Book Report: This Is Your Mind on Plants

51. Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind on Plants (2021) (10/12/21)

Although I have several of Michael Pollan's books, going back to the 1991 Second Nature, this is the first I've read all the way through. I believe it was recommended by one of Ezra Klein's guests, but I am failing to find that episode. It doesn't matter. What matters is, this was a fascinating, if slightly disjointed, read. Disjointed simply because the three parts—on the opium poppy, on caffeine-producing plants (coffee and tea chiefly), and on peyote and Wachuma, cactuses containing mescaline—seem rather stand-alone, and have different emphases. Which did not detract from their enjoyability. Indeed, it felt like I was reading three long and in-depth magazine pieces. All, however, related by chemistry, and by human experience with them.

In fact, the first section was originally an in-depth magazine piece, published in Harper's in 1997. It's memoirish, focused on Pollan's interest in growing opium poppies and possibly experimenting with the mind-altering chemical substance. In this venture he encounters a teacher of sorts, who becomes a subject of the piece. And finally, Pollan comes smack up against the DEA and the War on Drugs, which provide fascinating, and rather chilling, context, regarding both the status of opium poppies (they are illegal only if you know that they contain opium; if you think you're just planting a pretty flower—and they are a lovely flower—they're perfectly legal) and the publishing history of the article in question (a section of it was excised lest the authorities come down on Pollan and anyone associated with him; that section is included in the current book, since the War on Drugs has weakened, overshadowed now by the War on Terror).

The second section (which originally appeared in 2020 in somewhat different form as an Audible audio book) goes deeply into the history of the importation of first coffee and then tea into Western Europe, from East Africa and China, respectively, and then into the spread of said plants worldwide as caffeine became increasingly important in society. Coffeehouses as crucial to the rise of Enlightenment philosophy and the twentieth-century origin of the coffee break figure in. While writing this chapter, Pollan abstained from his daily cup of coffee, and shares his experience of becoming just a tad... dulled. 

The third section explores the role of peyote in the Native American Church, which formed in the 1880s (in parallel with but separate from the Ghost Dance) to draw Indians together in response to the existential crisis facing Indian culture in the face of white colonialism. Pollan also references Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception as he tries to gain access to mescaline, either in plant form or as synthetic mescaline—ultimately with partial success. His experiences with the latter and with the Peruvian Wachuma, a cactus that is relatively easy to procure (in contrast to peyote, which is increasingly rare, very slow growing, and highly protected by its Native American consumers), round out the chapter.

I enjoy the combination of memoir/first-person involvement in the story, on the one hand, and science and history on the other, and Pollan balances these gracefully. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

Here he is describing his first cup of coffee after three months without:

My special [a double-shot espresso drink made with steamed milk] was unbelievably good, a ringing reminder of what a poor counterfeit decaf is; here were whole dimensions and depths of flavor that I had completely forgotten about! I could almost feel the tiny molecules of caffeine spreading through my body, fanning out along the arterial pathways, sliding effortlessly through the walls of my cells, slipping across the blood-brain barrier to take up stations in my adenosine receptors. "Well-being" was the term that best described the first feeling I registered, and this built and spread and coalesced until I decided "euphoria" was warranted. And yet there was none of the perceptual distortion that I associate with most other psychoactive drugs; my consciousness felt perfectly transparent, as if I were intoxicated on sobriety.
     But this was not the familiar caffeine feeling [of habitual use]—the happy (and grateful) return to baseline, as the first cup disperses the gathering fogs of withdrawal. No, this was something well up from baseline, almost as if my cup had been spiked with something stronger, something like cocaine or speed. Wow—this stuff is legal?

I was going to quote from each section, but really, that gives an idea of the style. It's very engaging, very readable, and I learned a lot.