Michael Pollan’s latest title is a subversive reference to the no-nonsense egg-frying anti-drug commercials of the late 1980s. A monotone man dryly quipped, “This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?”  While one may ponder why Pollan chose to put “mind” and not “brain” for his title, there’s no mistaking why he substituted “plants” for “drugs.” Pollan has made a long and distinguished career of covering gardening, biological sciences, and food and cuisine (especially his famous, The Omnivore’s Dilemma). I suspect he might end up most famous in the long run for his recent forays into drug-use.  As early as 2001, in The Botany of Desire, Pollan called into question whether there is any meaningful difference between consuming an apple and smoking a bud of cannabis (more on this below). In the past five years, he’s spent considerably more time on drugs (plants?). In 2018, he published How to Change Your Mind, a discussion of America’s academic, clinical, and cultural relationship to psychedelic substances. The present title feels more like a half-baked sequel to How to Change Your Mind. Why not then review How to Change Your Mind? The depth of research is not as vast, but I think this title gives a better sense of Pollan’s worldview and, most importantly, a better sense of a cultural shift we will soon undergo. 

Summary

The book is divided into three discrete, self-contained section-chapters: Opium, Caffeine, Mescaline.  Pollan describes this as a survey of each of the major drug types: downers, uppers, and outers (respectively). The Opium section is derived from a piece he wrote for Harper’s in 1997 with some additional editorial commentary for the book. The Caffeine and Mescaline sections are new.

The Opium chapter follows Pollan’s efforts to grow poppy flowers in his garden. A large part of this chapter focuses on the legal grey areas created by the drug war: one law enforcement agent signaled that his flowers were no problem; another indicated the severe legal hazards he faced. It ends with Pollan’s private experiments with an unpleasantly bitter opiate brew.  His editorial commentary on the 1997 article permits a disturbingly ironic retrospective. At the exact same time that Pollan “took up arms” in his garden within the context of the War on Drugs, Purdue Pharma was insidiously gaining FDA approval for OxyContin. All of Pollan’s fretting about his flowers and poppy tea turned out to be a huge side show while opioids entered the American bloodstream through institutionally sanctioned channels.

The Caffeine chapter offers some history on the discovery and use of caffeine. I frankly had hoped to read a lot more about the cultural history of coffee: the central European coffee houses and the intellectual life surrounding them. I got a solid chuckle reading about seventeenth-century pamphlets decrying coffee’s negative impact on male sexual performance.  But this historical treatment only covers a few pages. The majority of roughly eighty pages are devoted to the coffee drinking and ultimately coffee abstinence of Pollan himself. Much of the rest is dedicated to an attempt to tarnish the name of caffeine. 

The book concludes with Pollan’s mescaline experiment conducted in the midst of the Covid-19 shutdown. Mescaline is the name for the psychoactive compound found naturally in the Peyote and San Pedro cacti. This section most resembles How to Change Your Mind, in its cultural history, private experimentation, and popular science of psychedelics. Along the way, Pollan offers up interviews, interview refusals, and other encounters with various Indigenous groups across the Americas. Unlike the extended discussions of the medicinal, clinical and scientific study of psychedelics found in How to Change Your Mind, the discussion of mescaline is much more ritualistic and “spiritual” in nature. 

Stylistic Issues

I now turn to offer some critical commentary, moving from less to more serious. Pollan’s writing is frankly fun.  He’s creative, humorous, and easy to read. His fame is justly earned. Witness his description of a San Pedro plant: 

The skin was a smooth matte green with a slight bluish tint. The columns … are divided into six vertical ribs, each punctuated every few inches by an areole from which jut exactly five short, sharp spines. The vertical ribs come together at the top of each column to form a six-pointed star. It’s a handsome cactus, stately and architectural, a bit like the model for a Gaudí-esque skyscraper.  

This is your mind on plants, p. 175-6

Nevertheless, Pollan’s writing style strikes me as at least moderately irresponsible for a couple of reasons. First, his writing is self-consciously ambiguous. Is this journalistic reporting? Memoir? Popular Science? Pollan is not so ignorant as to miss this blending of methods. It’s deliberate and skillful. Viewed from the standpoint of strict reporting, offering biographical details gives the writing a personal, human touch. Viewed from the standpoint of memoir, his mastery of the relevant history and science introduces a measure of authority. What’s the problem? When dealing with topics other than personal gardening—that is, when dealing with issues that have major public policy implications—interjecting one’s personal experience feels a bit off-color. This is because well-told personal stories will be often be the most compelling portion of an article or book; however, personal experience is mostly irrelevant when millions of lives are involved. In effect, these intriguing anecdotes draw attention away from the parts that require close scrutiny.

Second, I sense that his dedication to his literary craft outstrips his concern for the truth or the broader benefit of society. To illustrate, Mind on Plants is about three drugs: opium, caffeine, mescaline. The obvious presentation of these drugs is that opium and mescaline are dangerous, while caffeine is harmless.  But Pollan inverts these: opium and mescaline are actually pretty cool, and caffeine is problematic. He doesn’t say anything quite this crass, but Pollan’s dedication to stylized irony warps the borders of ethical writing. At no point does he claim that everyone should have at it with home grown poppy or San Pedro. He also starts to drink coffee again after his personal experiment. Yet, the overall tone seems insouciant at best. I have a hard time imagining that there haven’t already been people who have felt foolishly empowered to irresponsibly imitate his private (and relatively controlled) experiments.   

Shamanism

In both How to Change Your Mind and Mind on Plants, Pollan speaks derisively about Christianity and positively—even nostalgically—about what he calls shamanism. No doubt, there have been many atrocities committed against Indigenous peoples in the name of Jesus, or at least by self-identifying Christians. But for Pollan, that’s just Christianity, writ large. Now, when Pollan refers to shamanism, he probably means those cultural forms that are no more dangerous than crude medicine. Nevertheless, some forms of shamanism are vile by any measure: human sacrifice, self-mortification, ritualized rape, and so on.  Pollan writes:

The poet who has done the most work scraping off all that meaning, symbolism, and Judeo-Christian crust off the natural world is William Carlos Williams, who I decided that afternoon is the patron saint of mescaline.

This is your mind on plants, p. 218, emph added

As with any thing that involves whole continents and numerous centuries, the story is necessarily more complicated. Someone as sophisticated as Pollan should know better. At the least, he could use more specific language.

Vague Boundaries

As I’ve indicated above, Pollan has a certain dedication to stylized irony. Just as he wants us to question why we’ve embraced caffeine and shunned opium and mescaline, so too he winks at a broader dissolution of cultural and institutional boundaries between drugs, food, chemistry and plants.  

So, then, what exactly is a drug? And why is making tea from the leaves of Camellia sinensis uncontroversial, while doing the same thing with the seed heads of Papaver somniferum is, as I discovered to my peril, a federal crime?

This is your mind on Plants, p. 1

This dissolution of boundaries raises two questions at once, both of which turn on certain types of vagueness and slippery slope arguments.  The first one is similar to the paradox of the heap: how many cups of poppy tea must one make before it is manufacturing or distributing an illicit substance? Surely one cup is not enough; and for any number of cups of poppy tea, brewing one more doesn’t make the difference. Yet, we all agree that millions of cups of poppy tea would create a problem. The second soft boundary is less numerical but depends on features of the relevant plants: a poppy seed bagel is not a problem; poppy tea is not obviously a problem but does produce psychoactive effects; smoking the dried sap of a poppy’s seed pod (opium) is a further step along the path. But all of these are different ways of metabolizing different parts of the same plant.

To some extent, I understand Pollan’s frustration with the overly black-and-white War on Drugs. There are (and have been) laws that can destroy lives and communities. If such things are at stake, it matters where the lines are drawn and that such lines respect the adage that the punishment must fit the crime. On the other hand, Pollan knows that there are significant differences between tea leaves and poppy sap. Maybe it’s ambiguous when poppies become dangerous, but there is no ambiguity regarding the manufacturer of OxyContin. Furthermore, Purdue Pharma’s chemists are not alchemists: they could never turn tea leaves into a powerful drug because there’s no gold in that plant. Likewise, laudanum and opium abuse long pre-dated the rise of synthetic opioid production.

To be fair, Pollan periodically qualifies some of his more exaggerated statements. In How to Change Your Mind, he goes as far as to mock the drippy platitudes on the lips of his interviewees. In Mind on Plants, he’ll back up at times and tip his hat to his own ironism. And yet, the totality of these books present a specific portrait more heavily painted by the punchier statements. Perhaps this brings us back to the issues concerning his writing style. Even if Pollan slips out from under his more outrageous remarks through timely qualification, his devotion to craft over content, rhetoric over reality, poses ethical questions about the nature of these projects.

Drugs and Institutions

The foolishness and destructive nature of the drug war is a theme that runs through much of Mind on Plants. Most of us can agree with the flawed design and execution of the Drug War. However, I have found that Pollan’s frustration with that particular federal initiative has led him to entertain equally untenable ideas regarding all cultural and legal institutions.

In this attempt to loosen up the cultural institutions built around caffeine, Pollan ends up saying things that are frankly silly. He takes two shots at caffeine, and both involve garden-variety fallacies. First, he tries to show that caffeine is bad for health; second, he argues that caffeine bears a problematic relationship with capitalism. Regarding caffeine’s adverse health effects, he offers something like the following argument: caffeine makes it harder to sleep (obvious), sleep is essential for your health (equally obvious); ergo, caffeine negatively impacts your health…? Did Pollan forget that when one drinks caffeine is essential? Most people are capable of regulating their caffeine intake so that they can sleep. To show what he wants to show, there needs to be longitudinal studies showing that people who don’t drink caffeine live longer and/or better lives. He even admits at one point that caffeine in measured amounts is good for you!

Pollan also draws our attention to the capitalist greed beneath caffeine. For example, he notes the historic relationship between British tea imports from China and the Opium wars. “[I]n order for the English mind to be sharpened with tea, the Chinese mind had to be clouded with opium” (140). Likewise, uncompensated coffee breaks were forced upon garment laborers to help them speed up. These stories are troubling, but they’re irrelevant. These are isolated cases and are somewhat distorted. Ignoring Pollan’s hypocrisy on opium, the Opium Wars were not exclusively about tea. So too, even members of the “one-percent”—arch capitalists—drink coffee. It’s not exactly a tool of oppression. As for the present day, even Starbucks, the embodiment of globalized capitalist retail coffee, offers Fairtrade options. If he wants me to reconsider drinking coffee, he’s failed miserably. 

He makes even more ill-considered comments at the end of his Opium section. The chapter winds down with Pollan articulating similarities he shares with a previous owner of his farm, a man who made an alcoholic cider during Prohibition:

And there’s this: the refusal to accept that what happens in our gardens, not to mention our houses, our bodies, and our minds, is anyone’s business but our own. Fifteen years ago, when I first moved into this place, some of the crumbling outbuildings dotting the property still bore crudely lettered warnings directed, I liked to think, at… anyone …the old farmer judged a threat to his privacy—to his liberty. KEEP OUT! went one, an angry scrawl painted in red on the side of shed. My sentiments exactly.  

This is your mind on plants, P. 83

When reading such a passage, it’s hard to ignore the parallels between the hyper-freedom celebrated by anti-vaxxers and what Pollan wrote here: what I do with my body is my business! Even laying aside issues of vaccination and public health, what kind of fertilizer one farmer uses will impact the farmers who are downstream; what one does in and to her own house can impact the value of other houses around her; what one does to his body will impact his loved ones. The list goes on and on. As with his low-key celebration of shamanism, Pollan embraces the noble savage caricature: the individual’s private choices are sacrosanct and should be protected against the evils and demands of organized society.  Here, more than anywhere else, I couldn’t help but whisper a faint, “OK Boomer.”  

While I can agree with Pollan that there are flaws in our nation’s institutions, what he writes here implies a wholesale rejection of institutions per se. Meanwhile, Pollan was nurtured and supported by this nation’s institutions.  I struggle to take him seriously when he discusses capitalism or the War on Drugs.   Pollan is a wealthy, successful writer who has lived in some of the most expensive parts of the country during a time of unprecedented growth in private wealth (1980s-2020s).  His legal liability with his poppy flowers was nothing compared to the dangers that law-abiding Black men faced during the same time frame.  The main victims of the War on Drugs were not hippy gardeners, but Black and Latino men, their families, and their communities.  I admit that these remarks have an ad hominem  flavor, but if Pollan wants me to accept his moral vision, he needs to live it himself. 

Who Has Known the Mind of Christ?

What is a thoughtful Christian to think?  I think it should be obvious that recreational indulgence in psychedelics and opiates are off the table. The Bible consistently condemns intoxication (e.g. Prov 23:29ff, Gal 5:21, I Peter 4:3).  The Apostle Paul writes, “Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit.” (Ephesians 5:18) If one is tempted towards intoxication, Spirit-filled acts of faith provide feelings of joy and exhilaration in its place. The positive effects of serving God last much longer than a momentary high, both in this life and the next. Alcohol can be consumed without intoxication, but most of the substances surveyed by Pollan cannot.  

Again, a slippery slope argument beckons. I can almost hear Pollan asking, What difference is there between beer and cannabis, or wine and peyote? Is it even possible to identify a line between sobriety and drunkenness? As I’ve noted above, these arguments are flawed. The existence of some borderline cases doesn’t dissolve the significance of a given concept. Just because there are some cases where it’s unclear if someone is intoxicated implies nothing about those cases where someone is clearly sober or clearly drunk. I don’t know when someone goes from hairy to bald, but few of us have difficulty with unambiguous cases.

The clinical and therapeutic potential of psychedelics are hinted at in Mind on Plants but covered in depth in How to Change Your Mind. Many mainstream outlets have taken notice in the past couple months. This is where things become more morally complex. To the extent that psychedelics are not addictive and to the extent that scientific evidence supports positive mental health outcomes, I support their professionally-administered use. Nevertheless, I would urge significant caution for anyone pursuing this therapeutic route. I would like to see more clinical trials, in general. I would also want to know that less extreme forms of therapy had failed, in particular cases. The temptation to exploit such powerful substances seems high—no pun intended.

Part of the benefit that psychedelics provide is the ability to escape one’s immediate situation or even self. To some extent, spiritual thinking does the same thing: how can I lay down my anxieties and get the big picture (Matt 6:28ff)? How can I move away from self-absorption and serve someone else (Lev 19:18)? Psychedelics introduce a break in an obsessive self-orientation. But such breaks can be introduced in more mundane ways, say, through conversation or private reconceptualization exercises. For the majority of cases, proceeding through such routes is ideal. When these normal routes fail, I could imagine introducing these types of substances.  

Aside from the potential overapplication of such therapies, I also am concerned from a distinctively theological standpoint. To some extent, psychedelics hack one’s central nervous system with the effect of creating a form of spirituality. It’s no surprise that introducing a spiritual form would have positive therapeutic effects. God made the brain to operate according to certain healthy habits that could function well with any measure of big-picture thinking. So, the concern then is not the form that psychedelics introduce to the mind, but rather that there is no content filling that form. It tends to be whatever is put into it by the setting of the “trip” or what was already there somehow in the mindset of the patient.  

Pollan is explicitly materialistic in his world view, so he’s primarily concerned with therapeutic expedience. If the form delivers a good result regardless of the content, who cares? But what if a day will come when God comes to earth to judge the living and the dead? (II Tim 4:1) The content filling those spiritual forms suddenly matters. That is not to say that the therapy itself is a problem, but more that it doesn’t go far enough. Someone who peacefully comes to accept their own death but who is not primed to be resurrected in the age to come is like someone who’s being distracted by one thief while another picks his pocket. In that case, all the clinical pageantry built around psychedelics simply institutionalizes a form of escapism.