This Is Your Mind on Plants

by Michael Pollan

Or, perhaps I should say, with the power to change consciousness in ways that run counter to the smooth operations of society and the interests of the powers that be. As an example, 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.

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.

I’ve come to appreciate that when we take these plants into our bodies and let them change our minds, we are engaging with nature in one of the most profound ways possible.

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.

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). Or, to put it a bit more scientifically, I profile here a sedative, a stimulant, and a hallucinogen.

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?

Human consciousness is always at risk of getting stuck, sending the mind around and around in loops of rumination; mushroom chemicals like psilocybin can nudge us out of those grooves, loosening stuck brains and making possible fresh patterns of thought.

President 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.

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.”*

The war on terror has taken over from the war on drugs as a justification for expanding government power and curbing civil liberties.

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.

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.

Humans have been cultivating opium poppies for more than five thousand years,

In the nineteenth century, especially, the poppy played as crucial a role in the course of events as petroleum has played in our own century: opium was the basis of national economies, a staple of medicine, an essential item of trade, a spur to the Romantic revolution in poetry, even a casus belli.

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 apparently haven’t gotten the memo yet.

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.

In the case of Coffea, whose range had previously been limited to a few corners of East Africa and southern Arabia, its appeal to our species allowed it to circumnavigate the planet, colonizing a broad band of territory, mainly in the tropical highlands, that reaches from Africa to East Asia, Hawaii, Central and South America, and now covers more than 27 million acres.

The path of Camellia sinensis has taken the plant from its origins in Southwest China (near present-day Myanmar and Tibet) as far west as India and east to Japan, colonizing more than 10 million acres.

At high doses, caffeine is lethal to insects. Its bitter flavor may also discourage them from chewing on the plants. Caffeine also appears to have herbicidal properties and may inhibit the germination of competing plants that attempt to grow in the zone where seedlings have taken root or, later, dropped their leaves.

Caffeine does, in fact, shrink the appetite and discombobulate insect brains.

Hard as it is to imagine, Western civilization was innocent of coffee or tea until the 1600s; as it happens, coffee, tea, and chocolate (which also contains caffeine) arrived in England during the same decade—the 1650s—so we can gain some idea of the world before caffeine and after.

Coffee was known in East Africa for a few centuries before that—it’s believed to have been discovered in Ethiopia around AD 850—but it does not have the antiquity of other psychoactive substances, such as alcohol or cannabis or even some of the psychedelics, like psilocybin or ayahuasca or peyote, which have played a role in human culture for millennia.

Tea is also older than coffee, having been discovered in China, and used as a medicine, since at least 1000 BC, though tea wasn’t popularized as a recreational beverage ...

But like the caffeine molecule itself, which rapidly reaches virtually every cell of the body that ingests it, the changes wrought by coffee and tea occurred at a more fundamental level—at the level of the human mind. Coffee and tea ushered in a shift in the mental weather, sharpening minds that had been fogged by alcohol, freeing people from the natural rhythms of the body and the sun, thus making possible whole new kinds of work and, arguably, new kinds of thought, too.

According to the story, a ninth-century herder by the name of Kaldi noticed how his goats would behave erratically and remain awake all night after eating the red berries of the Coffea arabica plant. Kaldi shared his observation with the abbot of a local monastery, who concocted a drink with the berries and discovered the stimulating properties of coffee.

Initially the new drink was regarded as an aid to concentration and used by Sufis in Yemen to keep them from dozing off during their religious observances. (Tea, too, started out as a kind of spiritual NoDoz for Buddhist monks striving to stay awake through long stretches of meditation.)

Within a century, coffeehouses had sprung up in cities across the Arab world. In 1570 there were more than six hundred of them in Constantinople alone, and they spread north and west with the Ottoman Empire.

In China the popularity of tea during the Tang dynasty also coincided with a golden age.

A Venetian traveler to Constantinople in 1585 noted that the locals “are in the habit of drinking in public in shops and in the streets, a black liquid, boiling as they can stand it, which is extracted from a seed they call Cave . . . and is said to have the property of keeping a man awake.”

the fact that you needed to boil water to make them meant that they were the safest things a person could drink. (Before that it had been alcohol, which was more sanitary than water, but not as safe as tea or coffee. The tannins in all these beverages also have antimicrobial properties.)

In 1629 the first coffeehouses in Europe, styled on the Arab model, popped up in Venice, and the first such establishment in England was opened in Oxford in 1650 by a Jewish immigrant known as Jacob the Jew. They arrived in London shortly thereafter, and proliferated virally: within a few decades there were thousands of coffeehouses in London; at their peak, one for every two hundred Londoners.

Coffeehouses became uniquely democratic public spaces; in England they were the only such 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 coffeehouses.)

You paid a penny for the coffee, but the information—in the form of newspapers, books, magazines, and conversation—was free. (Coffeehouses were often referred to as “penny universities.”)

London’s coffeehouses were distinguished one from another by the professional or intellectual interests of their patrons, which eventually gave them specific institutional identities.

Tom Standage, author of A History of the World in 6 Glasses (three of which happen to contain caffeine: coffee, tea, and cola), writes that coffeehouses “provided an entirely new environment for social, intellectual, commercial, and political exchange,” making those in London what he calls “the crucibles of the scientific and financial revolutions that shaped the modern world.”

One of England’s earliest magazines, The Tatler, began its life in the Grecian in 1709 and was itself an attempt to translate the sheer variety of London’s coffeehouse culture to the page. The magazine was divided into sections, each covering a different subject and named for the coffeehouse associated with that particular interest.

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.

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.”

A Londoner could get a cup of tea in the coffeehouse, but tea didn’t have its own dedicated public venue until 1717, when Thomas Twining opened a tea house next door to Tom’s, his coffeehouse in the Strand. Here women were welcome to sample the various offerings and buy tea leaves to brew at home.

Thanks in part to Twining’s innovation, what was soon to become the more popular caffeinated beverage in Great Britain came under the control of upper- and middle-class women, who proceeded to develop a rich culture of tea parties, high teas and low, and a whole regime of tea accessories, including china and porcelain, the teaspoon and the tea cozy, and finger foods expressly designed to accompany tea.