This Is Your Mind on Plants by Michael Pollan, #1 New York Times bestselling author, offers a radical challenge to how we think about drugs and an exploration of the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants—and the equally powerful taboos surrounding them. Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs—opium, caffeine, and mescaline—throwing the fundamental strangeness and arbitrariness of our thinking about them into sharp relief. A unique blend of history, science, memoir, and participatory journalism, the book examines why we go to such lengths to seek shifts in consciousness and why we fence that universal desire with laws, customs, and fraught feelings. Based in part on an essay written more than 25 years ago, this groundbreaking consideration of psychoactive plants holds up a mirror to our fundamental human needs and aspirations, the operations of our minds, and our entanglement with the natural world.
Why it matters: It exposes the arbitrariness of how we categorize some consciousness-altering plants as acceptable daily habits and others as federal crimes—asking why making tea from tea leaves is normal while making tea from an opium poppy is criminal. By exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around opium, caffeine, and mescaline while consuming (or abstaining from) them, Pollan demonstrates that calling something a “drug” is one of the least interesting things you can say about these plants. When we take psychoactive plants into our bodies and let them change our minds, we are engaging with nature in one of the most profound ways we can—and understanding this entanglement illuminates something essential about human consciousness and desire.
