Changing Consciousness with Psychoactive Plants - with Michael Pollan and Jules Evans

[Music] thank you very much uh lovely to be here with you all and it's great to be here with uh michael pollan um michael very distinguished a journalist and explorer um your last book uh how to change your mind really changed our minds and and and did probably more than any other book uh to shift public perceptions around psychedelics and helped to uh instigate this this uh rapid reevaluation of these substances so it's it's great to have you with us here michael oh thank you jules pleasure to be here and and in the royal institution sort of uh where i have fond memories of speaking in person when that book came out and also to be with you uh and continue this conversation we've been having for a while well we're going to talk about your new book this is your mind on plants which explores how humans like to change their consciousness in various ways particularly by consuming plants in the book you look at and you try an upper a downer and an outer so uh coffee and tea is the upper poppies is the downer and then masculine and peyote is the the outer um so we will look at these one by one but i'd like to start if i may just with some uh general question by the way for the audience we're going to talk for about an hour and then take your questions for the last 30 minutes so of course when we talk about altering our consciousness with with plants and drugs that sounds illicit uh and and fringe and you know a bit from from the underworld but your point is that it's actually completely normal and human to want to change our consciousness with plants yeah this this appears to be a universal drive um like the drive to reproduce and find food and survive um it's been there was a survey done in the 70s and they found that um you know the overwhelming majority of cultures had some some plant or fungus they used to change consciousness this could be alcohol this could be coffee and tea or it could be something more radical like a psychedelic and it's a very curious the one exception to this by the way were the inuit in greenland um and the only reason was nothing psychoactive grew where they lived and as soon as alcohol was introduced they took to it like just about everybody else um and it's a curious desire because on its face it would seem to be maladaptive uh in that when you change your consciousness at least in you know radical ways you're more prone to accidents um you're more vulnerable to being preyed upon you're defenseless um and so you would have thought that evolution would have edited out the drug takers by now uh if that were the case but in fact they're going strong um and that suggests that there is probably some value and you can imagine uh some of these values i mean the relief of pain is is a big deal right i mean and you know humans have been using opiates for thousands of years to do that at a time when medicine offered very little in the way of cures relieving pain was it was a was the the main thing that doctors could do for you um and and obviously it's very adaptive to have tools to uh to uh limit pain um i think relief from boredom is another um you know we're just not satisfied with um the world as it presents itself to us always um but i came to think that it had other values too and that um i think that a lot of drugs are kind of pro-social and they in the in the proper doses um they make us a little less egotistical and separate feeling and a little more um you know melded with the group with the community and we are very social beings we we cannot survive without other people as much as we like to mythologize our independence and you know alcohol is a great example at low doses it tends to um lubricate social situations and and make people get along better until they don't and um and then the psychedelics i think um have a value um particularly in times of crisis i think that they're um they're i describe them in the book as as um mutagens in a sense uh parallel to what radiation does to the genome you know causing causing mutations a very small percentage of which turn out to be useful to the individual or the species in the realm of culture uh drugs mutate means and create new memes and the the encounter of these powerful molecules with certain minds you know brings brings insights and in discoveries and new metaphors and um new theories and there's a long history of people who you know i mean artists and scientists who um have testified to the fact that it was during certain drug experiences that they had key insights so i think that envisions too that have perhaps informed religion the earliest you know i mean many religions are based on a mystical uh experience uh of an individual reported back to the group um so i think that they've played a really important role and hard to document all of it obviously but um but there it is so i think that yeah we tend to look down on consciousness change as escapist um but i don't think that's the right word for it um because it's often very hard work and um you know psychedelics i i don't think of as escapists i think they're it's too intense um that you know and and you actually they're you confront things you don't escape them very often and uh it's kind of impossible not to take mind-altering substances everything we eat alters us in in in some way or other oh yeah i mean think about sugar right i mean sugar has drug-like effects especially on children i mean that is the you know the childhood drug of choice and um uh and you know food what we eat changes our mood in all sorts of subtle ways and then there is this amazing psychoactive caffeine that 90 of us are involved with on a daily basis um and so we're functioning on an altered consciousness most of the time and you know and it's for many of us certainly for me it's default consciousness so if this is a natural normal thing that we all do um that's relevant of course for our attitude to drugs for our policies around drugs it means that the expression don't do drugs is is meaningless um do you think are you hopeful that this very damaging century-long war on drugs that america has waged on its own people and on other countries as well that we might really be nearing the end of it well i think we have a ways to go but i definitely think it's on the wane uh i think that in this country at least voters have expressed their desire to end the drug war quite dramatically in 2020 and in a handful of elections since in 2020 five more states four of them traditionally read voted to legalize cannabis uh new york state then followed and legalized cannabis so now there are 18 or 19 states where cannabis is completely legal uh and sold in stores and and then another 18 where medical cannabis is is is legal but we had some more radical things happen too in that election the state of oregon voters there by a significant margin like 10 point margin voted to decriminalize all drugs people even even people arrested for charges involving cocaine or heroin will not be incarcerated they will be moved into drug treatment programs small amounts of any drugs will not be prosecuted and in a separate ballot initiative the voters of oregon um voted to legalize psilocybin therapy this you know in an amazing measure that actually obliges the state department of health to um train and certify guides or facilitators for psychedelic experience and licenses growers of magic mushrooms so in 2020 in 2023 you'll be able to go to oregon and have a legal guided psychedelic experience that's pretty amazing and then we've had five or six cities around the country decriminalize uh what are called entheogens this is an alternative word for psychedelics that stresses their spiritual value and and this includes washington dc oakland california santa cruz california ann arbor michigan denver colorado and this movement to decriminalize uh plant medicines um they never they don't even use the word drug this movement is taking off around the country so i think the voters are ahead of the politicians who are a little afraid to to give it up but the the the the drug war has really been exposed as a failure um the modern drug war which i mean yes we've been boring against drugs for a hundred years but the modern drug war really dates to president nixon in 1970 uh when in 1970 was the year that the control substances act was passed and psychedelics were made um you know schedule one uh the most serious uh criminal activity and um you know it hasn't reduced drug consumption the drugs have won the drug war basically and um and the uh collateral damage has been so uh terrible i mean from you know the incarceration of people of color uh the drug war has really fallen most heavily on them um and we have jails you know we have the biggest jail system in the world and and a in latin america yes because of the empowerment of the cartels i mean the fact that our that drugs are illegal and the demand hasn't gone away has essentially funded the rise of cartels that are undermining the government of mexico have undermined the government of colombia it's been a disaster for south and central america and the violence in these cultures as a result is just is awful but you know the other thing that happened i think that people saw was that the drug war was sold to us as a public health campaign right there were these drugs that were destroying young minds um but in fact the biggest public health crisis tied to drugs in the last 50 years arose from legal opiates from uh purdue pharma's marketing of oxycontin an opioid as supposedly a safer less addictive opiate which it wasn't this led to hundreds of thousands of deaths 93 000 last year alone more than died from auto accidents in america and so this scourge of of uh opiate addiction and overdose um was driven by um not from you know illicit drugs but from illicit drugs and um and i think that's i think that's um eroded the credibility or hollowed out the credibility of the drug war in the eyes of most people so um yeah i think we will end it i think it'll it'll be messy and complicated um i wrote a piece for the times a couple weeks ago about what you know if the drug war is going to end what does the drug piece look like and that's a that's a very complicated thing because um it's a lot easier to just say no um but then when you say yes you have to say yes under certain circumstances what's the best cultural container for some of these substances we're going through that process with psychedelics right now um what's the best way to use them uh how will you regulate them as drugs um who else should have access to them a whole host of very interesting cultural questions come up now as the drug war ends and i think that's going to be really important work for the culture in the next few years to figure out the right container for each of these powerful tools so you say that um in the book you talk about how humans have co-evolved with certain plants in a kind of symbiotic way there's a great sentence the flowers that gave people the most pleasure were the ones that produced the most offspring could you unpack for us that idea of the co-evolution of certain plants with the human species yeah i mean this has been a subject i've been writing about since a book i published in 2001 called the botany of desire and um in that book i was looking at domesticated plants i looked at four different domesticated plants tulips potatoes cannabis and apples it's been a while and the idea for the book grew out of a little epiphany i had as a gardener where a lot of my work originates i'm a pretty passionate gardener and i was i was planting potatoes um potato seed uh and at the in the very week that the apple trees in my vegetable garden were just buzzing with activity they were in full bloom and the honeybees were all over them and as i sat there planting uh it it occurred to me that i was more like the honeybees than i realized or then we generally realized the honeybee kind of assumes that it is getting the best of its relationship with the apple it's breaking in it's stealing the nectar and has no idea that it's being manipulated to do that and that the plant is dusting its legs with pollen on its way in and out and um and the the bee uh is uh basically moving the genes of this apple tree around the neighborhood and um and i realized well how is that different between you know me and the potato i think i'm getting the benefit of growing potatoes and this wonderful food but in fact the potatoes have induced me to order these seeds have them delivered plant them give them new habitat expand their range and um so that sent me down this path of looking at the symbiosis of of our co-evolution and um i give plants a lot more credit i think than some people do for for having agency and um a point of view i'm not saying they're conscious but they have a set of goals as we do evolutionary goals um and they um a certain subset of them have prospered immensely by hitching their wagon to ours that when cannabis figured out and i used those words advisedly that by changing human consciousness it could get its genes out of the area in asia where it originated india china i forget exactly where it was and spread all over the world and get a level of attention and um a you know a tailor-made uh habitat um that it never would have coffee and tea are are also very good examples by by um changing our consciousness they benefited enormously and we now give tens of millions of acres to coffee um and you know millions of humans spend their lives tending to the welfare of these plants so you know who who benefits more um and i would say it's a pretty equal exchange um but um i don't know what the plants would say i mean i think they'd be laughing because we have this expression uh that guy's using drugs but from your perspective the drugs are using us using yes yeah i i think we are you know when you mow your lawn and you keep your you know your lawn at two inches or whatever it is you may think you're subordinating these poor grasses but this is exactly what they want you to be doing because they're competing with trees for sunlight and trees are the death of lawns so every time you mow you're keeping trees from growing in that piece of land it's returned to forest and that is exactly what the grasses want you to do so do you think there's a possibility that magic mushrooms or ayahuasca are giving us these shiny epiphanies that we just can't help but go and tell everyone about just as a way of spreading their their dna the joke's on us well it may be i mean ayahuasca is still pretty much two wild plants i don't know how domesticated i'm sure there's been some selection that's gone on magic mushrooms though no doubt we have moved them around the world um we there's not a lot of breeding um there's some but uh compared to the grasses the edible grasses for example that have been really transformed by our attention um magic mushrooms we benefited basically by the ones that got people high were the ones that got moved around the world and every time you pick a mushroom you're trailing fairy dust of spores and you don't even know it i remember searching for um philosophies with paul stamets the great mycologist for um how to change your mind and we went up to this uh state park in uh either oregon or washington i can't say and um and we went looking for them a place he knew that they would come up at a certain point and uh i was really struck by the fact that we didn't have to go very far from the the campground or the parking lot to find them um and he said oh yes one of the indicator species for philosophies are winnebagos rvs and what he meant was you know people go out there and gather and then and then concentrate in this one area where their campsites were and and had dropped lots of spores and we've moved them all over the world um you know we thought for a time that you had to go to mexico to get magic mushrooms and then they found them in washington state and oregon and you know they're in many many places uh were they originally probably not i think we we have been the vector of uh their spread around the world it's it's both an evolutionary idea and a somewhat shamanic idea as well of a kind of relationship with plants a kind of contract and you also uh quote paracelsus's idea and the idea of the pharmaco that word meaning both a uh an antidote is it and also a poison a poison and an ally um it basically captures this was the greek word for uh drugs farmicon and it's it there's a lot of wisdom in it because it recognizes that drugs are not all one thing or all another that they are blessings and they can be curses and that the same substance that can give people uh great pleasure uh can kill them um and and it's parakelsis who says the dose makes the poison um and and it's not just dose it's intention it's kind it's setting its context all these things go into uh determining whether that relationship with a drug will be constructive or destructive um there's a third meaning of pharmacon too which is very interesting which is scapegoat and these are uh substances certainly that we've scapegoated we blame a lot of problems on them um you know an addiction is typically blamed on the on the opiate or the cocaine or the alcohol but of course there's uh a lot of causes behind an addiction um you know five people exposed to the same drug will not all get addicted so why will one and not another well it has to do with that person's life circumstances um so but we tend to blame the drug uh automatically so but i always keep that in mind that there are real ambiguities here and our tendency is to either over romanticize drugs um and you're seeing a lot of that in this psychedelic renaissance right now uh or to demonize them um and in both cases uh without sufficient sensitivity to the fact that it's it's both um you know we have to be able to keep some contradictory ideas in our head i don't know if you've read a wonderful book by stefan bayer called singing to plants no but it's a study of amazon shamanism brilliant book and he talks the shaman c interview says that every plant ally also has a kind of shadow side a dark side there's no such thing as a totally benevolent kind of plant they they all have dangerous properties as well well you know a lot of the things we call drugs are alkaloids um evolved by plants to to to protect themselves they're pesticides and that's an interesting fact too that you know even caffeine beloved by our species and it turns out a couple other species the plant produced this to protect itself from insects and also keep other things from growing around it it's herbicidal um and what's curious about that and i and i write about a little bit in this your mind on plants is um why should you go to the trouble of producing this complicated a neurochemical basically something that affects the mind of animals when you just want to kill them or you should just want to kill them and it occurred to me and this is not um uh i don't know that i can prove this scientifically yet but if you if the if the pesticides produced by plants were lethal at small doses to everything it would select for resistance among the pest population and and we know this from our own pesticides the lethal ones select pretty quickly for resistant members of the pest population rendering them useless how much more clever to just kind of discombobulate the mind of your pest make your pest forget where it saw you or forget what it's doing um and all these almost all these drug alkaloids and cannabis is different is a different category because it's not true of cannabis but all of them um caffeine mescaline um and uh uh opium um ruin your appetite you don't want to eat and that's also perfect if you want to you know protect yourself against a pest um i i i came to understand this um years ago because i had a cat named frank who had a major um catnip issue and um he loved catnip and i kept catnip in my vegetable garden which was fenced off so i had to let him in uh and every evening when i'd go down to the garden in the summer to pick a salad he would follow me in and he'd look up at me and he clearly had forgotten where the catnip was every day and i actually had to show him where this plant was and so and then he would roll in it and get completely wrecked and to the extent that he forgot where this plant was and i thought that's pretty brilliant on the part of the plant um you know mess with his you know this again needs uh to be a needs a controlled trial but that's my theory excellent let's um let's dig into the the three plants then um so if we start with the chapter on um poppies and opium this uh grew out of an article you wrote in the early 90s in which you you about your experience growing poppies and originally when it came out it was edited a lot because you were worried this was going to end up put you in prison and you'd lose your house and you you know your your life would be wrecked by it um so tell us a bit about that what happened you obviously hopefully you didn't end up in prison no i didn't uh thank god but i did have to censor my self and and always felt bad about that and and tried to uh correct that uh with this republican of that essay so what happened was um i had i was writing columns on gardening columns for the new york times magazine mostly and harper's magazine i was a freelance writer and my editor sent me a copy of an underground press book called opium for the masses written by a a writer named jim hogshire and in this book he explained that you could produce your own opium at home uh that papaver somniferum uh which any of the gardeners in your in this audience know well a beautiful flower it's very easy to turn into narcotic tea or loudness a tincture with alcohol um and that these uh plants were grew from seeds that were legally available or plants you could buy in a nursery um and there was really not much to it and uh you know we had been kind of trained to think that uh opium had to be grown in afghanistan or turkey and in places with like armies of ten-year-olds who could slit all the pods and it was very onerous production in fact it had been grown widely in the united states the shakers grew it in upstate new york and sold it and in the south it was grown to help with the war effort during the civil war um but the government uh has been quietly trying to discourage people from growing opium poppies for a very long time and this book alarmed them so i decided oh this would be a cool column let me see if i can grow opium in my garden and um and i'll write a column about it i start corresponding with jim hawkshire asking him for horticultural advice this is by email and um and asking if he has seeds that i could borrow it's actually the late 90s not the early 90s 90s summer of 96. and uh i'm in correspondence with jim and then i get word that he's been arrested um and that a swat team with 20 guys in black ninja supes busts into his apartment throws him up against the wall and arrests them and the evidence is perfectly legal stuff he's got a box of poppy heads dried poppy heads that he bought at a flora shop in seattle they're they're every florist shop in the world has these things because they're quite beautiful i have some back there and um and so how could they prove that he had intent to manufacture a narcotic because it's this is the weird wrinkle in the law it's legal to grow papaver somniferum as long as you don't know that you're growing a scheduled substance in which case if they can prove that state of knowledge you are breaking the law this is in the united states i don't know if it's quite the same in in britain so the proof that that's what he was doing was contained in in his book so the book was used to indict the the growing of the poppies and i realized when this happened to him uh and they really did wreck his life um he he got off eventually a judge threw this out but he he had to spend a lot of money and it really was damaging to him it was a horrible miscarriage of justice um he uh i was i realized i was in the same boat i was you know i was growing pupper or somniferum with the intent of making opium and they could prove it because i was in his hard drive on his computer you know asking for horticultural advice and i owned a copy of his book so that led to a summer of fear and paranoia the likes of which i've never experienced i'm growing the poppies trying to determine if i'm really at risk and i start doing some investigative journalism and i gradually learn that indeed the drug enforcement administration we have a whole police force that just deals with drugs it's part it's a legacy of the drug war that um they are going around to nurseries and seed sellers and discouraging them from selling something that's perfectly legal they're busting a handful of people for growing poppies and they are um uh basically trying to quietly squash what they think could be a big fad and um uh and it's clear that this and they're also going around the flora shops and telling them not to sell dried poppy hats which again are perfectly legal they were not within their rights to do this so anyway i i write the article it ends up being kind of this long parable of the drug war and and i learn along the way what powerful tools they have to to wreck one's life um and that includes what's called acid forfeiture if your property is involved in the commission of a drug crime the government can seize it even if they don't prove that you knew about it or that you were guilty of anything your property can be guilty i mean our civil liberties have been badly eroded by the drug war that's another um one of the consequences that is just so regrettable anyway after i published the article i submitted to harper's they're all ready to publish it but then they submit it to a lawyer at my request and the lawyer was a criminal defense lawyer and he reads the article drives up to our house in the country in connecticut and says look you can't publish this article it's a it's a confession to a crime it's very easy to date to this year and it's very easy to tie to this place because you're describing your garden and i cannot advise you to publish this and i was a freelance writer depending on this paycheck um anyway when the publisher of harper's got wind of this uh he was outraged and um uh went out and got a new lawyer and this time it was a first amendment lawyer instead of a criminal defense lawyer and this lawyer said you must publish this piece for the good of the republic um because this is exactly what the first amendment exists to protect which is critical speech about the government so i didn't know what to do between the two of them and ultimately i learned from this first amendment lawyer that um the two most provocative passages to the government were was the one where i described exactly how to turn poppy heads into tea the recipe and then the so-called trip report where i described how the team made me feel um and he said you could you could reduce your risk uh substantially by eliminating those two passages so i bolderized my own article and took them out and we published it and nothing happened and i've always wanted to publish it in its correct form and um and right that wrong um and the other but the other reason i wanted to publish it is we've learned in the years since that something else was going on in the summer of 1996 and that was the year that purdue pharma the pharmaceutical company owned by the sackler family uh introduced oxycontin this new opiate that they claimed was less addictive and safer than uh opiates before and knowing full well that this was not the case and this is really what led to the opioid crisis um so it was a lesson to me about the limitations of journalism and the importance of history and that to a journalist the important drug story of that year was this quiet campaign to crush opium growing but of course the real deeper story which none of us were aware of was the seeds of the opioid crisis were being planted by legally by this corporation what changed that made you think it's okay to publish these paragraphs now well a couple things the statute of limitations uh had passed so after a certain number of years you can confess to you know just about anything but murder and um and they can't get you um so you know this was many years 25 years later so there was no risk um but also the atmosphere has changed um i i would not hesitate to publish that that piece or or describe i mean look you know in this is your mind on plants and in this book um i'm sorry and in the previous book i do describe illegal activity um and and i just think that there's much less risk right now that the government is much less interested uh in uh making an example of a writer uh around drugs so looking at the kind of sackler family and opposite oxycontin um does that could a skeptic about the legalization of drugs point at what happened with the opiate crisis and say look at what happens when these drugs are legal and controlled by big business uh it leads to the opiate crisis i mean it is does that weaken the position of people like us who are trying to argue for the legalization of drugs yeah i mean i i have a real problem with the commercialization of drugs i i and in the case of psychedelics i don't think they should be commercialized i think it's going to be hard to avoid um but um i think when capitalism gets a hold of these things they tend to i mean look at what's happening with cannabis now um well you can't see it until you come to california but you will see it then which is billboards in our cities promising to deliver cannabis to your door within an hour if you just call this number or go to this website um so we are we are having cannabis pushed on us in a very aggressive way and it's being packaged in new ways it's being you know put into candy um which strikes me as a really stupid thing to do for many reasons um and uh so i you know i have real questions i think if if we are gonna decriminalize it which is different than legalizing it um you can decriminalize it and remove the penalties but not uh not allow for manufacture um and and then people will they'll still be a black market in manufacture um but you're not putting the muscle of capitalism behind it yet you're not removing the black market which you want to do also so you know you look at portugal where they've decriminalized drugs and um what's the role of the government or or um switzerland where um heroin addicts you know get uh prescriptions from the government the government actually supplies them heroin which is safer than street heroin because you know exactly what the dose is and it's not contaminated clean needles um and then before they so they don't try to get you off the drug until they've changed your underlying circumstances um making sure you have a good job good housing good therapy and then they try to get you off the drug but in that case the government is now in the heroin business um and that's awkward too um so i don't have the answers to what this drug piece is going to look like um but i think we know enough to be concerned that the promotion of drugs by uh corporations uh could be a lot worse than the promotion of drugs by drug dealers who don't have billboards you know and don't have advertising they don't bother putting into gummy bears no so let's look at um the second plant uh caffeine coffee and tea your thesis in a nutshell is that um caffeine helped to shape modern capitalist civilization um by helping us just be honest and and industrious could you just uh unpack that for us yeah sure so caffeine is a really interesting drug to study historically because unlike the other big categories of drugs unlike the opiates or cannabis or alcohol which have been around till you know until from prehistory we don't really know what a world innocent of those things look like um caffeine doesn't show up in europe until the 1650s uh it arrives in london that decade coffee tea and chocolate all show up the same decade it's a very good decade and and so we can see what england uh and europe in general look like before and after and the before was pretty drunken people were drinking all the time alcohol was safer than water you gave a diluted alcohol or hard cider to your children because it was safer than water and it was um people were buzzed or drunk a lot of the time there were beer breaks on farms um and um and alcohol consumption was just you know intense um caffeine comes along and it obviously doesn't displace alcohol people in england i understand still drink um but it did shrink its hold on uh the populace and you have people writing at the time about this new sober and civil drink which is so much better for you know the office workers and um that this new sobriety was a boon to to business by and large and you see uh a change of consciousness that is ushered in um and you see it in the coffee houses um in you know in london there there's this explosion of coffee houses um beginning in the in the 18th century and there there's one for every 200 londoners and the conversation in these coffee houses is substantially different than the conversation in a tavern for one thing all classes mix in coffee houses they were a place where there weren't different rooms for different classes everybody and when i say everybody i mean men because women were not admitted to coffee houses uh early on um and that the conversation was about work um or you know cultural interest and there was a coffee house associated with the royal institution where the scientists would come um and um you know uh isaac newton was there and francis bacon and uh and then there was another one or a couple in coban garden tied to the literary crowd and then there were ones for businessmen and insurance brokers that then became lloyds of london um so it fostered a new kind of conversations and and even um people have argued changes in in english prose a more conversational style of writing um with people like defoe and and dryden and um uh pope you know rhythms of of english conversations start seeping into literature which before was incredibly formal and it was all king james bible kind of syntax um so much changes and uh much of it for the good and you have a drug that is just very well suited to the rise of in an to an industrial revolution because people can operate heavy machineries more safely when they're not drunk they can stay up later you can have a second shift or even a third shift they can do double entry bookkeeping and mental work that doesn't go down very well when you're drunk um so this is a tremendous boon to capitalism yes and uh obviously there are other things going on there's uh you know light electric light and uh or gas light there's coal you know there and and there's technological inventions so i don't want to have overly essentialist interpretation um but caffeine i think is is very important to the rise of capitalism and you use the expression that caffeine helps to reconsolidation of the cell which is kind of like the opposite of the ego dissolution you talked about with psychedelics and i noticed that 1650 is kind of like the decline of mysticism and it kind of goes underground until the romantics discover like hashish and masculine so you know it's kind of part of this rise of rationalism and the decline of it it clears away the shadows i think you're exactly right about that um the so i see drugs on a kind of spectrum with some of them kind of ego fortifying and and nurturing individualism and a sense of separateness and rationalism and focus and linear thinking and abstraction and then on the other side you have a set of drugs the psychedelics especially but not just them that soften ego boundaries that encourage mystical thinking or magical thinking um and that um yes and psychedelics are at one end of the spectrum and caffeine and cocaine is uh are at the other these are ego drugs um and egos are very useful for getting stuff done uh obviously they're important tools important voices um but they don't they they're they're they don't have a lot of patience for mysticism they don't they're they're not or spiritualism for that matter of all kinds so yeah so i think that drugs offer us tools to to enhance certain tendencies that we we we have and when i talked about the consolidation of self i it was this sense i had when i you know i i abstain from caffeine for three months that was my experiment for that chapter um and i found that you know whenever we wake up in the morning we're we're kind of disassembled to a certain extent um frayed and there's a process in getting up and and caffeine for me is central to it of kind of knitting yourself back together your sense of intentionality and purpose and drive um it doesn't naturally show up at least for me and and caffeine is an indispensable ingredient in the construction of an ego and the construction of a writer too i mean we think about psychedelics as creativity inspiring and yet you mentioned balzac in your book who who wrote i mean i couldn't even get a concrete figure for how many books he wrote so no i i couldn't either it's like 54 or something i'm not sure i counted 80 on his wikipedia page but said tell us about because he really had a caffeine habit he did and he believed that caffeine was essential to his creative process and he drank huge amounts and he got to the point where he thought the the liquid form of caffeine was just too dilute for him so he began consuming the coffee grounds and he claimed and he wrote about this that the the coffee grounds falling onto the the veli or whatever it's called in your stomach was the best way to deliver the biggest dose what this did to his stomach i don't know but he would stay up all night and write a massive amounts and um and he was convinced that his imagination needed the the fuel of of caffeine of coffee to uh to survive and you know many writers in this period are using caffeine um the enlightenment writers voltaire diderot uh big caffeine consumers um and i think it does contribute to that rationalist project uh in all sorts of ways not to mention the heroic labors of someone you know writing the first dictionary the first encyclopedia on his own um and so yeah i think it was an important fuel um and but i'm not convinced it's the best drug for creativity per se um you know the kind of uh of the the spotlight consciousness that that caffeine encourages um is very good for getting stuff done it's very good for editing um but in terms of like creativity sometimes you need a less focused mind you need a a daydreaming mind a wandering mind what the psychologists sometimes call lantern consciousness um which is encouraged by psychedelics of course um this you know taking in of information from all these unexpected corners of reality uh without that narrow focus um so maybe you need a combination and that you know there's i mean the creative process is complicated and a lot of creative work is editing and you know refining and shaping but but often the impetus for it is a is a intuition or a chance chance thought that might be actually encouraged by by psychedelics so i i want to get on to psychedelics for the for the last um 10 minutes or so just um very briefly uh for for those who didn't read your your last book how to change your mind why would someone want to take a psychedelic drug well i think people have a variety of reasons um uh curiosity about your mind i i would put for me you know high on the list you learn things about yourself um whether you want to or not and some some of them are unpleasant um but you know these molecules don't contain narrative they don't contain images they don't contain memories they're they're they're catalysts and they reveal things the word psychedelic coined by humphrey osmond the english psychiatrist means mind manifesting it brings things to the surface or into the space of our conscious awareness um and so curiosity you know self-discovery is one reason healing is another i mean many people now are taking psychedelics to heal and we have now uh you know a pre an impressive body of evidence that they're they're successful in helping people deal with depression and anxiety and obsession and addiction so that's another reason that people would take it and some people i think take it in low doses to just enhance ordinary experience to enhance music i mean they do have very interesting effects on your senses and um and you know they can intensify uh the pleasure in something like music so in your last book you tried magic mushrooms uh a substance that you get from a frog i think called five meow dm from the sonoran desert toad this this time you wanted to try peyote and san pedro which contained the psychedelic masculine and initially your plan was to go to a a ritual in a native american church and there is this church existed for the last 100 years or so where it's it's legal to take peyote within a religious ritual could you tell us just a bit about that church i think many people will be surprised that there is such a church yeah so um native americans have the legal right and have had since 1994 to use peyote this cactus that that contains mescaline in their uh religious observances they fought very hard and very long to get that right um which is ironic given that uh you know white europeans came to america for religious freedom and then crushed the religious freedom of the people who were already there um irony is a too gentle a word for that but um so native americans rediscovered peyote peyote had been used in the new world at least 6 000 years ago um we have found archaeological evidence of peyote use in southern texas on the rio grande um but it had fallen away some tribes knew about it some didn't but in the 1880s which is a moment of maximum uh suffering and trauma for native americans this is a time when the u.s government's official policy is to destroy indian culture outlaw their rituals force them onto reservations take take nomadic people who move with the bison and turn them into agriculturalists on shitty land in oklahoma forcing tribes together who didn't necessarily get along um uh kidnapping the children of indians cutting their hair which is the worst thing you can do and putting them in boarding schools with the express purpose of killing the indian and saving the man this was the the avowed purpose of these boarding schools um so it was just a time where the indian culture was on the verge of complete annihilation they discover or rediscover peyote then and and a new religion is formed um and this is um it wasn't yet called the native american church but they found that peyote was very helpful in uh healing people who were struggling with the trauma of their existence especially alcoholism which as soon as the reservations are established becomes a tremendous problem for uh indians who had no experience metabolizing alcohol and were really vulnerable to it um and so they start meeting and this ceremony forms it's a very uh carefully choreographed very rigid ceremony where everyone is in a teepee around a fire um there is a a road man who's like the shaman but then there are other then there's a cedar man who's handling a fire chief and a water carrier they're all these roles everyone sits indian style staring at the fire you don't get up and you're there all night long and there is one person who is the focus of the ceremony this is a person struggling with trauma or alcoholism or spousal abuse or whatever it is everyone uh they're passing um the peyote buttons there's they're little buttons of cactus that you eat they're spineless cactus cacti um and everyone's attention is focused on that person and healing that person and a certain collective consciousness forms um on the peyote and um and the peyote is like psychedelics can be uh indians i interviewed describe it as a mirror you see yourself in it um and you see what's wrong with yourself and with the support of the group you start writing a new narrative about yourself a narrative of rebirth really um and there are 250 000 members of this church now and um it's proven very valuable in sustaining indian culture healing healing that culture's trauma um and it's a it's a beautiful phenomenon in in many ways and it i found it striking because it it's such a different image of what a psychedelic is you know in the west we think of psychedelics as disruptive to culture and society as they were in the 60s for good or bad but they were disruptive um here is an example of profoundly conservative use of the psychedelic where it's reaffirming society and and the community and um uh and that i think that tells us that it's really all about set and setting and expectation in the context that the same drugs in a different context can perform a very different role uh and that's one of the reasons i was so interested in exploring um the indigenous use of psychedelics which was not a part of how to change your mind and your your plan to take part in rituals disrupted partly by the pandemic and the lockdown but also it seems like you've got a sense that maybe just you know it would be i don't know cultural appropriation in some way or just just leave that particular substance i was interested to hear that the native american church doesn't want peyote to peyote to be included in the decriminalized nature movement yes they oppose that there's a battle there but yeah so you decided not to take part in a native american the reason i didn't the reason i didn't and i and i did have invitations to participate in a ceremony um there was the pandemic but even now when it might be possible there is a shortage of peyote um the the the native american church has grown the lands where peyote grows very narrow band on both sides of the rio grande um but on the american side it's much smaller and the population of wild peyote is crashing it's not easy to grow it takes 15 years from seed to usable button there's development where it where it grows there's cattle ranching so there's a conservation story here too that's very important and i came to the conclusion after interviewing a great many native americans that the best way to show respect for this this ritual um and is not to use it i mean that we have taken enough from native americans and to take this too by making it popular by having a fad for peyote would just be the worst thing possible so and their other way if you're interested in mescaline you can find synthetic mescaline or there's another cactus called san pedro which grows i have growing in my garden it's legal to grow uh it also produces mescaline and lesser amounts but you know you can turn that into a tea and um and get your mescaline that way so yeah i i think as um a white american um leaving peyote alone is is is the right thing to do at least for me and the book ends with you taking san pedro in a in a group uh different to you that how you how to change your mind or your experiences individual experiences or or maybe guided but this is a a a group collective trip with your with your wife as well and i thought a very beautiful and moving description about how you're all kind of um participating in each other's healing yeah that there's some i had never done any kind of group psychedelic work and it's a very interesting dynamic um at least on on this on mescaline which is a kind of more social psychedelic than others it's very easy to converse uh you're still you're aware of other people and i thought this would be about me you know this experience like most of my psychedelic trips have been but it wasn't it was about my wife judah and she there was a group of us and we were being led by a shaman um although she wouldn't call her that she would call herself a wachumara or a medicine carrier um but it's the same basic idea and she had a lot of experience in ministering this in groups and you know there's this interesting phenomenon where you all get on sort of the same psychic wavelength and but it was clear that one person judith was struggling and she was having a very big experience and mine was milder and the attention moved to her and um and and the shaman's attention moved to her also and she was struggling with uh an issue having to do with her her mother and uh who was dying at the time and um uh and a burden she was carrying from her father who died years ago [Music] and i mean without going into detail she she needed to let something go and with the support of the group and this medicine and it's it's not a powerful medicine i mean it's it's fairly mild um but it does soften the the boundaries of individuals such that we were like kind of in sync and she found it enormously helpful and it was and and a ceremony that wasn't about me was exactly what i needed you know to move my focus off my own stuff and and on to hers um so it was a beautiful ceremony um and and it suggests another way to use psychedelics or at least this psychedelic um and i don't think it's an accident that it's used in groups by indians too uh that there is a kind of you know a consciousness that develops that's greater than the sum of its parts there's lots i'd love to ask you but i i'm conscious i want to give time to our audience so i just want to ask uh a last one which is since your book came out um how to change your mind in 2018 it's been an extraordinary three years in the kind of world of psychedelics it's gone from counter cultural to to suddenly like big business hedge funds um ipos billion dollar valuations it's really just gone extraordinary and and i think you know some of that was the caused by your book as well so i i i know one mushroom retreat center in in holland and they call it they talk about the pollen effect after your book came out you know the the number of people applying to go to their retreat rocketed up so i guess i'd just like to ask what do you think of this so-called shroom boom and i mean do you ever feel a sense of trepidation like what have i done yeah so just which of course you're not responsible for psychedelic capitalism at all but what are your feelings on it well there is a gold rush happening right now and there are i think somebody just told me there are 350 companies now wanting to get into the psychedelic space none of them have a very good idea how to make money there uh and i think many of them will crash and burn it's you know even the company with the billion dollar valuation that you mentioned hasn't really figured out a business model it's it's not easy to figure out how you're going to make money on psychedelic therapy when you consider that psilocybin therapy you know is going to be one or two pills how do you sell one or two pills for enough money to justify the investment this is you know the pharmaceutical industry is based on drugs you take every day for the rest of your life they they love drugs that don't cure you basically and psilocybin when it works actually cures you um so and then there's all the therapeutic support you need it's not just the pill you need a package so much remains to be figured out about the business model um i think that you know some of the investment is is going to lead to really valuable research and uh it costs a lot of money to bring a drug to market and um the value of of going through this uh approval process with the fda and the ema is that it will then presumably if it does work be available to people uh and covered by insurance and that will make it accessible right now it's you know it's the rich who can afford guided psychedelic therapy which and and the prices of which have gone through the through through the roof sin in the last three years because the demand is outstripping the supply you know in terms of feeling responsible i mean as a writer you can't i mean you know ripples come out of your work that you can't control i'm very careful to talk about risks and not be too evangelical about the benefits of psychedelics even though i do think they have important benefits in the right context i hear though people write to me with some horror stories i mean things have gone really very wrong for some people um and and but those emails and letters are vastly outnumbered by the people who write to say how their lives have been improved and that makes me feel really good i mean that somebody took a step that helped them deal with the problem they were having and um and many people have been healed um so on balance i think these are positive developments i think that there will be you know over exuberance as there always are you know as there always is um but in addition to all the corporate money there's a ton of philanthropic money that's going into supporting the research because there's no government money supporting this uh these drug trials it's all private money and they're all these new research centers you know there's one at harvard there's one at yale there's now one at we just started one at berkeley where i teach and really brilliant minds are applying themselves to what psychedelics has to teach about not just how to cure mental illness but understand consciousness understand the brain mechanisms behind perception um so i'm very excited that we're going to learn a lot and that on balance this is a positive direction for society uh i think um and you know there could be a backlash things could go wrong um but they are um uh you know i i think the potential for good is is exciting enough to take the risks [Applause] you

Channel: The Royal Institution

Views: 86,943

Keywords: Ri, Royal Institution, michael pollan, this is your mind on plants, psychoactive plants, consciousness, changing consciousness, mind, brain, botany, caffeine

Id: FfxnS1PuJxM

Length: 63min 17sec (3797 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 04 2021

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[u/adreamingandroid]

Just come across this on YT, thought I would share, Michael Pollan is easy to listen to.

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