PositiveThe New York Review of BooksHe is vulnerable and struggling to find meaning in his life. His dependence on the Internet and on his cell phone compounds his confusion and malaise. He hopes that naturally occurring psychedelics will have a healing force, help him understand his own mortality, and show him why he is driven to make art ... With a mix of bravado and courage Lin then smokes the leaf of Salvia divinorum ... Lin’s account sometimes enters the third person ... the human desire to alter consciousness and enrich self-awareness shows no sign of receding, and someone must always go first. As long as care and diligence accompany the sort of personal research conducted by...Tao Lin, it has the potential to be as revealing and informative as any work on psychedelic drugs conducted within the rigid confines of universities.
Michael Pollan
PositiveThe New York Review of BooksPollan does justice to the contributions of Hofmann, Osmond, Huxley, and Timothy Leary but also emphasizes those of people like the physician Sidney Cohen, who warned that the use of LSD in psychiatry needed strict controls ... Pollan’s thorough investigation includes new insights about one of the most baffling and elusive figures to grace the field of psychedelic research ... Al Hubbard ... Hubbard believed in promoting LSD by using what he called the \'Eleusinian model\'—turning on society’s elite to its consciousness-expanding effects first ... Pollan is also impressed with the encouraging preliminary results of another of the Imperial group’s experiments, in which they used psilocybin to treat nineteen patients with treatment-resistant depression ... Pollan’s enthusiasm for this kind of research is perhaps too unqualified ... But the human desire to alter consciousness and enrich self-awareness shows no sign of receding, and someone must always go first. As long as care and diligence accompany the sort of personal research conducted by Pollan...it has the potential to be as revealing and informative as any work on psychedelic drugs conducted within the rigid confines of universities.