foods from drugs? Faced with that very dilemma, the Food and Drug Administration punted, offering a circular definition of drugs as articles other than food that are recognized in the pharmacopoeiathat is, as drugs by the FDA. Not much help there.
Things become only slightly clearer when the modifier illicit is added: an illicit drug is whatever a government decides it is. It can be no accident that these are almost exclusively the ones with the power to change consciousness. Or, perhaps I should say, with the power to change consciousness in ways that run counter to the smooth operations of society and the interests of the powers that be. As an example, coffee and tea, which have amply demonstrated their value to capitalism in many ways, not least by making us more efficient workers, are in no danger of prohibition, while psychedelicswhich are no more toxic than caffeine and considerably less addictivehave been regarded, at least in the West since the mid-1960s, as a threat to social norms and institutions.
But even these classifications are not as fixed or as sturdy as you may think. At various times both in the Arab world and in Europe, authorities have outlawed coffee, because they regarded the people who gathered to drink it as politically threatening. As I write, psychedelics seem to be undergoing a change of identity. Since researchers have demonstrated that psilocybin can be useful in treating mental health, some psychedelics will probably soon become FDA-approved medicines: that is, recognized as more helpful than threatening to the functioning of society.
This happens to be precisely how Indigenous peoples have always regarded these substances. In many Indigenous communities, the ceremonial use of peyote, a psychedelic,
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