Michael Pollan on Psychoactive Plants, Chemicals and Us

Michael Pollan is an extraordinary journalist and thinker whose writing about food and drugs has educated and influenced tens of millions of readers. No book in recent history has done so much to enlighten people about the benefits of psychedelic-assisted therapy as his 2018 best-selling How to Change Your Mind. His latest book, This is Your Mind on Plants, examines three psychoactive drugs: opium, caffeine, and mescaline. But I first met Michael in 1997, when he wrote a prescient article about the political and cultural impact of California’s pathbreaking medical marijuana initiative, Proposition 215.

Here, we discuss why Michael's book on psychedelics has had such a transformative effect, and whether he still believes the new psychedelic revolution may be proceeding too quickly for its own good. He reflects on the challenges of writing about one's own psychedelic experiences -- and why caffeine is the one drug one studies not by using it but by abstaining from it. Few relationships are as complex and multi-dimensional as those between psychoactive plants and us humans, and few humans are as insightful on this relationship as Michael.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Ethan Nadelman, and this is Psychoactive, a production
of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. Psychoactive is the
show where we talk about all things drugs. But any
views expressed here do not represent those of I Heart Media,
Protozoa Pictures, or their executives and employees. Indeed, Heed, as

(00:23):
an inveterate contrarian, I can tell you they may not
even represent my own. And nothing contained in this show
should be used as medical advice or encouragement to use
any type of drug. Hello, Psychoactive listeners today is Uh, Well,

(00:46):
we have quite a guest. He's an extraordinary writer and author.
He is a professor of journalism at u C. Berkeley. Uh.
He's somebody I've known for quite a while who I
think whose writing is changing the world, and that is
Michael Pollen. So, Michael, thank you so much for joining
me today. I'm very grateful for your time. Yeah, we

(01:08):
do go back. I guess too, when I was writing
about medical marijuana, right, I think I interviewed you then
as exactly I was going to bring that up, which
is it was back in the spring of nineties seven,
and I think you had just maybe maybe around that
time you had published the piece on Poppies and Opium
and Harper's which is the chapter of your new book,
This is your Mind on Plans, And I had put

(01:31):
together that ballot initiative in California on legalizing medical marijuana,
hadn't drafted it. That had been a local activist, Dennis
to Rome. So you came to see me. We spent
a couple of hours together my office, and we're beginning
to plan out the next cycle. And I think since
then we've crossed passed over the years. But let me
open up by asking you. I mean, the next thing
I saw you writing about drugs was the Bodany of Desire,

(01:53):
where you wrote about what apples, potatoes, tulips and mean, Well,
what I remembered about that piece I remember sitting around
everywhere after you did it, was that what you did
was really when you raised the question, is this victory
for Proposition to fifteen the meddical marijuana and they should
have been California twenty five years ago, did it represent
a tipping point or beginning of a tipping point at

(02:15):
ending the war on drugs? And the second key point
you made there was that what it had really done
was to open up a dialogue between the people and
the government, between the cops and the growers, and the
docks and the patients and you name it. And I
just thought that in both rowse respects, it was prescient.
But I'm curious now when you look back on these
last twenty five years. I mean, marijuana has not been

(02:37):
a focus of your writing in recent years, But what
do you think about this evolution? I mean, what's I
Do you have concerns about it? Do you feel very
good about it? I basically feel good about it. I
think that what we learned from that episode was that
a very important tool for changing attitudes towards drugs was
um And this was your your idea, I think, was

(02:58):
to reframe marijuana as a medicine rather than a kind
of cheech and chong, you know, fun thing. And when
the public began to see that it was helping people,
and then it was aids patients of course, and some
people with epilepsy UM and these were mostly anecdotal stories
about how they had helped people, but that completely changed

(03:19):
the public's attitude. The simple demonization of these substances became
much harder. When we began to think of them as
medicines for some people, and I think it's that same
game plan, and I don't use that word in a
cynical way, has really driven the shifts around psychedelics too.
What's interesting is there was never as much science around

(03:40):
cannabis as a medicine. It was really largely anecdotal. It
was a citizen science kind of movement, whereas the science
around psychedelics has been um, you know, more conventional control,
double blind studies. Yeah, I mean in a way, right,
because you also had marijuana was in the farm with
copia until the twenties or thirties. Oh yeah, there was history,
There were studies out there. There was the fact that

(04:01):
marin all, that synthetic version of marijuana was already available.
They're oncologists already saying they were using it, and in fact,
you know, it was really a previous generation before me.
That helps shift opinion on medical marijuana because with ballot initiatives,
you weren't really going to run a ballot initiative unless
you went into it with already or more public support.

(04:22):
I think somewhat similarly with the psychedelic stuff. You know,
those local initiatives that began to win in Denver, and
in Oakland and now the big state one in ore
again last year. I mean, those were doable because of
the work of others. And when I look at the
work of others, I give a huge amount of credit
to Rick Dobblin's organization maps. I give a lot of

(04:44):
credit to the researchers, the Roland Griffiths and Bob Jesse's
and the others. But your book had to change your mind.
I just think that had an explosive impact just personally.
The number of people would come up to me and say, Ethan,
I just read Michael Pollan's latest book. I mean, where
can I get some mushrooms? I've never done them, or
I haven't done them in three or four years, So
I mean, what do you think about that? I really

(05:06):
think that you've been this major catalytic writer about food.
I'm the worst dilemma. But that book was extraordinary in
its impact. Well, I you know, I do hear that
a lot, and people such as the couple that started
the organ initiative, you know, have told me that it
was reading not that book, but the New Yorker piece
that preceded the book that inspired them. And it's incredibly gratifying.

(05:30):
I mean, people write things and nothing happens all the time.
To have anything happened. But I also feel that I
was amplifying the voices of the researchers because these were
incredible UM findings, and I would interview the patients and
tell their stories, and that's really what moved the needle.
As with medical marijuana, hearing about individuals whose lives were

(05:51):
transformed for the better. There's nothing more powerful than that.
And of course that's what happened in Oregon, right. I mean,
they began that ballot initiative underwater. They were at forty
six percent, I think, and they did have the resources
that you didn't have back in the nineties. UM. They
had a lot of advertising money. But what did they
do with it? Well, they told the stories of cancer
patients whose fear of death had been removed by their

(06:14):
use of of psilocybin and picked up ten points in
a very short amount of time. So the public is
ready to hear these stories. I think the public is
ahead of the politicians on drugs, and uh, they know
that the drug war has been a failure, and they
see the collateral damage, and they know now that the

(06:34):
lies they've been told about drugs are just that, and
they're much less likely to buy the propaganda. In the
beginning of your new book, this is your minor Plans,
you write, My wager in writing this book is that
the decline of the drug war, with its brutally simplistic
narratives about your brain on drugs, has opened to space

(06:55):
in which we can tell some other, much more interesting
stories about our ancient real aationship with the mind altering
plans and fun guy with which nature has blessed us.
And that opening to the book is actually a good
description for why I'm doing this podcast now. It's the
same thing, and we need this new conversation. I mean,
I think just ending the drug war is not enough,
because these are powerful substances. They're going to be part

(07:16):
of our lives. They're going to be accessible. We're gonna
have to talk to our children about them. Uh, and
we have to learn how to live with them, which is,
you know, not obvious. Yeah, well you know. So let
me give you a little shit about something and see
how you respond to it. Right, You wrote an our
bed piece in the spring of twenty nineteen, I think
in New York Times, Right, and it was a reaction
to Denver legalizing uh, you know, plant medicines or philocipic mushrooms.

(07:40):
I cant remember was Narrow Shore and you said, hold
on here, you know, maybe the country isn't ready for
this debate. And I was thinking, oh, well, Michael's just
covering his asks. His book is having such a huge impact.
The last thing he needs is to be identified as
a new Timothy Leary of psychedelics. But ay, tell me
what you were thinking then and what you're thinking now
about this, because now you're talking about opening up to debate. Yeah.

(08:02):
So Um. At the time, I was strongly influenced by
the scientists that I had been interviewing and that were
really at the heart of my book, and they were
all very nervous. Um. You know, this path had been
laid out by Rick Doblin, originally of f d A approval. Right,

(08:23):
We're gonna go through the phase one to three of
the trials, then we're gonna get FDA approval, and then
we'll reschedule psychedelics. And the fear then was that if
this became a popular issue rather than this more or
less hidden regulatory path, um, it would blow it. It
would politicize psychedelics, and that I expected a backlash. I

(08:46):
expected us to fall into the old culture war drug
war narrative, and that suddenly this research, which had not
been controversial, would get to be controversial. So I was
in effect being protective of this research, which I thought
was so important and so promising that I didn't want
anything to get in the way. As it turned out,

(09:07):
that process is going on. It hasn't been affected for
reasons I don't entirely understand. The Republicans have chosen not
to fight this, uh, you know, this suing for peace
in the drug war that's happening. I think they've decided
it's a losing issue. Uh. And and given that the

(09:28):
how how the culture war is raging, it's very interesting
they're leaving this one alone. And in fact, psychedelic research
has has friends on the right. Rick Perry, the former
Energy secretary and governor of Texas, as a supporter of
psychedelic medicine. Rebecca Mercer gave money to MAPS, and Steve
Bannon says friendly things about it. So, as you know,

(09:50):
and I evolved, I mean, what can I say. I
still don't support the commercialization of psychedelics. I don't think
that cannabis is the proper model. And cannabis you know
where I live. You know their billboards on the Bay Bridge,
you know, promising delivery of cannabis within two hours if
you call them, like you know, by the time you

(10:10):
get home in traffic, it'll be there. There'll be a
guy you're on a bicycle with your with your cannabis.
And um. That kind of active promotion of psychedelics is uh,
you know. I mean, maybe I'll be ready for that
in a year too, but I'm not yet. And I
think that decriminalization is very different. And I see all
this capital moving into the psychedelic space, most of it

(10:33):
for medical treatment. And I do believe there is a
place or there should be access for psychedelics for people
who are not clinically you know, mentally ill. Um. I
think they have a lot to offer all of us.
But I'd love to find a model that is well
suited to psychedelics, to magic mushrooms, and not as many

(10:53):
people in the cannabis world want to do follow that
path so that the magic mushrooms are sold right next to, uh,
to the cannabis, you know, vape cartridges in the in
the dispensaries. Um, that doesn't feel right to me. Yeah,
I mean, you know, Michael, I'm actually fairly sympathetic to
your viewpoint. I'm also wary of the kind of over
the counter commercialization and advertising. I think with marijuana, we

(11:16):
recognize that it was inevitable and there probably was no
other better model, and you just have to hope for
good regulatory approaches at the state and ultimately the federal level.
I mean, I do look at places like the Netherlands
or Jamaica where they do seem to sell magic mushrooms
in the same places that oftentimes cannabis is Clause I
legally available, and those don't seem to be an issue yet.

(11:37):
But I agree it has to be careful and I
don't want to see that that backlash either. I mean,
that definitely scares me that possibility. Right, We went through
that backlash once, of course, and uh, it could happen again. Um.
You know, this country is prone to moral panics around
drugs and it has been for a very long time.
What's happening with the truffles in Amsterdam though, that's a

(11:59):
that's a pretty weak form of psilocybin. You have to
consume enough truffles to get a stomach ache for it
to actually work. And you know, some of these substances
are you know, LSD is obviously very powerful, and uh,
I do think that we have to find, you know,
the proper cultural container. I was very influenced by rereading
Andrew Wild's book The Natural Mind. It's like fifty years old.

(12:24):
It's a very wise book, and he talks a lot,
since he's done all this research in South America of
what we have to learn from indigenous cultures about how
to safely use these powerful psychedelics. Well, you know, I'll
tell you Michael Andrew was my first guest. I did
it in part because he has such a huge influence
on me back in the eighties reading The Natural Mind
at the time, and then his other books Chocolate to

(12:45):
Morphine in the Marriage of the Sun of the Moon.
I mean. The other thing, of course, is you know,
he goes from drug writing to writing about integrative medicine,
and he and he writes about coffee for example, which
I will get into that shortly. And you also go,
you know, you do the stuff on marijuana, but the
embody desire ardening in this and then you become you know,
the world's leading writer about food stuff. But I wonder
how you think about your back and forth in the

(13:07):
merging of these two issues. Yeah, well, for me, there
of a piece. I mean, you have to go back
in time to the beginning of my writing, which was
very much about uh, you know, I began writing in
the garden. I was very interested in the symbiotic relationship
between us and plants and how plants have evolved to
gratify our needs and desires. And that's a very successful strategy.

(13:29):
Just look at the edible grasses, which now you know,
have this huge amount of territory. We a lot to
them because we depend on them for corn and rice.
This has been a really winning strategy to hitch their
wagon to ours. And so if you're interested in that,
if that's the kind of trunk of my work, of
the tree of my work, this interest in plants and people,
eth nobotany, you might call it. UM. One big branch

(13:52):
off of that trunk is food and agriculture. And I
spent a couple of years writing about that, and I
still do from time to time. I'm still very interested
in that, and that's kind of the most profound way
we change nature. UM is through our eating and what
our agriculture does to the planet. Um, we changed the land,
we changed the atmosphere, we changed the composition of species,

(14:12):
so it was kind of natural. I would dig into
that first and and wrote three or four books about that.
But another really interesting thing, We use plants for us
to change consciousness. And this turns out, as Andy says,
in the natural mind to be virtually universal. And so
that's another interesting branch um of our use of plants
and their cleverness in enlisting us in their their mission

(14:36):
to expand their habitat. They're also, you know, both things
we ingest that changes us. And finally, they're both critically
involved in health, physical health for the most part with food,
and mental health for the most part in drugs. But
as we know, those lines even are not what you
would think. And Andy has made a very strong case

(14:56):
that the psychedelics can have you know, real physiological effect
and heal physical elements, not just mental ailments, and that
there's not a real difference between the two at some level.
I also like moving on as a writer at a
certain point, I prefer to write as an amateur and
then I become an expert and that kind of sucks

(15:17):
it up. From a literary point of view, I mean,
it's very gratifying as an advocate that you know, I
learned about a subject, I publish a book about it,
and then I have a platform to argue for the
world I want to see. And that's great. But as
a writer, I really prefer being at the beginning and
being the idiot on page one who has a set
of questions but doesn't have his answers. Read the first

(15:40):
page of any of my books and you'll see I
really am very naive at the beginning. And what I
like to do is dramatize the process of learning and
what I have to do to learn, which includes not
only talking to people and reading lots of books, but
having experiences that are really relevant that teach us in
a way that books can't teach us. And so you know,

(16:01):
when I was writing about the cattle industry, I bought
a cow and followed it through the process for Omnivor's dilemma.
And as you know, when I wrote about psychedelics, I
took you know, a menu of psychedelics, because there's no
substitute for personal experience, um, and there's a perspective you
have doing something for the first time that you'll never
have again. So even though I'm a relatively green or

(16:24):
young psychoonaut, as Andy reminds me every time we're on
the stage together and he lists the hundreds of experiences
he's at all right, I actually think there's a virtue
in being a newbie that I see things that you
might not see on your hundredth trip, um, and that
there's a quality of wonder not to mention the fact
that the reader can identify more easily with someone doing

(16:44):
something for the first time than for the hundredth time. Um.
So there's a there's a bit of narrative strategy involved
to right. One of the things I love There was
a piece of the Times a year or two ago,
and it had you having a lunch at your home,
and it was with IoLET Waldman, who had written a
book on micro dosing in fact, and I think she
actually interned a Drug Policy Alliance when she was in

(17:06):
her twenties. And then the novelist uh TC Boile, who
I remember reading his wonderful book about growing marijuana and
paranoia in Humboldt back in eighty four, Budding Prospects, but
then he wrote a very recent novel. Yeah, Timothy Leary,
Yeah exactly. It's called Outside Looking In. And one of
the comments they quote you saying there is you're debating

(17:27):
about what's going on American culture with with Iolette and
TC boiled, and you say, I think part of what's
going on is it's a reaction or or it's linked
to the growing anxiety in American society, you know, and
not just Trump is um, but a whole range of
other things. Does that still feel true to you that
or you just kind of speculating with him when you
said that. I don't remember saying that. I mean that

(17:49):
it was the anxiety that was leading to interest in psychedelics. Yeah,
that's interesting. I mean I see it more as a
dissatisfaction with the tools we have to deal with mental
illness and anxiety and depression and the you know, the
fact that s SR eyes are increasingly um not working
as well as they once did, and people really don't
like taking them. I see it being driven by like

(18:12):
a willingness to do something really outside of the box
that people feel, you know. The underground use of psychedelics
is booming also, and I think people are looking for help, UH,
and that people are in a very stressed state. It
has partly to do with our politics, it has partly
to do with climate change, and the pandemic has has

(18:33):
only intensified this, and many people are looking for healing
and UH, and here are psychedelics that offer some relief,
but a very different kind of relief. And that this
is not self medication in the sense of using an
opiate or alcohol to kind of dull your senses. As
you know, psychedelic experience is really hard work and it's

(18:55):
an attempt to go inside, which can be a very
scary place to go. But people are looking for something
more radical, something that in the in the true sense
of the word, that will deal with the roots of
their problem. It's depression, it's anxiety. It's just the sense
that we're in a very very difficult time and the future,

(19:16):
you know, has not looked this dark, uh in my lifetime. Um.
You know, the questions being raised not just about the
environmental crisis, but about our political system, and well, whether
our political system can cope with the environmental crisis, whether
our political system can survive. And I think all these
things make the potential of psychedelic healing very attractive to people,

(19:38):
and they're they're willing to take a chance, right, They're
willing to do something that may be way out of
their comfort zone. I am really surprised at the people.
I mean, many people come to me now like looking
for psychedelic therapy, and we should tell your listeners, please
don't come to me for this. I can't make referrals.
It's just too dangerous for everybody. Um find your own guide.

(20:00):
But I'm amazed that who comes to me. They're just
not the people you would think. There are people in
very prominent positions, people who look like they've got everything
worked out in their lives, and they're willing to roll
the dice and do something they never would have considered
a few years ago. We'll be talking more after we
hear this Adh. I have to say reading your chapter

(20:36):
on mescalin in the current book was fascinating for me.
First of all, I mean, I must confess I've only
done mescaline I think once back, you know, years ago,
I did synthetic mescaline, and I didn't. I did not
appreciate the differences that you describe in your latest book
between mescaline and LSD and psilocybin. And then you also

(20:58):
quote Sasha Alexander Shulgin and uh, you know, the brilliant
backyard chemist who actually I was quite friendly with and
we visited his home in Latvia, California often times, and
who was generous with me and having the experiment. Um,
but he calls mescalin the queen of the psychedelics. And
you had I think a Rabbi psycholic friend who said
the same thing. Yeah, the king of the materials, the

(21:18):
king of the materials. So is your experience would you?
Would you agree with that description? Yeah? I mean I
had a really interesting, uh and positive experience with mescalin.
I had a more profound one with psilocybin. And given
the choice what I do mescaline again, I guess I would.
I mean I really liked this quality of you know,

(21:41):
the way it immerses you in the here and now. Um,
it's very different than the psychedelics that at high dose
take you somewhere else, take you to another world, another dimension.
I was just more here than I'd ever been, and
more absorbed in what was right in front of me.
And in a way it was the perfect drug for
the pandemic. You know, where we were kind of claustrophobic.

(22:02):
We were stuck in place. It felt like our worlds
had shrunk down. Still feels that way. And here was
this drug that made what you had, the room you
were in, the life you were leading so interesting and
so nuanced and so rich with possibility and insight that
you were completely content with your little nutshell. And I

(22:25):
thought that was a very interesting experience. I think Huxley's account,
and you know, these accounts influence us. You know, there're
no innocent psychedelic experiences, right, They're very much constructed by
our expectations, as Timothy Leary understood. But Huxley in the
Doors of Perception, a lot of what I felt chimed
with what he said, which was that he felt like

(22:46):
the reducing valve of consciousness, the fact that our consciousness
is trying to reduce the amount of information coming in
because it threatens to overwhelm us, and it's more than
we need for the business of living in survival. But
there's so much more out there, there's so much more
sensory information than we're taking in. That felt really right

(23:07):
to me, And Shulgin says this too. He said he
saw colors or nuances of colors that he didn't know existed.
And it is that kind of child mind, which is
taking in information from in all directions, is not focused.
It's the opposite of caffeine. I think psychedelics and caffeine
are on two ends of a spectrum. Where caffeine helps
you focus the lens where you want, which is very

(23:29):
powerful for getting work done, which is why it suits
capitalism so well. Psychedelics, you're bringing in information from all
these you know, corners of the room and doesn't necessarily
encourage you to focus, but can be incredibly enriching to
see what's out there. So it was interesting. I didn't
have that experience of ego dissolution. I didn't have hallucinations,

(23:52):
with the one exception of there are a couple of
moments where I was a little bit overwhelmed by how
much information was coming in and I closed my eyes
to meditate. But the me that was meditating with somebody else, um,
And this happened a couple of times. I was like,
who is this Latin American woman who's in my head meditating?
I know that sounds crazy, but um. But in general,

(24:15):
it wasn't about hallucination. It was about perception, and it
was about taking in this information. The only negative experience
I felt besides this brief period of being overwhelmed by
as as I quote this poet, the immensity of existence.
I mean I was really hit by that a couple
of times at the peak. The only negative was it

(24:35):
went on so long. I mean it's like fourteen hours,
and I was done with the mescaline before it was
done with me um. I wanted to just have dinner
and go to bed, but it wasn't gonna happen. Well,
I guess that's why they're not really using mescalini. Yes,
it means two shifts for your two guides, right, your too.
Therapists be kind of expensive, but it does seem like

(24:58):
it's worth investigating or maybe working on the molecule as
as Sasha Shulgin did so brilliantly, because it has some
of M d M as qualities. You can feel very
connected to somebody else on it, and you can hold
a conversation, and it seems to me it could be
useful in a group therapy context um, which might justify
all the hours of therapist time. And there is a

(25:21):
company that wants to work with it. Journey collab wants
to use mescaline to work on alcoholism. And you know
the Native Americans have used mescaline in the form of
peyote with great success in a group setting and working
often on alcoholism. Yeah, well, you know I reread before
talking with you now, another essay you wrote that. I
just thought it was wonderful and it was about the

(25:42):
challenges of writing about this, you know, about putting into language.
And I remember at one point, you know, you uh,
you had done five N E O d m T
the toad trip, the signor and toad where you squeeze
the glands and you get five m O D M T,
and you talked about the role of metaphors or rocket
and the big bang, or another point. I think in
the most recent book you're talking about comparing LSD and

(26:03):
psilocybinto kind of a top down approach and mescalin almost
a bottom up one. And I realized that as a writer,
as a brilliant writer, you have the luxury of looking
at your words and crafting them, where as I'm interviewing
this moment, you don't have that luxury of doing it.
Did you feel that when you were writing this most
recent book and talking about your mescalin experience, that the
words are the ways of writing flowed more naturally than

(26:25):
it had a few years ago, just as you've been. Yeah,
I think I found a way to write about psychedelic
experience for me, And that was hard to do when
I when I first approached the whole issue, and I
knew that there was going to be a chapter in
How to Change Your Mind where I'd have to describe
my trips, and I was very nervous about it because
I've read a lot of you know, really shitty trip

(26:46):
reports we all have, and uh, and you know, it's
like telling people your dreams. You know, the chances are
you'll bore them to tears. So I approached that as
a very you know, nervous making part of the writing um.
In the event, it was actually great fun, much more
fun than I thought, And as a writer, it was

(27:06):
some of the most fun I've had And and writing
about this mescal and trip too was really fun. And
what unlocked it for me was understanding that I was
writing for people who probably hadn't had this experience, many
of my readers, and I needed to address them directly
about what I imagined they were thinking about what I

(27:27):
just said. So in other words, I I go into
the trip and I describe it for a certain amount
of time. But when I reached a moment of incredulousness
in my own mind, like there was a Latin American
woman meditating in my head, I stopped and talked to
the reader and said, I know how crazy this sounds,
or yes, I know that love is the most important

(27:49):
thing in the world. I know that there's a hallmark sentiment,
but remember it's also profound. It can be both. And
so this direct address to the reader gave me the
license to go where I had to go. And I
felt like I wouldn't lose that reader by taking account
of their skepticism or their wrinkled brow or whatever it was.

(28:10):
So once I kind of found that that little formula
I could let go, I could totally cut lose. And
you know, for a journalist who's normally writing things that
have to stand up to fact checking, right in that
small box of checkable facts, when there's a lot of
other interesting things that you can't quite pin down. Here,
I'm transcribing the contents of my mind. There's no fact checking, right,

(28:33):
I am it. I'm the expert on this story. And
I imagine it's how novelists feel because they're they're basically
as I imagine, I'm I don't write fiction, but they're
telling themselves a story, or they're enacting a dialogue in
their head and writing it down, and there's enormous freedom
in that. And it was it was great pleasure. So
I was very happy to write a book where I
would get to describe another trip. You know. I also

(28:54):
found sometimes, like when I smoke a marijuana, if it's
strong marijuana, I'll get into this thinking of all great thoughts,
great thoughts, but so often later in the day, afterwards,
the next day, they just seem like fluff, you know.
Whereas I found that when I've done this has happened
on mushrooms, has happened on ayahuasca, that actually, and especially
if I don't get high at the end of the trip,

(29:16):
that my thoughts can be very clear later that day
or even the next, and easy to remember, easy to
remember and actually have there are insights. I had an
influence of mushrooms years ago, they still have validity in
my life today, and so I think that must be
a benefit. Actually, you had, I think the same experience.
Oh yeah, I know, I did. There are insights I
had and you can you know, you can also call

(29:37):
them banal insights around love and connectedness, but they're real.
You know, the sense of interconnectedness people feel on psychedelics.
The illusion is the idea of separateness, right, And so
there is a veracity to some of this these ideas
we acquire. But also think of the people using psychedelics

(29:58):
to quit smoking, and they come to the profound conclusion
that smoking is stupid and it's killing them. They knew
that at one level. But there is a sturdiness to
the insight on psychedelics. It's it's what James called the
no edic quality, right that this is not just an opinion,
this is a revealed truth, and some of the truths
are really important. Um. And they have that etched in stone,

(30:22):
brought down from the mountain quality. And I think that's
one of the keys to the success of psychedelics and
helping people change bad habits such as addiction, is that
whatever insights they come to, either directed towards them by
their therapists or on their own, those insights are sturdier
than the insights we have in everyday life. Well, now

(30:44):
let's talk about the powerful role of set in setting.
And one of the big points you make in the
mescal In chapter, I think it's in your other book
as well, is for a lot of these drugs, there's
the synthetic version, right, in this case mescalin or or
you can have that with psilocybin as well, and then
there is the natural plant version, or the one that
comes from the toad um in the case of five
mm e O d M T right. And actually, by chance,

(31:06):
I met this guy last week, a Mexican guy named
Mario Garnier, who is like the latest, you know, major
advocate for the toad medicine. He actually comes from the
Sonora area, and when he's asked, there's a debate synthetic
versus the toad, and the way he resolves it is
to say they're just different. They're just different. Right now.
I think he privately actually believes the real stuff is better,
but he frames it that way. I remember Sasha Shulgin,

(31:29):
he was a bit contemptuous. He said, use the synthetic.
It's the same drug, and in fact, if anything, that's
a little cleaner, so you're less likely to get sick. Now.
You talk in the book about your own experience with
a synthetic and then using I think the mesican that
comes from the sun pedro plant. I think in the
second case, the first ones are very high dose. That
was a kind of a lower dose. Um. But you

(31:51):
also talk about how our view of this is so
alien to people in the Native American church or indigenous
people's for whom the drug quote unquote is almost secondary
to the ritualistic context. And they're very devoted to their
cactus and they're not interested in synthetic mescaline, and they're
not interested in san pedro, and in fact, they're not

(32:11):
even interested in peyote that's been grown cultivated. They think
that's not the same either, that it has to be wild.
And there may be some truth to that. I don't know.
We haven't grown a lot of payoty, but we're gonna
try and see what happens. But it may be like
hydroponic lettuce, you know, it just maybe weak. Um, you know.
I think it depends on the drug. I think that

(32:33):
synthetics are often cleaner and there's less gastro intestinal upset.
There are other alkaloids we know that are active um
in the same way, cannabis is not just THHC. It
has other things going on and and maybe other things
we haven't yet found. Same with the natural forms of
most of these drugs. In the case of air got

(32:53):
you would not want to eat the natural form. That's
you know, you could get gang green and insanity. I
mean that things happen. And I just say to our listeners.
Is the connection with LSD, right, Yeah, it's the It's
the fungus from which LSD is derived and has a
dark history in European culture of leading to all sorts
of problems when people ingested it on bad grain. Another

(33:16):
way to look at this is um look at coco
versus cocaine. You know, Andy and Wade Davis have written
eloquently about how coca leaves, which are used like caffeine
is in our culture in South America, has a lot
of positive attributes and very few negative attributes. And it
is the refinement into cocaine where you end up with

(33:37):
a powerful drug that people can get into trouble with
and dit oh, you know opium poppies, poppy tea is
or even opium Compared to the powerful synthetics like fenyl
and so it depends. I mean, if you're talking about
things of equal strength, that's one argument. If you're talking
about the fact that you're refining something from nature and

(33:58):
making it orders of magnitude more intense, that's another story. Um.
I think we can get hung up though on romanticizing
things in their natural form, But there are some protections
and having them in their natural form too, which is
that they're often weaker and you know, likely to be
less overwhelming. Yeah. Well, you know. The other thing I
like about your writing, and especially in the most recent book,

(34:20):
is the way you throw things into historical context. And
I'm reading through it and I'm saying to myself, I
wonder if he's going to mention Shivel Bush, wonder he's
gonna and there there's Wolfgang Shivel. He both this book
Tasted Paradise a couple of decades ago, about spices, stimulants,
and intoxic ins, and he points out how in Europe
they didn't have coffee or tea until the sixteen hundreds,

(34:40):
they didn't have tobacco. I don't think till the fifteen
sixteen hundreds, right, that actually spices played a role almost
like a Nebrians they had alcohol, and they didn't even
have hard liquor, right, they had low potency alcohol. So
spices played that role. Yeah, they had a hard cider
and things like that. Yeah, I forget when distillation comes in,
but that's pretty late too. Um. Yeah, spices are the

(35:00):
kind of forerunners of drugs. Um. And you know, I
mean if you eat chili peppers, right, or black pepper,
lots of black pepper, you feel flushed and you feel
it changes consciousness. I mean, there are many foods to
change consciousness. Sugar Just watch kids with sugar. That's their drug.
It's a powerful effect. But I love that chivil Bush
book and I remember reading it back in the eighties

(35:21):
and thinking, wow, this is a fascinating area. And and
that was one of my inspirations to write about drugs.
The other is a book I wonder if you know
by uh By Lenson called on Drugs. I think that's
just a brilliant book that no one's heard of about drugs.
And um, he's very good at looking at the cultural
and economic um identity of different drugs. You know that

(35:44):
cocaine is a consumerist drug, right, you always want more.
It drives that consumerist economy. And other drugs make you
very content with what you have in front of you, cannabis.
And then he had a wonderful chapter on LSD and
how it was orientalized by Timothy Leary. It's really true,
you realize it's it's so much of you know. He
used the Tibetan Book of the Dead as the frame

(36:04):
for the experience. And it's really just about how constructive
these drug experiences are. But yet they do have qualities
that push them in one direction or another. Let's take
a break here and go to an ad. He also write,

(36:33):
I mean about the ways in which society has transformed.
I mean, alcohol is the far and a way the
most widely consumed drug and revolutionary error early nineteenth century America,
other parts of the world. Um, but then there's the
transition here and in other countries, United Kingdom elsewhere, man
a bunch of the Western world to coffee, and that
in an increasingly industrialized world, that is more appropriate. I

(36:54):
love the point you make that it can't be just
coincidence that both the emergence of cought the and the
emergence of the minute hand on the clock happened around
the same time. Yeah, well, you know, what's really interesting
about the arrival of caffeine, coffee and tea and chocolate
in Europe. Those three substances arrive in the same decade
in England, which makes that a really a red letter

(37:17):
decade as far as I'm concerned. But we see it
before and after the introduction of a of a powerful drug,
because the older drugs like alcohol, cannabis, opium, they've been around,
you know, since prehistory. Probably said, we don't know what
a world without them was really like. But we see
the arrival at a moment in time of caffeine and
it changes things in a profound way. And people at

(37:39):
the time noticed, they're writing about this new sober and
civil drink and that you know, clerks and offices are
no longer drunk, and they're doing a better job and um.
And it was immediately grasped that this drug was well
suited for mental work in a way alcohol wasn't, and
was well suited for operating machinery. So the the industrial revolution,
you gets a big push from the arrival of caffeine.

(38:02):
It creates the kind of worker that you want. And
you know, before that people were doing physical work outdoors
and it didn't matter if you were buzzed, and people
were buzz because they were drinking, you know, at breakfast,
because alcohol was safer than water. And that's why you
even gave alcohol to your kids. UM in the form
of hartsider, I mean, not strong forms of alcohol, but
but everybody got alcohol. Once you start doing work that

(38:26):
involves heavy machinery, and especially when you need a night shift,
you know, because these machines are so expensive and you
want to run them all night. Caffeine is what allows
us to stay up late. Caffeine disconnects us from uh
natural time, the time of the sun used to be.
You would work from dawn till dusk. With caffeine and

(38:47):
electric light and or gaslight and a few other things
like coal, you could have a night shift and an
overnight shift. And it had a profound effect on um
creating a human being, a human body that could work
in the in the context of a mill or another
kind of technological setup. UM. So, I think it had

(39:08):
a big effect. And if you want an example of
what's going on with capitalism and caffeine, just look at
the coffee break and think about that. You know, your
employer gives you a drug coffee or tea and then
paid time in which to enjoy it. That's incredible. Why
is your employer doing that not to be nice, They're
doing it because they know that you you will work

(39:28):
better and harder and more efficiently. Yeah. So part of
what you do is to write this broad historical perspective,
and you also raise concerns about the future. You point
out that with climate change, many of the coffee growing
regions maybe hurt the most. You know, you point out
another place that with you know, we've typically gotten our
opioids from the opium plant, morphine, heroin, etcetera. But now

(39:49):
we see fentyl emerging, and we see other either semi
or total synthetics that may be displacing this. We now
see a for profit psychedelics world that knows that part
of its opportunity to make money is by designing slight
variations on the natural substances which they can't patent. And so,
I mean, any thoughts about where we're going in terms

(40:09):
of our psychoactive drug use of the future. Well, there's
a few different futures out there, and I don't know
which one is going to predominate, but I think they're
going to be multiple. I mean, there isn't a kind
of enclosure movement in the corporate world around psychedelics, an
attempt to patent as much as possible. Compass Pathways is
most notorious for wanting to patent psilocybin, and you can't

(40:30):
exactly but the patent of one crystalline form of it,
and whether that's a meaningful patent or not remains to
be seen. But you know, psilocybin will continue to grow
in cow patties, it will continue to grow in closets
and the gardens, and it's I think it'll be hard
to control. There will be the you know, the natural form,
the mushroom form that will still be out there, and
and underground therapy won't go away. I think it will

(40:52):
actually get even more successful. There was a period where
the underground therapists were worried they were going to be
written out of psychedelic medicine. But they're no long you're
worried about that because the demand is going to be
so great and they have access to the drug and
they they're the ones with a lot of experience too
and administering it. And then there's gonna be this religious path.
I'm very interested to see these new churches or you know,

(41:13):
that use psychedelic as a sacrament. I mean, already we
have three of them. There's two Ayahuasca churches that have
the legal right to use ahuasca, and then there's the
Native American Church, which has the legal right to use peyote.
But there will be a church of psilocybin and a
church of LSD. And I think that it's going to
be very hard for the Supreme Court to deny that
they are either religions or that this is their sacrament,

(41:35):
and that the jurisprudence around religious freedom has gotten so
crazily expansive that I think it's going to be like
an exploding cigar when it gets to Samuel Alito's desk
one of these churches, and we'll see. I mean, you know,
they don't always feel they have to be consistent, you know,
they don't they it was saying, I mean, I remember
Justice Scalia you mentioned right, and shot down the Native
American Church is right to use peyote, and fortunately Congress

(41:57):
overturn them. But Scalia was not consistently bad on all
drug issues. But he may have been somebody who just
kind of saw America as a Christian nation or Judeo
Christian nation as fundamental to his conception, and that therefore
allowing something like this might threaten it. But how outrageous
I mean, given the fact that white people came to
this country seeking religious freedom, the free exercise of religion,

(42:19):
and they put it in the First Amendment. And here
are the people who pre existed us using their sacrament
and being told by the Supreme Court of the United
States that the drug war is more important than your
religious practice. I mean, it was just one of the
most outrageous decisions, and I'm really glad it was undone.

(42:40):
So you know, you get into the Native American Church,
what are the interesting things? Well, first of all, you
make the point that if people white people and all
others who are not part of the Native American Church
are gonna use mescaline, don't get it from peyote, get
it from the synthetic or else, get it from the
sign pedro plant which grows in abundance. And his very
hearty right. But you also interesting pointed out that Native

(43:01):
Americans did not actually use this until a hundred years
or so ago, whereas the traditional use went back hundreds
of not suses of six thousand years six value among
the witch all in Mexico and others as well. Yeah,
the story of the Native American Church and how it
was created and what it did for Native Americans was
to me one of the more moving stories I've I've

(43:22):
written about. UM. It is true that it wasn't until
the eighteen eighties at least, that white people noticed it
that they were using peyote in a ceremonial way. Um.
It was a revival of a practice um that had
been continuous in Mexico. And remember the distinction between Texas
and Mexico is fairly recent, and peyote grows on both

(43:42):
sides of the Rio Grand in a strip there. And UM,
there may have been Native Americans in Texas South Texas
who used it continually, but for most Native Americans, it
was really when they were forced onto reservations in Oklahoma
and brought into close contact with one another that this
practice spread, um and became a really an inter tribal

(44:03):
um practice and did a lot to knit different Indian
groups together, because remember, before we got here, they weren't
Native Americans. Uh. In both in both senses, there was
no America. But also they were separate nations, and many
of them hated each other. They were agrarian people, and
there were no mads, and they had many different lifestyles

(44:23):
and and uh so it's it's only us that have
forced them to be lumped together. And the Native American
Church when that phrases invented, is the first time the
phrase Native American is used. And that doesn't happen to
but anyway, at a at a moment of maximum trauma
for American Indians in the eighteen eighties, this is after
the Ghost Dance has been suppressed violently, there's a massacre

(44:46):
at Wounded Knee. This is after, um, we've begun taking
Indian children from their parents, cutting off their hair, putting
them in boarding schools. Where the avowed aim was to
and this is a quote to kill the Indian and
save them. And it was the policy of the US
government to destroy Indian culture. Um, many of their religious
practices were outlawed, the Sun Dance, for example, and and

(45:09):
by the way, we're outlawed until the Carter administration. So
this is a kind of horrible episode. And um, the
Native Americans found that peyote used in ceremony was helped
accommodate them to their new lives um and helped heal
them from things like alcohol, which don't really become a
problem until reservation life. And so you know, this is

(45:33):
a traumatized people, and they found relief in peyote and
continue to the payote is um is is. Now you know,
there're two and or fifty thousand members at least in
the Native American Church, and and I don't know how
many different tribes, but dozens and dozens of tribes. So
it's a very hopeful story and it's a story from
which we we stand to learn a lot. Well. In closing,
let me just say, you know, when I think about

(45:54):
the future of psychoelic assistans psychotherapy and whether health insurance
will pay for it, reading in your talk that the
Indian Health Services pays for peyote sessions, I mean, what
a great you know, precedent for covering the cost of
psych assisted therapy. So, Michael, thank you so much for
joining me. It's great to catch up. I love your
new book. Um do you have any plans where the

(46:16):
next book is not? Yeah, not yeah, I'm working on that.
I've been too busy with this one. Okay. Always a
pleasure to talk to you, Ethan Yes YouTube, Michael, Thanks
very much. Psychoactive is the production of I Heart Radio
and Protozoa Pictures. It's hosted by me Ethan Naedelman. It's
produced by Katcha Kumkova and Ben Cabrick. The executive producers

(46:38):
are Dylan Golden, Ari Handel, Elizabeth Geesus and Darren Aronovski
for Protozoa Pictures, Alice Williams and Matt Frederick for iHeart
Radio and me Ethan Naedelman. Our music is by Ari
Blusian and especial thanks to Aviv Brio, Sef Bianca Grimshaw
and Robert Beatty. If you'd like to share your own stories, comments,

(46:58):
or ideas, please leave us a message at eight three
three seven seven nine sixty. That's one eight three three
psycho zero. You can also email us as Psychoactive at
protozoa dot com or find me on Twitter at Ethan
natal men And if you couldn't keep track of all this,

(47:19):
find the information in the show notes. Tune in next
time for my conversation with the former president of Columbia
that's the country, not the university, and Nobel Peace Prize
winner Juan Manuel Santos. I come from a country which
perhaps is the country that has suffered most in this

(47:42):
world war on drugs. Colombia, for decades have been fighting
this war at a terrible cost. We have sacrificed our
best leaders, are best journalists, are best judges, and we
are still the number one exporter of cocaine to the world.
Mark Subscribe to Cycoactive now, see it, don't miss it.