This Is Your Mind on Plants
(Penguin, $28)
Michael Pollan’s latest best-seller is “likely to trigger a fair amount of illicit gardening,” said Rob Dunn in The New York Times. The author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Botany of Desire focuses this time on three plant-derived substances that have mind-altering effects, and he is determined to illuminate how irrational our taboos and legal bans can be. Opium, caffeine, and mescaline, he shows us, each have distinct roles in society that were shaped as much by culture as by pharmacology. Though he often marshals evidence that’s been used by others before, “what Pollan contributes is expert storytelling” and an inquisitiveness that’s “likely to leave readers thinking in new ways.”
Pollan begins with a “fascinating and infuriating” tale about his own efforts to grow opium-producing poppies in his Connecticut garden, said Alec Gewirtz in The Boston
Globe. This was in the mid-1990s, a time when the DEA was cracking down on garden poppies but greenlighting the spread of the addictive synthetic opioid in OxyContin. Because lawyers warned Pollan that he risked prison time, he excised his recipe for poppy tea from the 1997 article he wrote about the endeavor for Harper’s. But the recipe, and an account of its pleasing effect, is here now, followed by a “riveting” chapter about how caffeine, by contrast, was rushed into mainstream use because it benefited industrialized economies, making