[Pollan] masterfully elevates a series of big questions about drugs, plants and humans that are likely to leave readers thinking in new ways ... Most of the background in Caffeine can also be found in stand-alone books on coffee or tea. What Pollan contributes is expert storytelling and a second big idea in the form of a question: Do coffee and tea have a mutualistic relationship with human society? ... Invariably, the challenge of personal stories about self-experimentation is that the experiences the writer is relaying are ones the reader does not share. By the end of the book, Pollan convinced me so fully of the relativistic effects of mescaline that I was left wondering what sort of general truth his own story represents. Can we generalize from his own drama? Surely his experience does not tell us much about the Native American use of peyote, a culturally contextualized practice that he was told by Native American interviewees 'had done more to heal the wounds of genocide, colonialism and alcoholism than anything else they had tried' ... Pollan seems to bet, and he is probably right, that readers will relate to his dabbling with drug plants because of one aspect of their usage that does happen to be nearly universal. To varying extents, we are all trying to negotiate the challenging interplay between our own brain’s chemistries and a number of converging factors ... Ultimately, Pollan does not answer whether individual readers should partake in the plant drugs he discusses; this is not part of his project. But he does skillfully achieve what he set out to do. He has left the reader with some 'more interesting stories about our ancient relationship with the mind-altering plants,' stories likely to trigger new debates and discussions as well as, no doubt, a fair amount of illicit gardening.
While not as revelatory as Pollan’s major works, this is a wonderful and compelling read that will leave you thinking long after you set it down ... Pollan is an astonishingly good writer, at times intimate and vulnerable, at times curious and expository, always compelling and credible. Reading his writing can be kind of like taking a psychedelic—a literary onomatopoeia. When I put the book down I felt temporarily smarter, more capable of deeper perception of myself and the world around me. It’s a wonderful and important gift ... After coming down from my reading high, though, I have a couple of reservations. First, Pollan’s interests are wide-ranging, but he seems most taken with brain sciences and sometimes flirts with a soft form of pharmacological essentialism—that is, a tendency to reduce drugs’ social and political complexities to the interactions between chemicals and brains ... I also have concerns about Pollan’s drug policy critiques. He can be effective here, skewering the absurdities produced by an irrational and arbitrary war against plant drugs ... When Pollan bridles that drug laws limit his freedom, and when he ridicules the foolishness of lumping him and his cozy garden with fearsome 'addicts' and criminals, he unintentionally reinforces this pernicious drug war logic ... These political qualms didn’t keep me from enjoying This Is Your Mind on Plants. It’s a lovely book by a deep thinker and a masterful storyteller. I can’t help but hope that such a powerful ally will wade as deeply into drug politics as he does drug neuroscience.
Pollan is a gentle, generous writer, so it is to his credit that he realises that an account of how he felt when he stopped drinking coffee for a few months was hardly likely to provide narrative drama. That doesn’t stop him doing it, with predictably tedious consequences, but he constructs a nice chapter all the same out of other bits of information.
Pollan is not particularly interested in recommending that readers scale back on coffee or experiment with opium tea. Instead, he wants readers to unlearn biases about drugs to make space for new cultural conversations about these psychoactive substances ... Moving fluidly between vivid character sketches and sweeping cultural commentary, Pollan charts how this early capitalist exploitation of workers with the aid of caffeine drove the expansion of colonialism and slavery ... In describing his own experiences of researching the peyote cactus, Pollan adeptly handles issues of cultural insensitivity. He is aware that, in writing about the cactus, he risks encouraging not simply cultural appropriation but material appropriation: The fear in writing about the peyote cactus is that white Americans will be inspired to consume it, which, given its scarcity, would effectively rob it from Native Americans ... For every sober-minded discussion of such a difficult cultural issue, there are multiple passages in This Is Your Mind on Plants of sparkling charm ... Throughout the book, Pollan’s voice is breezy, witty, and approachable as he gently interweaves such historical vignettes, science, and first-person stories of experimentation with plant-based drugs ... The book has little to say, however, about the major choices for governments and individuals that might flow from a more informed view of opium, caffeine, and mescaline. At one point, Pollan notes that, given how the same drugs can be both beneficial or harmful to individuals, depending on use, 'it’s up to us to devise a healthy relationship with them.' It’s unclear, though, exactly what Pollan means by this: Does he mean that all drugs should be legalized and we as individuals should be free to attempt to build “a healthy relationship” with any drug that we desire? Or, quite differently, do we need a reimagined health care profession, working in a new legal environment, to prescribe these drugs to us? Frustratingly, Pollan’s book leaves these questions unexplored ... Still, This Is Your Mind on Plants has much to offer its readers, whether they are curious about the plant-based adventures of others or the science of substances at work on their own minds. With historical depth, political punch, and narrative exuberance, Pollan’s book sounds a call to reimagine society’s relationship with psychoactive plants.
As with all the explorations in this spirited and informed series of quests, the results of these experiments open up as many public questions as private epiphanies. Pollan is the perfect guide through this sometimes controversial territory; curious, careful and, as his book progresses, increasingly open minded.
[Pollan's] descriptions of London’s coffee house culture and Honoré de Balzac’s barbarous habit of ingesting dry coffee grounds to fuel all-night scribbling sessions are worth the book’s price alone ... While his previous books may have had their critics, This Is Your Mind on Plants, places Pollan, for this reviewer at least, among those science writers — James Gleick, Marcia Angell, Harold McGee, Jared Diamond and more — who demonstrate through the night of Trumpism, QAnon and the anti-vaxx movement that the flag of scientific literacy still waves in America.
Pollan is a mindful and enthusiastic psychonaut. He is also a gifted writer, who synthesizes unruly social histories and wreathes them around his own drug-taking experiences. And he articulates these experiences with great insight and eloquence, and without the usual clack that typifies so-called 'trip reports.' But Michael Pollan has never explicitly cast himself in his writing as a pro-legalization advocate or anything like it. Late in How to Change Your Mind, he expresses his hope that the psychedelic experience will be more widely embraced, even outside of strictly 'therapeutic' contexts. But then he pulls his punch. 'Does that mean I think these drugs should simply be legalized? Not quite.' Instead, he maintains that one-on-one sessions with an experienced guide (whether a lab-coated clinician or an underground urban shaman) may be the ideal ... Pollan recognizes that the war on drugs is 'in truth a war on some drugs, their enemy status the result of historical accident, cultural prejudice, and institutional imperative.' Yet there’s still the nagging sense that he’s benefiting from these hypocrisies: that he enjoys a freedom of self-tinkering and contemplation that is not universally applied. Culture shifts that encourage the curious to engage in recreational consciousness-fiddling are all well and good. They’re great. But they’re just another privilege, if unaccompanied by harm-reduction programs, reparations, a robust social safety net, and other progressive political measures that might define the drug war’s antebellum period ... Pollan may be following from the lessons of psychedelia, in which obvious truths can be plainly revealed to the user (or, here, the reader) in ways that are revelatory but not prescriptive or didactic. Still, at the risk of rehashing psychedelic ’60s platitudes of smiling on your brother and finding our way back to the garden, I can’t help but feel that one must orient an opened mind toward action. We may only ever meet nature halfway. But surely we should strive to embrace our fellow drug users on an equal footing.
Mr. Pollan’s vast blanket of historical and scholarly reference is summer-weight but delightfully patterned, rich in anecdote and lively quotation. The book’s competing tendency towards gonzo journalism, however, is less successful, his feats of self-experimentation oddly anticlimactic ... Though Mr. Pollan’s own minor and abortive adventures may fail to charm, their very ordinariness and avuncularity may persuade the still-unconvinced about his eminently sensible and un-radical position: that the stigma around 'drugs' likely obscures a much more interesting, nuanced and generous story about human needs and hungers, and about the plants that satisfy or alter our appetites forever.
... a tour around three substances: caffeine, mescaline and opium ... Pollan offers us rich historical contexts for them that are often surprising ... Pollan’s summation of his three substances of choice is that they 'hold up mirrors to our deepest human needs and aspirations, the operation of our minds, and our entanglement with the natural world'. These are large claims, but in the main he justifies them.
Pollan is very conscious about being a white man writing about Native American culture, which is not his own. He worries about appropriation, a sensitive subject these days, that runs all the way through his new book ... Pollan situates himself and his wife, Judith, in the thick of the action. For those who like personalized narratives this will be an attraction. Others might want to skip the autobiographical material and get to the information that the author has to offer about the substances he explores ... Again and again Pollan gives credit where credit is due ... What’s new and exciting in This Is Your Mind on Plants is that Pollan is both the reliable guide and the brave guinea pig, an explorer with an insatiable curiosity, but also with a keen sense of boundaries ... He’s not about to blow his own mind, and he doesn’t want to blow the minds of readers, either.
Pollan weaves together three separately engaging stories in a pleasantly meandering style, deftly using his personal experiences with each compound as a jumping-off point for small forays into anthropology, history, politics, psychology, molecular biology, and neuroscience. Even the most distracted reader will come away with an understanding of the physical effects of the spotlighted substances as well as their cultural significance ... Pollan has crafted a narrative that he hopes will influence the stories we tell about plants, their active molecules, and the relationship we have with them as individuals and as a society. But this tome is not a self-help book. Instead of prescribing a list of potential policy actions, he ultimately leaves the details of how we might move forward with plant-derived compounds open to interpretation.
Readers of How to Change Your Mind will recognize Pollan’s thoughtful and scientific approach to the subject of psychedelic drugs and altered states of consciousness. This Is Your Mind on Plants is an entertaining blend of memoir, history and social commentary that illustrates Pollan’s ability to be both scientific and personal. By relying on contextual history and focusing on three popular, if misunderstood, drugs, Pollan challenges common views on what mind-altering drugs are and what they can accomplish.
... briskly enlightening if intermittently cursory ... Our mind on Pollan revels in his exceptional narrative lucidity and command of complex and intriguing facts and concepts.
To his credit, the author also wrestles with issues of cultural appropriation, since in some places it’s now easier for a suburbanite to grow San Pedro cacti than for a Native American to use it ceremonially ... A lucid (in the sky with diamonds) look at the hows, whys, and occasional demerits of altering one’s mind.
Blending artful exposition of the evolution and neurochemistry of botanical drugs, erudite history, and (usually) precise and evocative prose, this is an insightful take on plants’ beguiling sway over the human psyche.
