This Is Your Mind on Plants

“My wager in writing This is Your Mind On Plants is that the decline of the drug war, with its brutally simplistic narratives about “your brain on drugs,” has opened a space in which we can tell some other, much more interesting stories about our ancient relationship with the mind-altering plants and fungi with which nature has blessed us.”

The author positions himself in contradiction to the war on drugs, which he accuses of advancing a “brutally simplistic” story about the nature of drugs and their interactions with the human brain. He continues by acknowledging that some drugs can be immensely harmful to human health but that they can function as a “blessing” when used appropriately.

“And as a matter of public health, it has become obvious to anyone paying attention that, after a half century of waging war on drugs, it is the drugs that are winning. Criminalizing drugs has done little to discourage their use or to lower rates of addiction and death from overdose. The drug war’s principal legacy has been to fill our prisons with hundreds of thousands of nonviolent criminals—a great many more of them Black people than hippies.”

Pollan argues that the decades-long war on drugs in the US has not effectively reduced drug use or the harmful consequences of drug addiction. Indeed, he claims that this war has created significant social problems, including the mass imprisonment of many Americans convicted of nonviolent drug crimes. Black Americans are overrepresented in these drug-related convictions, a fact that ties into Pollan’s earlier analysis of Nixon’s anti-drug laws serving as a way to demonize and incarcerate Black people. This quotation helps Pollan lay the groundwork for his argument that the war on drugs is arbitrary, misguided, and harmful to Americans’ health and civil liberties.

“For what are the odds that a molecule produced by a flower out in the world would turn out to hold the precise key required to unlock the physiological mechanism governing the economy of pleasure and pain in my brain? […] It might be the result of sheer molecular accident. But it seems more likely that it is the result of a little of that and then a whole lot of co-evolution: one theory holds that Papaver somniferum is a flower whose evolution has been directly influenced by the pleasure, and relief from pain, it happened to give a certain primate with a gift for horticulture and experiment.”

Pollan ponders how some plants, such as poppies, can produce specific molecules that reliably reduce pain by creating changes in the human brain. He considers the possibility that people are in part what have made these plants so potent and so successful by breeding them in certain ways and encouraging their growth.

“Someday we may marvel at the power we’ve invested in these categories, which seems out of all proportion to their artifice. Perhaps one day the government won’t care if I want to make a cup of tea for a migraine, no more than it presently cares if I make a cup of valerian tea (a tranquilizer made from the roots of Valeriana officinalis) to help me sleep, or even if I want to make a quart of hard apple cider for the express purpose of getting drunk. After all, it wasn’t such a long time ago that the fortunes of the apple and the poppy in this country were reversed.”

Pollan considers the ever-changing landscape of the war on drugs, which in less than a century switched from prohibiting alcohol such as apple cider but allowing opium products to the reverse. In this quotation Pollan hints that he is hopeful that in the future the government will interfere less in the ways people choose to grow and use plant drugs.

“But though it is now widely recognized that the drug war has been a failure, to judge by the number of arrests for violations of the drug laws, it might as well be 1997: 1,247,713 arrests then; 1,239,909 in 2019. If the drug war is over the police and the DEA haven’t gotten the memo yet.”

Pollan discusses how greatly the societal perception of the war on drugs has shifted since the 1990s when he originally published his article about opium. He contrasts the changing public discourse with the hard facts on drug arrests, showing that while many Americans now feel the war on drugs is ineffective, law enforcement agencies continue to spend time and money making drug-related arrests.

“Indeed, for most of us to be caffeinated to one degree or another has simply become baseline human consciousness. Something like 90 percent of humans ingest caffeine regularly, making it the most widely used psychoactive drug in the world, and the only one we routinely give to children (commonly in the form of soda). Few of us even think of it as a drug, much less our daily use of it as an addiction.”

Pollan clarifies that caffeine is a psychoactive drug since it affects our brain function and can have addictive properties. Commonly found in tea, coffee, and soda, most humans are influenced by caffeine on a daily basis, making this drug an important part of our lives as individuals and our societies too.

“That reconsolidation of self—the daily sharpening of the mental pencil—took much longer than usual and never felt quite complete. I began to think of caffeine as an essential ingredient for the construction of an ego. Mine was now deficient in that nutrient, which perhaps explains why the whole idea of writing this piece—indeed, of ever writing anything ever again—had come to seem insurmountable.

Pollan, who gave up caffeine entirely while writing about it, reflects on how he felt dull and distracted at the beginning of his experiment without his morning cup of coffee and several teas throughout the day. He even feels that caffeine helps to shape one’s ego by providing concentration and energy for certain tasks and feels intimidated at the thought of writing without it.

“It’s an eerily familiar story: A credulous animal duped by a plant’s clever neurochemistry into acting against its interests. An uncomfortable series of questions arises: Could we humans be in the same boat as these hapless bees? Have we, too, been duped by caffeinated plants not only to do their bidding but to act against our own interests in the process? Who’s getting the best of our relationship with caffeine-producing plants?”

Pollan finds that while bees love caffeinated nectar and return to it more often than other plants, it actually holds little benefit for them. He questions whether humans, who also love caffeine, are benefitting from the relationship or simply doing these plants’ bidding by making them a dominant plant in world ecosystems.

“Coffeehouses became uniquely democratic public spaces; in England they were the only spaces where men of different classes could mix. Anyone could sit anywhere. But only men, at least in England, a fact that led one wag to warn that the popularity of coffee ‘put the whole race in danger of extinction.’ (Women were welcome in French coffee houses.)”

Pollan explains that England’s first coffee houses did not just popularize coffee, they created a new cultural space by allowing men of different backgrounds and classes to mingle. They quickly became crucial meeting places for exchanging social and professional information but were also controversial as they excluded women, many of whom resented their spouses’ preoccupation with the coffee house.

“Wine and beer did not go away, yet the European mind had been pried loose from alcohol’s grip, freeing it for new kinds of thinking that caffeine helped to foster. You can argue what came first, but the kind of magical thinking that alcohol sponsored in the medieval mind began in the seventeenth century to yield to a new spirit of rationalism, and, a bit later, the Enlightenment.”

Pollan explains how coffee came to substitute a great deal of alcoholic beverages for many Europeans. While wine and beer were still consumed, they were not as ubiquitous as before, and coffee offered a different effect on consumers’ minds, which Pollan argues encouraged rational rather than magical or religious thinking.

“Before caffeine, the whole idea of a late shift, let alone a night shift, was inconceivable, the human body would simply not permit it. But the power of caffeine to keep us awake and alert, to stem the natural tide of exhaustion, freed us from the circadian rhythms of our biology, and so, along with the advent of artificial light, opened the frontier of night to the possibilities of work.”

Pollan paints a picture of life before caffeine was readily available. He argues that the daily tasks of medieval life were dictated by the sun’s rise and set, and people’s natural circadian rhythms (along with the influence of alcohol of course). The introduction of caffeine allowed people to overcome their natural urge to sleep, making them more productive for their employers. Pollan connects this constant productivity with the feverish pace of work during the Industrial Revolution.

“As the seventeenth century Japanese tea master Sen Sotan put it, ‘The taste of tea and the taste of Zen are the same.’ Tea lost most of that taste on its transit from East to West, which transformed it from an instrument of spirituality into a commodity […] Soon after the British East India Company began trading with China, cheap tea flooded England, rapidly displacing coffee as the nation’s preferred caffeine delivery system.”

The author acknowledges East Asia’s centuries-long love affair with tea, during which they elevated the drink into a spiritual practice. Western merchants did not adopt this same reverence for the drink itself but prized tea leaves as a valuable commodity. Likewise, Pollan claims that Western consumers were unaware of tea’s sacred reputation and viewed it simply as a way to imbibe caffeine.

“In England, tea allowed the working class to endure long shifts, brutal working conditions, and more or less constant hunger; the caffeine helped quiet the hunger pangs, and the sugar in the tea became a crucial source of calories. (From a strictly nutritional standpoint, workers would have been better off sticking with beer).”

The author explains how the Industrial Revolution required workers in England to stay awake and alert for long shifts while doing demanding work on empty stomachs. As a source of caffeine, tea and its added sugars enabled workers to fulfill their tasks, though to the detriment of their individual health overall.

“Caffeine is an important molecule that happens to fit snugly into an important receptor in the central nervous system, allowing it to occupy it and therefore block the neuromodulator that would normally bind to that receptor and activate it. That neuromodulator is called adenosine; caffeine, its antagonist, keeps adenosine from doing its job by getting in the way.”

Pollan explains the science behind caffeine’s ability to keep us awake. He clarifies that caffeine does not really make us less tired, it just temporarily keeps us from feeling our exhaustion since the adenosine in our brains cannot access its receptors.

“Caffeine itself might not be bad for you, but the sleep its stealing from you may have a price: According to Walker, research suggests that insufficient sleep may be a key factor in the development of Alzheimer’s disease, arteriosclerosis, stroke, heart failure, depression, anxiety, suicide, and obesity.”

Pollan discovers that coffee and tea may hold some health benefits, but their caffeine is considered problematic by sleep experts, who have shown caffeine’s negative effect on sleep quantity and quality.

“Almost from the start, the blessings of coffee and tea in the West were inextricably bound up with the sins of slavery and imperialism, in a global system of production organized with such brutal rationality that it could only have been fueled by a—what else?—caffeine itself.”

The author makes it clear that while coffee and tea companies were enriching themselves from the immense popularity of their products in Europe, this wealth came at the human cost of enslaved people in Asian, African, and North American colonies. Pollan later connects this exploitation to the modern relationship between tea and coffee consumers and farmers in which the farmers only receive a tiny share of the profits.

“It was hard to imagine how this remote and sleepy rural scene had anything whatsoever to do with our everyday urban lives, but one doesn’t exist without the other. The two realms have become intimately connected, and are now implicated in each other’s destinies by powerful vectors of trade and desire. Our taste for coffee, only a few hundred years old, has reconfigured not only this landscape and the lives of the people who tend it, but the very rhythms of our civilization.”

The author reiterates how consumer’s global demand for coffee has greatly influenced agriculture and local economies in places such as Columbia, which he visited to experience a coffee harvest himself.

“We’re in charge, we tell ourselves. But isn’t that exactly what you would expect an addict to say? Sure you are. Bear in mind that caffeine has been known to produce delusions of power in the humans who consume it, and that this story of world-conquering success would read very differently had the plants themselves been able to write it.”

Pollan questions whether humans can confidently feel “in charge” of our relationship with coffee and tea since we can become so dependent on it. He notes that while caffeine has benefits and drawbacks for humans, our obsession with these plants has only benefitted them by spreading them around the globe.

“In Western Culture, peyote is a relatively obscure ‘psychedelic,’ but it's a precious sacrament in the Native American Church, the pan-tribal religion that sprang up in the 1880s, at the moment when Indian civilization in North America stood on the verge of annihilation. Native Americans I had interviewed claimed that their peyote ceremonies had done more to heal the wounds of genocide, colonialism, and alcoholism than anything else they had tried.”

Pollan impresses upon the reader the sacred reputation peyote holds in Indigenous American communities, who use it to create healing experiences for people in pain. The author contrasts this reverent attitude with the broader culture’s perception of this cactus as a psychedelic.

“As for plant sources of mescaline, most of the peyote gathered in Texas ends up in the hands of Native Americans, who have enjoyed the legal right to consume it since President Clinton signed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act Amendment in 1994 […] It is also a crime for a non-Native person to possess it, grow it, transport it, buy it, sell it, or ingest it. Which, according to many Native Americans, is exactly as it should be.”

This quote reiterates the legal protections Indigenous Americans have for access and legal use of peyote. The right to use peyote without government interference was a hard-fought battle, and many Indigenous Americans feel the access should remain solely in their hands. This idea contrasts to the philosophy of Decrim Nature, which attempts to decriminalize all plant-based drugs and therefore would provide access to peyote (among other plants) to everyone, which many Indigenous Americans feel threatens peyote’s sacred status.

“She put the button in a small plastic pot with some potting soil and gave it to me. I brought it home to Berkeley, where, at least in the eyes of the law, it instantly transformed my garden into an ‘illicit drug lab.’”

Pollan explains how he came about having a single peyote cactus in his garden. The idea of his garden now being considered an “illicit drug lab” recalls his discussion of the opium poppies in the first part of the book, particularly his concern over being arrested on drug charges like Jim Hogshire and his wife, who only had dried poppies purchased from a florist in their home. Though this section of the book was written much later, and the war on drugs policies were not quite as pressing, the legal issues surrounding peyote is much more complicated and in flux.

“Parker became a roadman, a charismatic leader of peyote ceremonies, and, in time, the Johnny Appleseed of Peyotism. He traveled all over Indian Territory, bringing his bag of peyote buttons and leading meetings for the Cheyenne, the Arapaho, the Pawnee, the Osage, and the Ponca, among other tribes.”

Pollan credits Comanche leader Quanah Parker with spreading the word about peyote to different Indigenous American communities in the late 1800s. His passion for this plant medicine would go on to fuel the popularity of the new Native American Church.

“We have been given this plant for our own needs […] The Great Spirit gave us this plant a long time ago. Before the melting pot, other people probably had the kind of connection with nature, with a place and its plants, that we still have. They once had their own healing plants, but they’ve been lost.”

This quotation from Navajo leader Steven Benally expresses the Indigenous American view of how their people and the peyote are inherently connected. Benally laments that as non-Indigenous people have become more disconnected with their landscapes, they have turned to Indigenous relationships with nature to try to reclaim what they have lost. This puts certain plants, such as peyote, in danger of being over-harvested and becoming extinct.