Think different
Author’s study of mind-altering drugs explores the medical and spiritual value of psychedelics
Scan the title of journalist Michael Pollan’s new book — “How to Change Your Mind” — on the cover, and you’re likely to conclude it’s a ho-hum pop psychology take on decision-making. You have to read the smaller print of the subtitle to learn the extraordinary depth and breadth of Pollan’s subject — “What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression and Transcendence.”
The book is about the therapeutic and spiritual values of psychedelics.
Those values are relevant today because, he argues, there are few tools effectively dealing with anxiety, depression and other mental health problems.
The primary psychedelics Pollan discusses in the book are LSD, psilocybin (magic mushrooms) and DMT, drugs banned since the 1960s, when the government shut down Timothy Leary’s feared Harvard Psilocybin Project.
Pollan marks three events in 2006 that he says could be the start of the “modern renaissance of psychedelic research.”
The first event was a symposium celebrating the centennial of the birth of the still-living Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann.
In 1943, Hofmann accidentally found that five years earlier he had synthesized the psychoactive molecule LSD-25, Pollan writes. The molecule was derived from a fungus.
The second event, weeks later, was a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing a small religious sect to import the hallucinogenic tea ayahuasca for its sacrament. The drink contains DMT, a powerful psychedelic compound found in many plants, Pollan writes.
The third event in 2006 was the publication of Roland Griffiths’ scientific paper on the use of psilocybin. The paper, Pollan writes, was the first “rigorously designed, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical study in more than four decades” to look at the psychological effects of a psychedelic. But to Pollan, what was most remarkable was that Griffiths focused on the drug’s spiritual effect, rather than its therapeutic use.
(Predating those events was what Pollan termed an early 1990s watershed study by Dr. Rick Strassman, a psychiatrist then affiliated with the University of New Mexico. Strassman, he said, studied the physiological effects of DMT. “But it was important because it showed the good that could be done and it was FDA-approved. That was a sign to a lot of other researchers who had other applications to test. It sort of lit a fuse,” Pollan said.)
Pollan’s smooth reading approach travels down multiple paths. It’s a social, natural and scientific history; it’s travel writing and it’s a memoir. Memoir because the author himself tries these drugs with a recommended “spirit guide.” He calls it “participatory journalism.”
Pollan is known for his writings about food but, he said in a phone interview, if you go back before those books (e.g. the award-winning “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”), “my larger subject was nature and engagement with the natural world and how we use nature to gratify our desires. Food is an obvious one,” Pollan said in a phone interview.
“But one of the more curious desires that plants have gratified in humans is their ability to change a person’s consciousness. Every society uses plants to do that. It’s very common. You do it when you drink a cup of coffee.”
He said he always thought he’d get back to exploring why humans aren’t satisfied with “normal consciousness.”
Pollan, 63, teaches writing at Harvard and at the University of California, Berkeley.