#520: Michael Pollan This Is Your Mind on Plants

You can never understand your relationship to a drug, to a psychoactive substance, unless you get off it, and stand back, and look at it. Because if you're an addict... you will never see it accurately.

Mental healthcare is in crisis. The people who practice it... know that they don't have very good tools. They have no tools that cure anything. At the best, they can alleviate symptoms. But the drugs they have to alleviate symptoms are pretty lousy ... The prospect of acquiring new tools to deal with the growing mental health crisis is attractive to just about everyone.

In general, the war on drugs is won by the drugs. They keep flourishing. Telling people you can't have them does not stop; it just makes them more dangerous.

Now, you can abuse caffeine ... But it's good for your heart, it's good for your blood pressure, it prevents certain kinds of cancer, it's associated with lower rates of certain kinds of cancer, dementia, it improves your memory, it improves people's performance in athletics. It's kind of amazing.

I have always been fascinated by this one, weird particular use to which we put plants. And this is true for most cultures. Probably 95% of cultures around the world have some plant or fungus they use to change consciousness to achieve transcendent experience.

I had read Aldous Huxley's 'Doors of Perception' when I was working on 'How to Change Your Mind' and before I had used a psychedelic. It's a wonderful essay. I encourage everybody to look at it. It's the first trip report, really. And it's influenced everybody's trip since then. You may not have read this book, but what you saw and happened to you on psychedelics, he wrote in part.

We tend to criminalize the drugs used by populations that make the establishment uncomfortable—immigrants and the poor and African Americans.

It's perfectly legal to grow opium poppies (possess the seeds and grow the poppies) unless you have knowledge that you are growing a scheduled substance in which case the same act miraculously gets turned into a federal crime of manufacturing narcotics that carries a 5-20 year sentence.

Alcohol and tobacco are much more dangerous than any of the drugs we've criminalized.

As a writer, finding where you stand, who you are in the story you're telling, is everything in terms of getting people to come with you on the journey.

What's happening in the garden is a microcosm of our engagement with the natural world for better and worse ... I could use the garden and gardening as a place to explore our relationship to nature.

When the drug war ends, our confusion and problems around drugs are not going to end. In fact, they're going to intensify.