This Is Your Mind on Plants

by Michael Pollan

We don’t usually think of caffeine as a drug, or our daily use of it as an addiction, but that is only because coffee and tea are legal and our dependence on them is socially acceptable.

coffee and tea, which have amply demonstrated their value to capitalism in many ways, not least by making us more efficient workers, are in no danger of prohibition, while psychedelics—which are no more toxic than caffeine and considerably less addictive—have been regarded, at least in the West since the mid-1960s, as a threat to social norms and institutions.

At various times both in the Arab world and in Europe, authorities have outlawed coffee, because they regarded the people who gathered to drink it as politically threatening.

Evidently, normal everyday consciousness is not enough for us humans; we seek to vary, intensify, and sometimes transcend it, and we have identified a whole collection of molecules in nature that allow us to do that.

How amazing is it that so many kinds of plants have hit upon the precise recipes for molecules that fit snugly into receptors in human brains?

that the introduction of caffeine to Europe in the seventeenth century fostered a new, more rational (and sober) way of thinking that helped give rise to the age of reason and the Enlightenment.

Clinton didn’t start the drug war—that distinction belongs to Richard Nixon, who we now know viewed drug enforcement not as a matter of public health or safety but as a political tool to wield against his enemies.

explosion in prescriptions for OxyContin that would earn the company’s owners, the Sackler family,* more than $35 billion, while leading to more than 230,000 deaths by overdose. But that figure grossly understates the number of casualties

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

plants, right up there with the edible grasses—rice, wheat, and corn.

tea and coffee’s ticket to world domination involved something much more subtle and superfluous: their ability to change our consciousness in desirable and useful ways.

The notion of drinking any beverage piping hot was itself exotic, and, in fact, this proved to be one of the most important gifts to humanity of both coffee and tea: the fact that you needed to boil water to make them meant that they were the safest things a person could drink.

Coffeehouses became uniquely democratic public spaces; in England they were the only such spaces where men of different classes could mix.