"This Is Your Mind On Plants," By Michael Pollan, Book Review
The Guardian, By Tim Adams, July 20, 2021. This fascinating insight into our relationship with mind-altering plants weaves personal experimentation with cultural history. - Excerpts:
Michael Pollan has written for many years, brilliantly, about our relationship with food and farming, in particular for the New York Times. In 2018, in what seemed like a midlife departure, he published a book on “the new science of psychedelics”, which was a personal report on renewed scientific interest in experiments with LSD and Ayahuasca, after decades of taboo. Pollan saw no change of direction in that project, however; he insisted to me at the time that it was simply a natural evolution of his “abiding interest in how we interact with other plant and animal species and how they get ahead in nature by gratifying our desires”. The desire to change consciousness was a fundamental element of that relationship, he suggested.
This book, which concerns our species’ symbiotic entanglements with three other potent plant-derived substances – opium, caffeine and mescaline – is a further development of a lifelong inquiry, which began, he writes, when he took up gardening as a teenager and attempted to grow cannabis.
His essays on perhaps the three most dramatically efficacious medicinal compounds proceed in a similar way, weaving personal experimentation with each of the “drugs” into informed histories of the ways in which they have taken such a hold of different human cultures. 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.
.. There is, as Pollan observes, a profound irony in the fact that at the same moment as his quaint domestic efforts to make poppy tea were being outlawed, the Purdue corporation was patenting the slow-release opiate painkiller OxyContin, the drug behind the “opioid crisis” that has killed at least 230,000 people, and made addicts of millions more. Far less fraught, but no less eye-opening, are Pollan’s adventures with caffeine...
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jul/20/this-is-your-mind-on-plants-by-michael-pollan-review-the-trip-of-a-lifetime
- PBS, July 2021. Even with the boom in legal cannabis, there were still more than one million marijuana arrests across the U.S. in 2019. In his new book, "This Is Your Mind on Plants," author Michael Pollan challenges the way we think about all drugs, from psychedelics and opioids to the caffeine in tea and coffee. Pollan speaks with Walter Isaacson about the effects of plant-based drugs on our behavior. - Fascinating discussion. Pollan mentions how the energy and productiveness derived from coffee, tea and caffeine helped fuel the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.
