How to Change Your Mind

How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan

A Door He Had Spent His Life Avoiding

Michael Pollan was sixty when he started writing this book, which makes the project either ridiculous or perfect, depending on your view. He was the food guy. The man who taught a generation to eat plants, mostly, not too much. He had spent decades writing careful, measured books about agriculture and apples and the cook. Then he picked up the most stigmatized class of drugs of the twentieth century and decided to try them on himself.

He was an unlikely candidate. As a kid in the late 1960s he had absorbed every warning the culture could throw at him about LSD. One scientist had claimed acid scrambled chromosomes, which turned out to be wrong but never quite shook loose from the public mind. Art Linkletter blamed LSD for his daughter jumping from an apartment window. The Manson murders got linked to it. By college, Pollan was terrified of acid. He also had what he calls a painfully anxious adolescence, the kind where you and your psychiatrist both quietly wonder about your grip on sanity. So even when his wife Judith and a friend handed him a Mason jar of dried psilocybin mushrooms in his late twenties, the experience stayed small. He took the mushrooms two or three times. He noticed the chartreuse softness of ferns and a sudden compulsion to be outdoors, undressed, away from metal and plastic. The jar sat in the pantry until they cleaned out the kitchen years later and threw it out. Cocaine had come along by then, and a snowy-white powder made the wrinkled brown mushrooms seem dowdy and demanding.