This Is Your Mind on Plants

by Michael Pollan

Nothing about drugs is straightforward. But it’s not quite true that our plant taboos are entirely arbitrary. As these examples suggest, societies condone the mind-changing drugs that help uphold society’s rule and ban the ones that are seen to undermine it. That’s why in a society’s choice of psychoactive substances we can read a great deal about both its fears and its desires.

“You want to know what this was really all about?” Ehrlichman began, startling the journalist with both his candor and his cynicism. Ehrlichman explained that the Nixon White House “had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. . . . We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Launched in 1996, Purdue’s aggressive marketing campaign for OxyContin convinced doctors that the company’s new formulation was safer and less addictive than other opiates. The company assured the medical community that pain was being undertreated, and that the new opiate could benefit not just cancer and surgery patients but people suffering from arthritis, back pain, and workplace injuries. The campaign produced an 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 from OxyContin: thousands of people who became addicted to legal painkillers eventually turned to the underground when they could no longer obtain or afford prescription opiates; four out of five new heroin users used prescription painkillers first.

The friend who had once smoked opium smiled wistfully as he recalled the long-ago afternoon: “The dreams! The dreams!” was all he would say. When I pressed him for a more detailed account, he referred me to Robert Bulwer-Lytton, the Victorian poet, who’d likened the effect to having one’s soul rubbed down with silk.

We have the scientist’s explanation: the alkaloids in opium consist of complex molecules nearly identical to the molecules that our brain produces to cope with pain and reward itself with pleasure, though it seems to me that this is one of those scientific explanations that only compounds the mystery it purports to solve. 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? There is something miraculous about such a correspondence between nature and mind, though it too must have an explanation. 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. The flowers that gave people the most pleasure were the ones that produced the most offspring. It’s not all that different from the case of the Bourbon rose or the beefsteak tomato, two other plants whose evolution has been guided by the hand of human interest.

Old-timers around here tell me that Joe Matyas used to make the best applejack in town—100 proof, I once heard. No doubt his cider was subject to “abuse,” and from 1920 to 1933 its manufacture was a federal crime under the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution. During those years the farmer violated a federal law every time he made a barrel of cider. It’s worth noting that during the period of anti-alcohol hysteria that led to Prohibition, certain forms of opium were as legal and almost as widely available in this country as alcohol is today. It is said that members of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union would relax at the end of a day spent crusading against alcohol with their cherished “women’s tonics,” preparations whose active ingredient was laudanum—opium. Such was the order of things less than a century ago.

Arbitrary though the war on drugs may be, the battle against the poppy is surely its most eccentric front. The exact same chemical compounds in other hands—those of a pharmaceutical company, say, or a doctor—are treated as the boon to mankind they most surely are. Yet although the medical value of my poppies is widely recognized, my failure to heed what amounts to a set of regulations (that only a pharmaceutical company may handle these flowers; that only a doctor may dispense their extracts) and prejudices (that refined alkaloids are superior to crude ones) governing their production and use makes me not just a scofflaw but a felon. 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 poppy 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.

But whatever the DEA was thinking in 1996 and ’97, the government missed the real story about opium, as in fact did I. While we were caught up in this remote and ridiculous skirmish in the drug war, the drug in question was quietly and legally making its way into the bodies of millions of Americans, as Purdue Pharma pursued its marketing campaign, seeding the culture with seductive disinformation about the safety of OxyContin.

There’s a parable here somewhere, about the difference between journalism and history. What might appear to be “the story” in the present moment may actually be a distraction from it, a shiny object preventing us from seeing the truth of what is really going on beneath the surface of our attention, what will most deeply affect people’s lives in time.

Maybe I should have anticipated the problem. The scientists have spelled out, and I had duly noted, the predictable symptoms of caffeine withdrawal: headache, fatigue, lethargy, difficulty concentrating, decreased motivation, irritability, intense distress, loss of confidence(!), and dysphoria—the polar opposite of euphoria. I had them all, to one degree or another, but beneath the deceptively mild rubric of “difficulty concentrating” hides nothing short of an existential threat to the work of the writer. How can you possibly expect to write anything when you can’t concentrate? That’s pretty much all writers do: take the blooming multiplicity of the world and our experience of it, literally concentrate it down to manageable proportions, and then force it through the eye of a grammatical needle one word at a time.

Not everyone in seventeenth-century England approved of coffee or of the coffeehouse. Medical men debated the beverage’s healthfulness in fevered tracts, and women strenuously objected to the amount of time men were spending in coffeehouses. In a pamphlet titled “The Women’s Petition Against Coffee” published in 1674, the authors suggested that the “Enfeebling Liquor” robbed men of their sexual energies, making them “as unfruitful as those Desarts whence that unhappy Berry is said to be brought.” The unsubtle subtitle of the pamphlet—“Humble Petition and Address of Several Thousands of Buxome Good Women, Languishing in Extremity of Want”—did not mince words: men were spending so much time in coffeehouses, and drinking so much coffee, that they arrived home with “nothing stiffe but their joints.” The men replied with their own pamphlet, claiming that the “Harmless and healing liquor . . . makes the erection more Vigorous, the Ejaculation more full, [and] adds a spiritualescency to the Sperme.” Any problem in this department the pamphleteers wrote off to the “Husband’s natural infirmity” or possibly “your own perpetual Pumping him, not drinking coffee.”

Voltaire was a fervent advocate for coffee, and supposedly drank as many as seventy-two cups a day. Coffee, and coffeehouses, fueled heroic labors in Enlightenment writers. Denis Diderot compiled his magnum opus while imbibing caffeine at the Café de Procope. It’s safe to say the Encyclopédie would never have gotten finished in a tavern. Honoré de Balzac was convinced his vast literary output, as well as the operations of his imagination, depended on heroic doses of coffee, consumed through the night as he chronicled the human comedy in his innumerable novels. Eventually, he developed such a tolerance for caffeine that he dispensed altogether with the diluting effects of water, developing his own unique method of administering the drug dry: I have discovered a horrible, rather brutal method that I recommend only to men of excessive vigor. It is a question of using finely pulverized, dense coffee, cold and anhydrous, consumed on an empty stomach. This coffee falls into your stomach, a sack whose velvety interior is lined with tapestries of suckers and papillae. The coffee finds nothing else in the sack, and so it attacks these delicate and voluptuous linings . . . sparks shoot all the way up to the brain.

Here’s what I’m missing: I miss the way caffeine and its rituals used to order my day, especially in the morning. Herbal teas—which are barely, if at all, psychoactive—lack coffee’s and tea’s power to organize the day into a rhythm of energetic peaks and valleys, as the mental tide of caffeine ebbs and flows. The morning surge is a blessing, obviously, but there is also something comforting in the ebb tide of afternoon, which a cup of tea can gently reverse.

The idea that the act of sipping tea could be a spiritual practice culminated in the Zen tea ceremony. Here the scrupulous attention to every physical gesture and material detail gave participants an opportunity to step outside the bustle and messiness of daily life, turning their minds instead to the Zen principles of reverence, purity, harmony, and tranquility. Approached in this spirit of transcendence, the tea ceremony held the power to change consciousness. As the seventeenth-century Japanese tea master Sen Sotan put it, “The taste of tea and the taste of Zen are the same.”

Reading Huxley’s account while quarantined in a pandemic intensified my desire to try mescaline. The idea that a molecule could somehow deepen or expand the scope of one’s reality suggested a mental strategy nicely tailored to the situation. I was reminded of the lovely line Shakespeare gave Hamlet, enduring a different kind of claustrophobia: “I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space.” Mescaline might offer a way to do that, not as a means of escape from circumstance, but as an expansion of it. Instead of an alternate reality, it promised infinitely more of this one.

Huxley experimented with mescaline because he wished to learn something about his mind and its relation to reality. No doubt what he learned was influenced by his mind’s own predilections and prior concepts, as much as he claimed he wished to escape them by accessing something nearer to “direct perception” of reality. (If there is a villain in The Doors of Perception, it is the constraining power of words and concepts—ironic, perhaps, for a writer, or perhaps not, since writers are acutely aware of the limitations and betrayals of their principal tool.)

It was more gradual than that for me—there was no ZANG. When I first felt the mescaline come on, I was sitting outside on the deck reading while keeping an eye on two bright yellow heads slicing through the rippling water—a pair of strong swimmers. I had glanced up from my book when I suddenly felt a wave of revulsion, almost a nausea, for print. Why would anyone ever want to read? Work to tease meaning from all these ugly black marks? Suddenly the whole enterprise seemed absurd. No, what I wanted and needed to do now was not to read but to look—at the dark blue water, at the yellow heads carving lines through it, at the grain and the stains in the cedar boards cladding the house. It was incredible how much there was to see! The pelicans lumbering over the water before slowly climbing into the sky. The diamond reflections of sunlight glancing off the ripples in the bay. The crazy shade of chartreuse in Judith’s socks. I was captivated by it all, and could not imagine ever wanting to do anything but devour with my eyes all that there was to see.

It was this—the immensity of existing things—that began to overwhelm me during the next phase of the day, as peak intensity approached and things took a darker turn. I neglected to mention that Hamlet’s claim to be king of infinite space was conditional: the very next line is “were it not that I have bad dreams.” Here they came. Now it felt like this was more reality than I could handle. Wide open, my senses were admitting to awareness exponentially more of everything—more color, more outline, more texture, more light. It was, to quote from Huxley, “wonderful to the point, almost, of being terrifying.” Indeed. I felt as though things could easily tip over into terror. Huxley’s trip had convinced him that the function of ordinary consciousness is to protect us from reality by a process of reduction or filtration—he spoke of consciousness as a “reducing valve,” and the metaphor had never seemed more apt. Throwing open the doors of perception was wonderful, in the literal sense of the word, but without the usual filters of consciousness there came the fear “of being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind, accustomed to living most of the time in a cozy world of symbols, could possibly bear.”

What was happening in my brain?! The notion that there is so much more out there (or in here) than our conscious minds allow us to perceive is consistent with the neuroscientific concept of predictive coding. According to this theory, our brain admits the minimum amount of information needed to confirm or correct its best guesses as to what is out there or, in the case of our unconscious feelings, in here. These top-down predictions of reality and prior beliefs are a bit like maps to sensory and psychological experience, and as long as they represent the actual territory well enough for us to navigate it successfully, there’s no need to flood the system with lots of unnecessary detail. Natural selection has shaped human consciousness not necessarily to scrupulously represent reality but to maximize our survival, admitting only the “measly trickle”—Huxley’s phrase—of information needed for us to get by rather than the full spectrum of what there is to perceive and think.

Psychedelics seem to mess with this system in one of two ways: In some cases, the brain’s predictions about reality go haywire, as when you see faces in the clouds or musical notes leap to life or something happens to convince you you’re being followed. Common on LSD or psilocybin, this kind of magical thinking might occur when top-down predictions generated by the brain are no longer adequately constrained, or corrected, by bottom-up information arriving from the world via the senses.

But if Huxley’s account and my experience are representative, then something very different happens in the brain on mescaline. Here, the bottom-up information of the senses and the emotions inundates our awareness, sweeping away the mind’s predictions, maps, beliefs, and “cozy symbols”—all the tools we have ...

So why not feel like that always? Well, it would be exhausting, surely, to turn life into this sort of unending observance. Ordinary consciousness probably didn’t evolve to foster this kind of perception, focused as it is on being—contemplation—at the expense of doing. But that, it seems to me, is the blessing of this molecule—of these remarkable cacti!—that it can somehow crack open the doors of perception and recall us to this truth, obvious but seldom registered: that this is exactly where we live, amid these precious gifts in the shadow of that oncoming moment.

Taloma began by taking a bundle of dried sage from a purse and lit it; she then smudged the plant, the knives, and then us with fragrant smoke. There were two ways to cook cactus, and Taloma showed me both. The first, more painstaking method calls for cutting the spiky plant into foot-long lengths with a knife, and then systematically removing its defenses. First the spines, by cutting a tiny notch around each areole and then scooping them out, taking care to remove as little of the precious flesh as possible. Next you stand the piece of cactus on end and, using a long knife, carefully slice down the length of each rib, separating it from the woody white core, which is discarded. After cutting the long triangular ribs into more manageable lengths, you remove the cuticle—the tough, semitransparent layer of skin that, along with the spines, protects the plant’s watery flesh from its unforgiving environment. This was the painstaking part: gaining sufficient purchase on an edge of cuticle, either with a paring knife or a thumbnail, in order to slowly peel it off in strips. Shorn of its defenses, the cactus’s flesh is surprisingly tender and moist, like a soft cucumber. It had the puckering bitterness of any plant alkaloid; think of oversteeped tea, but nastier.

The second method Taloma showed me for cooking the cactus was both easier and more gratifying, though it works only with a fairly young plant that hasn’t yet developed a woody core. After removing the spines from a foot-long length of cactus, you simply slice it through the center, as thinly as possible. This yields dozens of paper-thin six-pointed stars, their bright chartreuse coronas fading to snowy white at the center. Taloma piled these stars in a tall spaghetti pot, filled it nearly to the brim with water, and put it on a burner. This is when the domestic cooking scene gave way to something more ceremonial. Taloma lit her sage and smudged the pot of cactus with its smoke. Then she bent over the pot, looking down at its bright green stars bobbing in the clear water, said a prayer, and, in Spanish, began to sing. Before Taloma left, she offered these instructions: bring the pot of cactus to a rolling boil and cook it for three days, more or less, being careful to add more water whenever the level in the pot dropped below a couple of inches. When the stars turn from white to translucent, it is ready. Cool, then filter the mash through a fine cloth, put the pot back on the stove, and reduce the liquid by half. Pour the tea into Mason jars and store in the refrigerator.

At first glance the room looked like a peasant marketplace in Cuzco, the floor spread with woven cloths in colorful patterns and four large animal skins—a bear, a deer, a bison, and a buffalo. On closer inspection, however, every object had been carefully placed in one of four quadrants, each corresponding to one of the cardinal directions and one of the four elements. Here’s a partial list of the objects Taloma had set out on the altar: vials containing purple sand from Big Sur; gigantic seed pods from Peru; an intricately carved gourd; a bowl of spring water from Esalen; a snake skin; a wooden carving of four grandmothers circled around a lit candle; a marble etched with the seven continents floating in water; a talking stick made from the dried core of a Wachuma cactus; an enormous ear of multicolored corn; fossils; crystals; a dozen or so candles; a Wachuma flower in full bloom; eight stones in the shape of hearts; an abalone shell holding a packet of dried sage leaves; the feathers of a condor and a white owl; a collection of shells; the head of an eagle; and, somewhat incongruously, a photograph of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

(How saccharine these words must sound! I can only imagine. I’m afraid banality is an unavoidable hazard of working with psychedelics; they are profound teachers of the obvious. But sometimes those are exactly the lessons we need.)