Join acclaimed author Michael Pollan live to celebrate the release of This is Your Mind on Plants.
“Building on his lysergically drenched book How to Change Your Mind (2018), Pollan looks at three plant-based drugs and the mental effects they can produce. . . . A lucid (in the sky with diamonds) look at the hows, whys, and occasional demerits of altering one’s mind.”
From number one New York Times bestselling author Michael Pollan, a radical challenge to how we think about drugs, and an exploration into the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants — and the equally powerful taboos.
Since the 2018 publication of his instant New York Times bestseller How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan’s work on psychedelics has steered the national conversation on the medical potential and stigmas surrounding some of the most powerful, naturally-derived drugs. This is Your Mind on Plants (on-sale July 6) is in part a follow-up to the last book, with a chapter that takes a close look at the psychedelic molecule mescaline.
Michael explores its biomedical effects and reveals how the compound has been used as a healing tool by indigenous peoples of North and South America for thousands of years. There’s a chapter on his experiences growing opium in the 1990s at the height of the War on Drugs (originally published in Harper’s Magazine, but here extensively updated in light of the opioid crisis). And there’s a chapter on caffeine, the psychoactive compound that’s used by 90% of our species on a daily basis, which he has now expanded from his Audible Original audiobook. As you might expect, Michael engaged in some self-experimentation with these three drugs, and he shares his experience in the book. (In the case of caffeine, it was a matter of abstaining rather than indulging, which proved much harder for him to do!)
Juxtaposing these three compounds from the taboo to the everyday, This is Your Mind on Plants asks us to reconsider the whole notion of what a drug is.
