This is Your Mind on Plants

Michael Pollan [Allen Lane ]

Michael Pollan’s This is Your Mind on Plants is essentially a sequel to How To Change Your Mind, his acclaimed 2018 book. Whereas in the latter he guided readers through the renaissance of ‘psychedelic science’, This is Your Mind on Plants offers a more personal and, in many ways, bolder trip.

The book’s tripartite structure is itself a provocation; Pollan sandwiches his reflections on what might seem the relative innocuity of caffeine between meditations on the more rarefied – and illicit – worlds of Papaver somniferum, the poppy from which opium is derived, and mescaline, the active psychotropic in the peyote cactus. This helps subtly convey This is Your Mind on Plants’ broader point: that how we taxonomize what goes under the laughably imprecise rubric of ‘drugs’ – proscribing some; encouraging the consumption of others – is in large measure arbitrary. As Pollan documents, this has – and continues to have – disastrous consequences for society at large. Yet, it’s perhaps a testament to the drug war’s waning zeal that Pollan could emerge as an important voice of reason on this topic in the first place.

And none of this is to say he’s unaware of the pernicious effects these substances can have. Yet, as he points out, following legion others, ‘drugs’ are hardly unique in this regard. As with many things that can serve uses both salutary and malign, “it’s up to us to devise a healthy relationship with them.” LW