The instant New York Times bestseller A Washington Post Notable
Book One of NPR's Best Books of the Year
"Expert storytelling . . . [Pollan] masterfully elevates a series of
big questions about drugs, plants and humans that are likely to leave
readers thinking in new ways." --New York Times Book Review
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Michael Pollan, a radical
challenge to how we think about drugs, and an exploration into the
powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants--and the equally
powerful taboos.
Of all the things humans rely on plants for--sustenance, beauty,
medicine, fragrance, flavor, fiber--surely the most curious is our use
of them to change consciousness: to stimulate or calm, fiddle with or
completely alter, the qualities of our mental experience. Take coffee
and tea: People around the world rely on caffeine to sharpen their
minds. But we do not usually think of caffeine as a drug, or our daily
use as an addiction, because it is legal and socially acceptable. So,
then, what is a "drug"? And why, for example, is making tea from the
leaves of a tea plant acceptable, but making tea from a seed head of an
opium poppy a federal crime?
In This Is Your Mind on Plants, Michael Pollan dives deep into three
plant drugs--opium, caffeine, and mescaline--and throws the fundamental
strangeness, and arbitrariness, of our thinking about them into sharp
relief. Exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up
around these drugs while consuming (or, in the case of caffeine, trying
not to consume) them, Pollan reckons with the powerful human
attraction to psychoactive plants. Why do we go to such great lengths to
seek these shifts in consciousness, and then why do we fence that
universal desire with laws and customs and fraught feelings?
In this unique blend of history, science, and memoir, as well as
participatory journalism, Pollan examines and experiences these plants
from several very different angles and contexts, and shines a fresh
light on a subject that is all too often treated reductively--as a drug,
whether licit or illicit. But that is one of the least interesting
things you can say about these plants, Pollan shows, for when we take
them into our bodies and let them change our minds, we are engaging with
nature in one of the most profound ways we can. Based in part on an
essay published almost twenty-five years ago, this groundbreaking and
singular consideration of psychoactive plants, and our attraction to
them through time, holds up a mirror to our fundamental human needs and
aspirations, the operations of our minds, and our entanglement with the
natural world.
