Author Michael Pollan has pretty much conquered food. “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants,” is the inescapable mantra of the slow-food movement his work helped spark and the first of Pollan’s “rules.” But thinking enough about anything to distill it to a punchy truism tends to lead the thinker to contemplation of further frontiers. And now with our bellies fed, it’s high time— Pollan’s new book says—to feed our heads.
How to Change Your Mind may mainstream psychedelic drugs the way Pollan mainstreamed farm-to-table. His third book, Botany of Desire (2001), dipped into the powerful role of cannabis in our species’ coexistence with plants, but he has found a lot more to say since then. “The desire to change consciousness, weirdly enough, is a universal human desire,” he observed in a recent Recode interview, adding that How to Change Your Mind partly grew out of a 2015 New Yorker article on the lost science of psychedelics’ use as a treatment for psychological disorders.
Deeply researched and beautifully composed, the new book wanders from a historical survey of the war on drugs—in which Timothy Leary, Pollan determines, was no help—to interviews with deep-thinking dosers. They’ve “had full-blown mystical experiences, people whose sense of themselves as individuals had been subsumed into a larger whole—a form of ‘unitive consciousness’” which enfolded them “into the web of nature, as its not so humble servant.”
These seekers’ testimonials leave me with the nagging feeling that nothing about How to Change Your Mind is especially new. Long before Leary or William James, whose scholarship of everyday mysticism Pollan cites often, this book’s basic problem—“How do you put into words an experience said to be ineffable?” Pollan asks—has been mankind’s most compelling communication hurdle for millennia.
Therapeutic and spiritual uses for hallucinogens aren’t any less ancient, but Pollan’s new release foretells something else. What he offers today’s audience is an approved on-ramp to the mystical “mind made manifest,” roughly what the root of psychedelic (from Grk., ψυχή δῆλος) means. Could LSD be the nouveau yuppies’ gateway to a kind of religion? Psychedelics are a reliable gateway to contemplation of the beyond, but in modern yuppiedom—its Mecca and Medina being the Pacific Northwest and Palo Alto, plus parts of New York City and L.A.—the godliest ideals are self-improvement and über-productivity.
Tripping can serve these ambitions while also boosting mental health, Pollan finds, noting that certain cutting-edge corporations swear by it. “I know of one Bay Area tech company today that uses psychedelics in management training. A handful of other have instituted ‘microdosing Fridays.’” The practice of taking a tiny dose of LSD—“all the rage in Silicon Valley,” per Pollan—though not a central focus of the book, adds to its underlying thesis that psychedelics are on the cusp of new, mainstream prominence.
Pollan’s robust contribution to this movement, which a fun Financial Times feature heralded last year, is a dive into the field of research on psychedelic drugs’ possible role in treatment of addiction and other disorders. But since psychedelics can be addictive too—and their trafficking remains a crime, as in the case of the drug ring recently exposed at a nuclear missile base in Wyoming—the prospect of prescribing them to addicts seems dangerous and, well, stupid.
Speaking of danger and stupidity, I’m pouring one out for the bygone era when bored suburban teens were the target audience for acid trips. Dangling the prospect of politely acceptable drug use in front of people who follow Michael Pollan and religiously listen to NPR is something I find, personally, a little devastating. As some reviewers of How to Change Your Mind point out, rightly, reading about other people’s hallucinogenic trips is pretty boring, so I’ll spare you my recollections except to say that the LSD on offer at music festivals in coastal Connecticut or in my prep school roommate’s dorm at Bennington, was basically the same stuff Pollan gets in the office (a yurt) of his chosen psychedelic therapist.
As a guy with a long gray braid down his back and a tie-dye T-shirt told me during Deep Banana Blackout’s set at Gathering of the Vibes in the summer of 2008, he knew he had a good batch because, “The crystals were really fluffy.” That was also the summer we all learned about DMT, a short-acting hallucinogenic drug distilled in various forms from plants and animals—of which Pollan tries a particularly potent desert-toad-derived form, for research. (“There it was: the noetic sense William James had described,” he writes, “Which is I suppose the reason I decided I would smoke the toad.”) DMT throws your brain into a chemical bath that replicates the cognitive convulsions otherwise reserved for the moments of birth and death, according to my friend Cassie from camp. Or, as Pollan recalls, of his toad-derived DMT trip, “‘I’ was no more, blasted into a confetti cloud by an explosive force I could no longer locate in my head.”
Leading literary journalists and West Coast try-hards—and conservative Christians too (cf. Rod Dreher, “A Christian Approach To Psychedelics”)—have reclaimed psychedelic exploration. Aren’t they robbing younger generations of an outlet for formative destruction by reframing it as a good, productive thing for happy, healthy people to do? One arguable upside, though, to the rising trend in secular self-improvers dosing LSD: A mind-bending trip too many can often lead to a reconsideration of the actual divine. So, like the rise of Christian cults in the late 1960s, we may soon see Silicon Valley take a sudden, reactionary turn toward religion. And what a trip that would be.
An earlier version of this article referred to Rod Dreher as Catholic. We regret the error.
