This Is Your Mind on Plants by Michael Pollan
Michael Pollan usually writes about food. This book is about three plant drugs - opium, caffeine, and mescaline. Caffeine is in coffee, tea and Coca Cola, so it is a food of sorts. The other two substances are not in the food category, although I learned by reading the book that you can make a nice opium tea.
While opium and mescaline are essentially illegal, it’s OK to have caffeine drinks. Hundreds of years ago, European and Arab countries illegalized coffee because governments thought that people who came together to drink coffee could organize political resistance to the government.
These drugs do good in the world. Coffee and tea are popular drinks that perk up many people. Mescaline is a central element of many native American rituals and spiritual beliefs. Opium gives us morphine, a powerful painkiller in medicine.
Opium is the first drug discussed. Much of this section was written in 1996 and 1997 when the war on drugs was at its peak in the US. Michael Pollan wrote parts of this section as a Harper’s Magazine article. He was too afraid to publish it, lest he get arrested. As he was writing about opium, he was trying to grow poppies, the source of the drug. In 1996, the year the author was trying to figure out how to be a poppy farmer, the Clinton administration and the courts came down hard on drug users. A million people were arrested, some of whom had their property confiscated. That year, with massive arrest numbers, 4,700 people died from drug overdoses. Today, we lose 50,000 each year to drug misuse.
In the mid-1990s, Pollan grew poppies to extract heroin and experiment with it. Ironically, he lived in Connecticut, 60 miles from the headquarters of Purdue Pharma, the company that had just started aggressively marketing Oxycontin, an opiate, as a miracle painkiller. Another irony of the times was that when the US government was coming down hard on opiate users, the federal Food and Drug Administration gave Purdue free rein to push its pills with no oversight.
After Pollan figured out how to grow poppies, he figured out that he was breaking the law. He had ordered seeds from a reputable firm so he figured that it must be OK to grow them. Under state and federal law, it was legal to buy seeds as long as you didn’t plant them.
During the 1990s a man named Bob Hogshire self-published a magazine about drugs. He was an expert in licit and illicit pharmaceuticals so Michael Pollan looked to him for guidance in growing poppies and producing opium. Hogshire’s book, Opium for the Masses, gave detailed instructions about how to brew tea from poppies that would get the drinker buzzed. The book made it clear that it wasn’t clear that brewing this tea was legal.
Pollan read the classic books by Coleridge and DeQuincey that documented the pleasures of opium as well as its use in relieving pain. He was ready to grow the plant so he tried to contact Bob Hogshire. Unfortunately, the opium whisperer had been arrested by the feds. Apparently, a lot of his drug-related activity was indeed illegal. He was accused of using poppies (that he had purchased from a florist) to extract heroin, which carried a prison sentence of up to ten years. After posting bond and waiting three months for a hearing, the charges were dropped, but a few weeks later, new charges were brought. Both Michael and Bob were scared.
Pollan was panicked since he had ordered seeds from a catalog and was planning on growing poppy flowers in his backyard garden. To ease his mind, Pollan called up the local state police barracks and asked if growing poppies was illegal. He was assured that it wasn’t, but after what had happened to Bob Hogshire, Pollan was nervous. He did some more research and found a few experts. They told him that using poppies to make any heroin product was illegal, but if you kept your head down, you were unlikely to face any consequences. Pollan successfully grew poppies and, with the help of some poppy tea fans, mastered the tedious art of extracting mild heroin powder from the flower pods.
Around this same time in the mid-1990s, the FDA banned florists from selling poppies. They also ordered each seed catalog company to not sell poppies to anyone. The FDA admitted that just having the seeds was not illegal as long as you didn’t plant them. The anti-drug folks were serious. That begs the question of what was the point of buying the seeds in the first place.
Undaunted, Pollan finished his article about the history of opium and growing poppies and brewing tea and submitted it to Harper’s. The editor ran it by in-house legal counsel who admitted that he knew nothing about drug laws and suggested getting a criminal lawyer to look at it. The latter attorney was brutal in his evaluation. Given that, in 1996 when the article was submitted, the federal government was obsessed with anti-drug efforts, publishing the piece could set Pollan up for many indictments. The big one was manufacturing a controlled substance even though the article didn’t reference actually producing heroin. Pollan enjoyed the mild euphoria of poppy tea which he didn’t consider a manufactured drug. The lawyer made the point that once you’re indicted by the feds you almost always lose, even if you didn’t do it. The government could also seize the defendant’s home and other property before the trial. You could go to court to get it back. Good luck with that.
The editor did what any good editor would do: get a second opinion. He asked another lawyer to look at it in terms of freedom of expression. Lawyer 2 said that there were only two parts of the piece that were problematic. If Pollan could cut the recipe for poppy tea and his description of what a great buzz it gave, things should be fine.
Author Pollan did not want to cut anything, but he needed the fee and didn’t want to spend twenty years in prison, so he eliminated the dicey parts.
The book describes what drinking poppy tea is like. It does not make you high or produce hallucinations. It does “lighten the existential load” and provide euphoria. It makes you and your world more pleasant. Of course, it’s still illegal.
After the author finished his experiment, he dug up the poppies so that there would be no evidence of his horticultural efforts. He likes gardening and was pleased that in the summer of 1996 his garden produced a new crop that gave him special memories.
In the last part of the section, Pollan muses about why it is legal to make wine and brew beer but illegal to steep poppy tea. He has no problem with regulating and criminalizing dangerous drugs, but he doesn’t see poppy tea as dangerous. It tastes terrible and you can't drink much more than a cup of the stuff. The brew basically relaxes you, not a bad thing.
The section finishes with Pollan aptly observing that in 1996 and 1997 – the peak of the government’s drug wars – Purdue Pharma was schmoozing federal regulators so that the company had no FDA scrutiny as it ramped up to create the opioid crisis that still plagues us today.
Caffeine is the most widely used psychoactive drug in the world, with 90% of humanity ingesting it regularly. Adults like coffee and tea while children drink cola soda. Pollan, a big coffee drinker, stopped cold turkey as part of his research for the book. As he withdrew from caffeine, he felt miserable, lost mental acuity, and snapped at people, thus confirming his belief that caffeine is an important element of modern life. Caffeine is not just for humans. Researchers have discovered that caffeinated honeybees are more efficient at pollinating plants.
While coffee was first consumed in East Africa around 850 AD, it came to Europe in the mid-1600s. Pollan argues that this was a really big deal:
“Coffee and tea ushered in a shift in the mental weather, sharpening minds that had been fogged by alcohol, freeing people from the natural rhythms of the body and the sun, thus making possible whole new kinds of work and, arguably, new kinds of thought, too. Having brought what amounted to a new form of consciousness to Europe, caffeine went on to influence everything from global trade to imperialism, the slave trade, the workplace, the sciences, politics, social relations, arguably even the rhythms of English prose.”
Coffee first exploded in popularity in the Arab world. In 1570, there were 600 coffee houses in Constantinople and they spread all over the Ottoman Empire. (Query: How many were Dunkin Donuts?) The Muslim world forbade alcohol consumption, thus opening up a big growth opportunity for coffee. Coffee drinkers were considered more educated, liberal and hip than the masses, which upset clerical and government leaders who tried to shut down coffee houses, usually unsuccessfully. People like their brew.
As we learned in a previous Bob in the Basement book (Six Glasses that Changed the World), London quickly became home to hundreds of coffeehouses. You couldn't make coffee at home so you had to go out. People would head to the local brew house, grab a cup, sit down, and talk about politics, science, business, and whatever else was on their minds. Coffeehouses were referred to as “penny universities.”
Coffeehouses specialized in various intellectual pursuits. Some focused on shipping issues, while others were home to good discussions about banking and finance, physics and math, literature and poetry, and the London Stock Exchange. Some no doubt attracted drinkers trying to figure out what’s wrong with the Red Sox.
Initially, coffeehouses were for men only, so many ladies objected to the reality that their men were hanging out and drinking coffee with the guys and ignoring their domestic obligations. In an attempt to appease their women, some enterprising men published flyers asserting that coffee made guys more virile and better in bed – “Coffee adds spititualescency to the Sperme.”
As it turned out, enterprising entrepreneurs began marketing tea for the ladies and it worked. Women began routinely scheduling afternoon “teas” with their friends which helped tea become the drink of England.
Taking the lead from England, coffeehouses soon sprung up in Paris and spread all over France. The monarchy of both countries saw these gathering places as incubators of insurrection and tried to quash the coffee movement. It didn’t work. People needed their caffeine. Many scholars do believe that the French Revolution was organized in the coffeehouses of Paris.
Pollan makes the point that without coffee, a lot of the great ideas, scientific discoveries, and political thought of the times may never have happened. Sipping coffee perked up people and led to incisive discussions. Drinking beer in taverns just led to inebriated men who were not interested in serious thinking.
Intellectuals all over Europe were wild about coffee. Voltaire was said to consume as many as 72 cups of java a day. Iconic writers Denis Diderot and Honore de Balzac did their writing while drinking coffee.
Turning our attention to contemporary times, Michael Pollan had a tough time quitting coffee. He had days of actual pain and several weeks of lethargy to the point that he did not write. He had certainly been addicted to caffeine. He observed that besides the intense psychological need for caffeine, he really missed the ritual of going to his local bakery in the morning and having a pastry and coffee while chatting with friends. He also notes that today, with people doing their work at Starbucks, it looks like the coffee is a frill, with intense concentration on your laptop keyboard being the main show.
It is established that caffeine helps people remember better and keeps them more alert. Some people claim that it sharpens their creativity. However, studies have shown that coffee improves focus and linearity. This may help promote abstract thinking, but creativity is enhanced when one is not sharply focused.
In the early 1700s, the French shipped coffee plants to their colony of Martinique in the Caribbean. Legend has it that the person entrusted with delivering the plants gave up some of his water ration to keep the plants alive. He was thirsty for much of the voyage but the plants thrived. In any event, French colonies in the New World soon were growing and shipping lots of coffee.
Coffee helped propel Europe into the modern era. Before coffee became king, beer, ale and wine were consumed by workers on the job. This sort of worked when jobs involved repetitive simple manual labor, but as economies evolved, jobs required more intense and precise thinking, not easy when you’ve been drinking all day. The ascendance of coffee and the invention of the minute hands on clocks happened around the same time. As work became more nuanced and dependent on thinking skills, it became important to know the precise time. A worker doing manual labor in the field could approximate time by looking at where the sun was. He didn’t need to know the exact time.
Caffeine boosted the development of business because the drug allowed workers to toil at night, thus creating the second shift. With alert workers drinking coffee, the workday could be extended and productivity and profits increased.
By the 1800s, tea had become less expensive than coffee. Now the masses could afford caffeine. The East India Company initially shipped tea to Europe from China but after a few decades set up tea farms in India, a British colony. Workers were paid very little, and it was less expensive to ship tea from India than from China.
Tea helped fuel the industrial revolution. It kept workers alert so that they could safely work on big machines in factories producing textiles and other goods. The demand for tea in England helped the East India Company grow and increase profits. It did this by setting up a trade deal with India. India would ship opium to China in exchange for tea which would be shipped to England. While the Brits enjoyed their cuppa, increased supplies of opium wreaked havoc in Chinese society.
In the early 1950s, the coffee break was invented at a tie factory in Denver. The company owner, Mr. Greinetz noticed that productivity dramatically increased after he gave his workers time to drink coffee. At first, he didn’t pay people while they were drinking coffee. Labor took the company to court and Mr. Greinetz was ordered to pay folks while they were in the building. The fact that he had bragged to the judge that the coffee breaks increased productivity probably didn’t help his case.
Coffee is one of the most popular beverages in the world. One thing that bothers the author is that the farmers who grow the crop only receive pennies on the dollar for their work. Many layers of distribution that increase the cost to the consumer ensured that a lot of people make a lot of money on the bean, but not the people who grow the crop.
After three months, Michael Pollan had a cup of coffee. The caffeine gave him an instant lift. He felt alert and full of energy. He had gotten into the habit of drinking a lot of coffee every day. It had become a crutch so he used his three-month hiatus from caffeine to cut down the number of cups he drank each day.
Mescaline Is a drug derived from the peyote cactus that is an integral part of many Native American rites and rituals. In 2020 Michael Pollan had planned to visit Peyote Gardens in southern Texas that is the only place in the world where peyote (the source of mescaline) cactuses grow wild. Unfortunately, Covid happened in March and the trip was postponed indefinitely.
Pollan was initially delighted with Covid Spring, which enabled him and everyone else to take a step back and slow down and, in his case, literally smell the roses in his garden. After some time, boredom set in and the author decided to do research while he was waiting out the year or so that it would take to get back to semi-normal. He read a lot of classic books on psychedelic drugs including Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, a classic 1953 recounting of what it was like to use the drug regularly.
Huxley wrote that the drug greatly sharpened his ability to notice detail in the world. Everything was sharper. Pollan decided that he had to get first-hand knowledge of the drug. This would be a challenge, because mescaline had pretty much disappeared from the American drug world. The major exception was Native American tribes which used the drug in religious and spiritual activities.
Pollan developed a list of people who used the drug regularly, al Native Americans. One point users made was that they considered mescaline more of a medicine than a drug. It put people in a slightly higher plane and made them better attuned and more sensitive to people. It was integral to the weekend mescaline circles that the Native American Church helped organize all over the country.
Mescaline is different from other psychedelics in that one must ingest a fair amount for it to kick in, as opposed to LSD and such which require very tiny doses to do their thing. Mescaline also affects users for up to 14 hours, much longer than other drugs. You need to plan on being in the same place for 14 hours after taking mescaline.
Since it’s very difficult to get mescaline in the US, Michael Pollan decided to grow a cactus that would produce the drug. While the Peyote Cactus only grows in a few places, its relative, the San Pedro Cactus, is more ubiquitous. Pollan had a cutting sent to him and planted it in his front yard. It grew but he had no clue how to get mescaline out of it. He contacted one of the few experts on the topic, a guy named Keeper Trout who was as strange as his name. After several confusing conversations, Keeper sent Michael a recipe on how to extract the drug from the cactus. The procedure of cooking the cactus was pretty simple, although the cook is manufacturing a controlled substance, a no-no under the federal code. Pollan also got a seedling for the Peyote Cactus which he dutifully planted.
Peyote/mescaline has been used by Indigenous peoples of North America for at least six thousand years but its use by American Indians goes back only a century or so. For many years, Indians were restricted by the federal government from doing native ceremonies. Those limits gradually went away as the Native American Church grew in size and power. The church incorporated a peyote ceremony as part of its liturgy. That essentially is people on mescaline thinking and talking for a day-long event. Many whites saw this as like a retreat that a traditional church would hold so it was OK. Of course, the participants were buzzed on mescaline.
Quinnah Parker had an Indian father and a white mother. He became a successful farmer. He was respected by both natives and non-natives. Quinnah claimed that peyote had cured a stomach injury that a bull gave him so he became a peyote enthusiast, the Johnny Appleseed of the drug. He initiated all-night peyote ceremonies where people ingested as much peyote as they wanted. There was a tight routine to this, with chants and meditation and singing. The US government tried to clamp down on Quinnah but he convinced people that the ceremony was like some Christian rituals and he prevailed.
With prohibition came a new government effort to stop peyote consumption. A manager from the US Department of Indian Affairs went to a peyote ceremony and was impressed, so the government backed off.
Over the years there were many efforts to stop the natives from using peyote. The biggest setback was a Supreme Court decision written by Justice Anthony Scalia in 1990 that said the Native American Church’s religious interests were outweighed by the fact that peyote was illegal for most Americans. That was a big setback, but legislation signed in 1994 gave the church the right to reinstate the peyote ceremony.
The Native American Church makes the case that the peyote ceremony helps bond natives, preserves their culture and has even cut down the incidence of drug addiction among natives. The ceremony is steeped in spirituality so it probably does a lot of good things. Indian leaders make the case that if federal laws are loosened so that more people can get peyote, that will cut down the availability of it for Indian purposes and will likely create another reason for drug gangs to flourish. Many natives really believe that peyote/mescaline is a plant medicine, not a drug.
Some Indian leaders do fear that their brethren are consuming too much peyote and have become “overeaters” so there is a movement to educate people about the dangers of too much of a good thing.
A man known as Sandor Iron Rope spent a lot of time describing a peyote ceremony to the author. It literally is spiritual and family-oriented. Even if you don’t have a family, you have one at the ceremony. Many believe that peyote is an omniscient spirit, looking out after them. Peyote heightens one's senses instead of dulling them like alcohol and many drugs do. Many natives see the ceremony as helping heal their trauma, something shared by many Native Americans.
There is an almost-hypnotic state in the ceremony, with some participants believing that they stopped alcohol consumption after attending several peyote ceremonies. There is almost a group therapy vibe going on.
Michael Pollan ended up receiving two capsules of mescaline. He took the first pill and found that there was no big mood-altering moment. Gradually he became interested in just looking intensely at what was around him in the world. He said that the experience was so interesting that you didn't want to do anything else but just be there.It was like the drug tok the blinders off his being. His brain was being opened up to experience new things. He spent about twelve hours in an altered state. While he really enjoyed it, he was happy to come back to his normal world.
While Michael Pollan never attended a peyote ceremony, he and his wife were invited to California to go to a ceremony which uses the medicine derived from the San Pedro Cactus instead of the traditional peyote. This Wachuma ceremony comes out of Peru. A California herbalist named Taloma had developed the ceremony based on her years of working with plants in a variety of holistic health applications. She was particularly interested in using peyote products to treat trauma which she believed was a serious problem for many people.
Michael and his wife, Judith, had to be tested for Covid-19 before the ceremony which was held outside, with social distancing, because of the virus. They were looking forward to the experience but a nasty storm hit Northern California a few hours before the ceremony and it was called off.
All was not lost, however, Taloma taught Michael how to extract mescaline from cactus. Essentially you carefully skin the plants, cut out the tender tissue inside, and boil it for three days. Some people do a lot of chanting but that’s not necessary.
Taloma’s mentor, Don Victor who learned about the power of peyote from mystics in his native Peru, talked to Michael and Judith about how the cactus medicine can heal trauma. He told them that peyote and similar substances opened up the heart that had been closed because of trauma.
Taloma offered to have a mini-ceremony so that the Pollans could have some sense of that before they went home to Connecticut. They would drink cactus jive that came from boiling the plant. That would be a gentler experience than using the actual powder from the cactus.
The experience was less intense than what he had felt after taking mescaline but it really mellowed him out and brought him into close mental contact with the other four people in the group. Judith, Michael’s wife, was in a corner crying with Taloma comforting her. Later, she explained that she saw visions of her deceased father, who was tough on his children. She felt that the ceremony had helped her cope with the trauma she felt from her rocky relationship with her father. The ceremony had helped her move out of the box she was in because of her father.
That’s it. Michael Pollan has no doubt that mescaline, peyote and related substances do alter our minds but he also believes that the drugs/medicines unlock our inherent but sometimes ignored abilities to slow down and better appreciate the world and the people in it, and to help us deal with unresolved issues that affect our quality of mental life. As Taloma said, the peyote and related substances in the ceremony don’t do the job for us, but they open a path that we can take to get the job done. It’s weird, but it sort of makes sense.
Bob’s Take
I have read and enjoyed two of Michael Pollan’s food books. This one was really different, almost mystical in some parts. The book was Intriguing, but it sometimes got into the weeds too much. It might have been easier to digest as three separate articles in The Atlantic.
Pollan raises some thought-provoking questions about why drugs are legal and some are not. He wonders why making poppy tea is illegal but brewing beer and wine (and now growing and using marijuana) is legal.
I was most interested in the discussion of caffeine. Coffee and tea sparked the Industrial Revolution, created the second factory shift, kept us up at night, and sharpened our focus at work and at home. With 90% of the world enjoying the brew, it is a universal drink.
Caffeine helped Great Britain exploit people. Sending opium into China in exchange for tea was devastating to the Chinese because of the resultant addiction, but it was good for British merchants. Businessmen soon figured out that growing tea in India, a part of the British Empire, would be hugely profitable because you could use semi-slave labor which cost very little. In the 1800s, the East India Trading Company was much bigger than Apple is today.
The section on mescaline/peyote recounts another hit the American government gave Native Americans over the years. Medicine/drugs derived from certain cacti were an integral part of the native religious and spiritual life but for many decades the tribes were forbidden to use them. No doubt many people ignored the law and carried on but it wasn’t until Bill Clinton signed a law in 1994 that Indians could use peyote and such legally.
The book nicely describes the importance of spiritualism, mysticism, and nature to Native Americans. In a real sense, cactus substances – drugs/medicine – were the anchor of many of their religious ceremonies.
I had never heard of the Native American Church but it did a great job of organizing its 500,000 members to push back successfully against US government efforts to squash important Indian rites and rituals.
