This Is Your Mind on Plants

paperback, 563 pages

Published July 5, 2021 by Random House Large Print.

ISBN:
978-0-593-41421-7
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5 stars (1 review)

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 …

5 editions

In which a gardner experiments with opium, caffeine, and mescaline

5 stars

An exploration of the mind-altering effects of plants and how they have influenced humans individually and culturally. Michael Pollan is an avid gardener, and a very unlikely person to experiment with opium or mescaline, and yet that’s just what he did as he wrote this book, in a nerdy and thoughtful way. He didn't just try opium or mescaline, he also tried abstaining from caffeine, which almost seemed to have more of an impact than his small forays into growing poppies or trying peyote. It was an unexpectedly delightful read for me.