This Is Your Mind on Plants
The instant New York Times bestseller • A Washington Post Notable Book • One of NPR's Best Books of the Year • Author of the highly anticipated forthcoming book, A World Appears
“Expert storytelling . . . [Pollan] masterfully elevates a series of big questions about drugs, plants and humans that are likely to leave readers thinking in new ways.” —New York Times Book Review
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Michael Pollan, a radical challenge to how we think about drugs, and an exploration into the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants—and the equally powerful taboos.
Of all the things humans rely on plants for—sustenance, beauty, medicine, fragrance, flavor, fiber—surely the most curious is our use of them to change consciousness: to stimulate or calm, fiddle with or completely alter, the qualities of our mental experience. Take coffee and tea: People around the world rely on caffeine to sharpen their minds. But we do not usually think of caffeine as a drug, or our daily use as an addiction, because it is legal and socially acceptable. So, then, what is a “drug”? And why, for example, is making tea from the leaves of a tea plant acceptable, but making tea from a seed head of an opium poppy a federal crime?
In This Is Your Mind on Plants, Michael Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs—opium, caffeine, and mescaline—and throws the fundamental strangeness, and arbitrariness, of our thinking about them into sharp relief. Exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around these drugs while consuming (or, in the case of caffeine, trying not to consume) them, Pollan reckons with the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants. Why do we go to such great lengths to seek these shifts in consciousness, and then why do we fence that universal desire with laws and customs and fraught feelings?
In this unique blend of history, science, and memoir, as well as participatory journalism, Pollan examines and experiences these plants from several very different angles and contexts, and shines a fresh light on a subject that is all too often treated reductively—as a drug, whether licit or illicit. But that is one of the least interesting things you can say about these plants, Pollan shows, for when we take them into our bodies and let them change our minds, we are engaging with nature in one of the most profound ways we can. Based in part on an essay published almost twenty-five years ago, this groundbreaking and singular consideration of psychoactive plants, and our attraction to them through time, holds up a mirror to our fundamental human needs and aspirations, the operations of our minds, and our entanglement with the natural world.
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Community Reviews
A bit meh to be fair. Nothing here is offensive or bad. It just feels like a bunch of blabber. Like turning up to a livestream where a smart guy tries to expand a 10 min story into 1 hour. Here it's 3 stories. Each is fine enough with some curious outcomes. Yet it's all so stretched out it becomes bad.
If you have amazing patience and don't mind slow pace this would be the ideal book. But I was waiting for more lessons and science and there is very little here. We don't learn much about drugs as we are only presented to 3 here. And instead of focusing on science or overall history we focus on the author's anecdotes with a bit of science mentioned. It reads like a great article forced into a wrong template. He tells us about being a journalist and writing one of the 3 parts as an article. Planting an illegal poppy and hence the police could come after him. Yet nothing happens. Should he have focused on actual criminals? Maybe on the science and laws in each country? On the economy of the drugs?
It reads like a travel blog. It would have been better as a Youtube series or documentary series.
If you have amazing patience and don't mind slow pace this would be the ideal book. But I was waiting for more lessons and science and there is very little here. We don't learn much about drugs as we are only presented to 3 here. And instead of focusing on science or overall history we focus on the author's anecdotes with a bit of science mentioned. It reads like a great article forced into a wrong template. He tells us about being a journalist and writing one of the 3 parts as an article. Planting an illegal poppy and hence the police could come after him. Yet nothing happens. Should he have focused on actual criminals? Maybe on the science and laws in each country? On the economy of the drugs?
It reads like a travel blog. It would have been better as a Youtube series or documentary series.
The cover of this book got me—it’s pretty, and the title is intriguing. This month’s memoir followed the ramblings of a gardener who knowingly grew plants that were potentially illegal to harvest, all for the sake of knowledge. I enjoyed his perspective and the research he put into his experiments. It was interesting without requiring a deep interest in botany. 3⭐️ Book #54 in 2026
Nobody writes investigative journalism like Michael Pollan. With expert voice and infectious enthusiasm, Pollan leads one down the plant medicine path in a manner both enlightening, and startlingly eye opening, sharing with vulnerability his own personal experiences with consciousness altering plants and the sordid histories they share in kind. Meanwhile, the facts and revelations of his investigations into the history, laws and regulations that govern mind altering plants leave your head spinning in a similarly psychedelic fashion; psychedelics themselves optional. But readers (and gardeners) be warned: once you know what Pollan knows about Poppies - you can’t unknow it, and then your alibi of ignorance is blown. You’ve been warned.
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