From the Bookshelf of Science and Inquiry…

This Is Your Mind on Plants

Michael Pollan

Start date: January 1, 2022

Finish date: January 31, 2022

Discussion: Book Club 2022

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Book Club 2022

November 2022 - Rise of the Mammals
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Mar 09, 2022 aPriL does feral sometimes rated it really liked it

Shelves: academic-notations, science, history, memoir, non-fiction, religious-terror

A Goodreads book club I belong to selected ‘This is Your Mind on Plants’ by Michael Pollan to read. The comments from those who read it were uniformly “this sucks” (I am more or less paraphrasing). So, having got the book from the library two months later (long waiting list) after the club read was over, I began to read it with some hopelessness for it being good, actually.

It IS good, although it is more of a memoir, with factual history digressions. I suspect the club readers didn’t care for th A Goodreads book club I belong to selected ‘This is Your Mind on Plants’ by Michael Pollan to read. The comments from those who read it were uniformly “this sucks” (I am more or less paraphrasing). So, having got the book from the library two months later (long waiting list) after the club read was over, I began to read it with some hopelessness for it being good, actually.

It IS good, although it is more of a memoir, with factual history digressions. I suspect the club readers didn’t care for the magazine essay style, what a number of publishers call long-form articles, similar to what The Atlantic magazine publishes. The club readers wanted Science with a big S.

The book is a collection of three long-form articles, basically. They each include a mix of personal experiences and interviews with people connected to the subject at hand, history-book facts, political history and a bit of science. Pollan is a journalist, after all, and a Harvard University teacher of writing. The book describes the benefits and harms of three plants with psychoactive (for human brains anyway) chemicals.

I have a question - why do plants have psychoactive chemicals? Does anyone know? Do plants use these chemicals on purpose to attract people to pick it, ingest or inject it, disperse it? Idk. A few insects also get affected - proven by curious scientists, for example, playing around with spiders who try to make a web while 'high'.

The plants are poppies (opium), Coffea and Camellia sinensis (caffeine), and peyote cactus (mescaline). Governments describe the cultivation, processing and distribution of these plants in black and white legalistic terms, but the truths of how beneficial or destructive the usage of the drugs derived from these plants is, is less straightforward. The single truth is opium, caffeine and mescaline all affect the brains of humans and a few other animals. Depending on the individual, addiction could follow usage of the drug. Some individuals behave dangerously erratic after taking the drugs, causing harm to society on several levels. Some addicted people kill or sicken themselves accidentally while 'high', or because they cannot function unless they are high they go to extraordinary, sometimes criminal, acts to get more of their drugs. People addicted to caffeine are not stigmatized on any level, though. Caffeine is legal, so it is widely available and comparatively cheap.

From the introduction:

"Each represents one of the three broad categories of psychoactive compounds: the downer (opium); the upper (caffeine); and what I think of as the outer (mescaline)."

The section on opium necessarily describes a twisted history of schizophrenic political reactions and legal chaos. The author grew poppies in his garden out of curiosity which caused him some fear of being arrested. Caffeine-producing plants are not dealing with global warming very well. This section describes the difficulties of planting and harvesting these coveted plants. The author intentionally stopped drinking anything with caffeine for three months to see what would happen. Mescaline has a sad and, to me, also a strange history of culture and religious culture-clash. Currently, religious politics are overwhelming common sense in the use and availability of mescaline, imho.

As you can tell, gentle reader, since the use of these drugs is mostly decided by politics, and the use of one of them is currently snowed under by mudslinging invectives and accusations of cultural misappropriation and intra and inter-cultural religious beliefs (although there definitely are validated science studies available), the science of how these drugs affect the brain is generally shouted down by the politicians and religious groups. No wonder the author essays were not focused on the science!

I think this book is very engaging and interesting. There are extensive Acknowledgement and Bibliography sections, as well as an Index. ...more

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Jun 28, 2021 GONZA rated it liked it

More than the effects of caffeine, mescaline and opium, Pollan recounts their evolution and the history of their use by the first people who used them up to the present day. Personally, I was a bit bored.

Piú che degli effetti della caffeina, della mescalina e dell'oppio, Pollan ne racconta la loro evoluzione e la storia dei loro usi nei primi popoli che li usarono fino ai giorni d'oggi. Personalmente mi ha un po' annoiato.

I received from the Publisher a complimentary digital advanced review cop ...more

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