This is Your Mind on Plants: A Review
Michael Pollan, if you are not familiar with his work, is a writer and campaigner who writes about food, plants, nature and drugs. Perhaps the most well known of his writings is his brief list of rules for eating in the modern world, which he tries to distill into the simple phrase, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly Plants.” This is Your Mind on Plants is an exploration of three different, commonly used, chemicals derived plants through exploring the author’s use of, and experiences on them. The first deals with opium, and the section is primarily an exploration of the idiocy, in the author’s opinion, of the drug laws in the US in the 1990s. He comes to the subject of opium through his job as a gardening columnist for Harper's Bazaar, and an interest in growing poppies. It is, he discovers, actually extremely easy to extract opium from the poppy seed pods, and he is confused, and curious, about the legal status of dried bunches of poppies sold in florist stores, or of seeds sold for horticultural or food use. It turns out that the DEA is moderately confused about this as well, and he is presented with a range of legal opinions from the various sources that he consults. It is this investigation that I found to be perhaps the most interesting section of the book, and there is an effective tension generated in his dilemma about what to do with the poppies in his garden.
The second section deals with caffeine, and I enjoyed Pollan’s brief history of its use, and his discussion of its role in modern culture and industry. In common with the opium section, the most interesting bits of writing were, for me, those in which the author doesn’t use the chemical in question, rather than when he does. I think that this says something about what you could term psychedelic writing in general (I’d make some exceptions here); that it is frequently self indulgent and tedious. I would not level this criticism at This is Your Mind on Plants as a whole, but the final section, on mescaline begins to veer strongly in this direction for a significant period. However, it must be said, Pollan is extremely honest about what he describes as the ‘banality’ of psychedelic experience, and the details of the effects of consuming an extract of cactus is mercifully fairly short. It is a shame that this is the end of the book, as I was left with a slightly dissatisfied feeling after finishing it despite much of it being excellent and interesting. Perhaps there is a lesson in that the anthropology and history of drug use is rather more compelling than actually taking them.