review of michael pollan's latest book in the TLS
Michael Pollan knows a lot about plants. The Botany of Desire (2001) explored how four of them – apples, tulips, cannabis and potatoes – were bred to satisfy four basic human desires: for sweetness, beauty, intoxication and control. In This Is Your Mind on Plants he has turned his attention to three more, or rather, the psychoactive chemicals they contain: opium from poppies, caffeine from coffee and tea, and mescaline from the peyote and San Pedro cacti. Pollan is no stranger to the psychoactive, having tried several psychedelics of increasing potency for How to Change Your Mind (2017), culminating with 5-MeO-DMT, derived from smoking the venom of the Sonoran Desert toad. It was, he said, like experiencing the Big Bang in reverse.
Everything in the three essays presented here is gentler. “Opium” is a reprint of an article from 1997, which Pollan wrote for Harper’s Magazine, about the perils of growing poppies at the height of the American War on Drugs, which contains several pages that had to be cut from the original piece. Pollan explains that, in an Orwellian legal fudge, one is allowed to grow poppies, but only if one does not know what they can be used for. The poppy’s seeds, however, are legal at all times. This lunacy – that an illegal plant produces legal seeds which then grow into illegal plants – feels even starker when we learn that, right as Pollan was justly worrying about the DEA raiding his garden, Purdue Pharma began aggressively marketing OxyContin, an opioid that was to kill almost a quarter of a million people and addict countless more.
Mescaline is illegal, too, unless you are a member of the Native American Church. Its present ceremonial use began at the end of the nineteenth century as “a ritual of accommodation to the Indians’ new reality”, though ancient cactus effigies strongly suggest that it was used 6,000 years ago in what is now Texas. Aldous Huxley took mescaline in the “canonical trip” he recorded in The Doors of Perception (1954), which encouraged other non-Native people to consume it, and there is now spiky disagreement between the “Decriminalize Nature” campaign group, who believe everybody should be allowed plant medicine, and the Church, who would prefer their sacred substance to be left alone. The peyote cactus is delicate, slow-growing and tricky to harvest sustainably. “Cultural appropriation” becomes a less contentious term when a scarce resource is being depleted.
Following the necessary soul-searching, Pollan samples some mescaline, and finds himself agreeing with Huxley’s “reducing valve” theory of consciousness (also put forward by William James and Henri Bergson): that the mind’s function is to restrict what we experience, because if we perceived the world as it actually is we would be overwhelmed and, presumably, tripping so hard that we’d be eaten before we could reproduce.
Caffeine, which 90 per cent of people consume daily, has almost the opposite effect to this – it sharpens the mind as is. Pollan credits caffeine, in the audiobook on which his essay here is based, with “creat[ing] the modern world”. “If alcohol fuels our Dionysian tendencies”, he writes, “caffeine nurtures the Apollonian.” Coffee was consumed across the Arab world in the sixteenth century, just as tea was consumed across China during the Tang dynasty, and both periods produced arguably more advanced societies than contemporary alcohol-quaffing Europe; Charles II moved to close down English coffeehouses in 1675 on the grounds that they were fomenting revolution; and Pollan believes coffee’s ability to uncloud the mind made it the pharmacological cornerstone of the Enlightenment. If one wishes to write a treatise, or peer into a microscope for hours, what better companion is there? A couple of centuries later, corporations woke up to paid coffee breaks making workers more productive. But there is no such thing as a thermodynamic free lunch; any non-calorific boost in energy must be paid for. The quarter-life of caffeine is twelve hours, so we pay for our daytime focus with poor sleep, which we then counter with more caffeine the following day. We are all very much addicted to a universally legal thing.
Pollan neatly illustrates our cultural schizophrenia about drugs with a list of adjective pairs which align with coffee and tea, as well as with beer and wine (“male/female”, “casual/ceremonial”, “obvious/subtle”). “Let’s face it”, he says, “the rococo structures of meaning we’ve erected atop these psychoactive molecules are just culture’s way of dressing up our desire to change consciousness.” There are no courses in tasting orange juice.
This Is Your Mind on Plants – its title an echo of the “fried egg” anti-drug advertisements of the 1980s – is witty, entertaining and polite, but it is not trivial. Subtly but assuredly, Pollan argues that which plants (and fungi) we are allowed and how depends, consciously or otherwise, on the interests of power. If something makes us more able to contribute to, or tolerate, capitalism, then it’s in; if it does the opposite, then it’s out. We are deprived of healing, and often grievously harmed, while being told that the restriction of helpful medicine is for our own protection. Yet coffee has advanced by our hand from a corner of Ethiopia to occupy 27 million acres – and we can’t get out of bed without it.
Josh Raymond is a freelance writer and trainee psychotherapist. His website is joshraymond.co.uk
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