The instant New York Times bestseller Expert storytelling . . . [Pollan] masterfully elevates a
series of big questions about drugs plants and humans that are likely to leave readers
thinking in new ways.-New York Times Book Review From #1 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. Of all the
things humans rely on plants for-sustenance beauty medicine fragrance flavor fiber-surely
the most curious is our use of them to change consciousness: to stimulate or calm fiddle with
or completely alter the qualities of our mental experience. Take coffee and tea: People around
the world rely on caffeine to sharpen their minds. But we do not usually think of caffeine as a
drug or our daily use as an addiction because it is legal and socially acceptable. So then
what is a drug? And why for example is making tea from the leaves of a tea plant acceptable
but making tea from a seed head of an opium poppy a federal crime? In This Is Your Mind on
Plants Michael Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs-opium caffeine and mescaline-and
throws the fundamental strangeness and arbitrariness of our thinking about them into sharp
relief. Exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around these drugs while
consuming (or in the case of caffeine trying not to consume) them Pollan reckons with the
powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants. Why do we go to such great lengths to seek
these shifts in consciousness and then why do we fence that universal desire with laws and
customs and fraught feelings? In this unique blend of history science and memoir as well as
participatory journalism Pollan examines and experiences these plants from several very
different angles and contexts and shines a fresh light on a subject that is all too often
treated reductively-as a drug whether licit or illicit. But that is one of the least
interesting things you can say about these plants Pollan shows for when we take them into our
bodies and let them change our minds we are engaging with nature in one of the most profound
ways we can. Based in part on an essay published almost twenty-five years ago this
groundbreaking and singular consideration of psychoactive plants and our attraction to them
through time holds up a mirror to our fundamental human needs and aspirations the operations
of our minds and our entanglement with the natural world.
