This Is Your Mind on Plants

by Michael Pollan

Several of the experts I was interviewing had suggested that I really couldn’t understand the role of caffeine in my life—its invisible yet pervasive power—without getting off it and then, presumably, getting back on. Roland Griffiths, one of the world’s leading researchers of mood-altering drugs, and the man most responsible for getting the diagnosis of “Caffeine Withdrawal” included in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (or the DSM-5 for short), the bible of psychiatric diagnoses, told me he hadn’t begun to understand his own relationship to caffeine until he stopped using it and conducted a series of self-experiments. He urged me to do the same. The idea here is that you can’t possibly describe the vehicle you’re driving without first stopping, getting out, and taking a good look at the thing from the outside. This is probably the case with all psychoactive drugs, but is especially true of caffeine, since the particular quality of consciousness it sponsors in the regular user feels not so much altered or distorted as normal and transparent. 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. It’s so p...