Trippin’ With Pollan

How to Change Your Mind is a 400 page (New York Times Book Review Top 10 Book of the Year in 2018!) argument about the amazing benefits of psychedelic drugs. Here is the subtitle: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. You see: How to Change Your Mind is about how to quite literally change your mind through the use of psychedelic substances.

Right now, you fall into one of two camps. Either you are enthusiastically awaiting the explanation for why your psychedelic drug use is being defended in a bestselling book by a respected author or…well, you are wondering what is wrong with the world when Michael Pollan is writing and Your Humble Narrator is reading a defense of LSD. Believe me, until the Long Suffering Wife of Your Humble Narrator gave me this book for Christmas, I would have been in the latter camp too.

Pollan explains his mission:

Other societies have had long and productive experience with psychedelics, and their examples might have saved us a lot of trouble had we only known and paid attention. The fact that we regard many of these societies as “backward” probably kept us from learning from them. But the biggest thing we might have learned is that these powerful medicines can be dangerous—both to the individual and to the society—when they don’t have a sturdy social container: a steadying set of rituals and rules—protocols—governing their use, and the crucial involvement of a guide, the figure that is usually called a shaman. Psychedelic therapy—the Hubbard method—was groping toward a Westernized version of this ideal, and it remains the closest thing we have to such a protocol. For young Americans in the 1960s, for whom the psychedelic experience was new in every way, the whole idea of involving elders was probably never going to fly. But this is, I think, the great lesson of the 1960s experiment with psychedelics: the importance of finding the proper context, or container, for these powerful chemicals and experiences.

The history of psychedelics is fascinating, far more so than I would have ever guessed. Once upon a time, way back in the 1950s, there was a growing scientific literature on the possible uses of psychedelics in treating psychological disorders. The research was still in its infancy, but it was starting to show some promise.

Then along came Timothy Leary, who is surprisingly the villain in this story. Leary single-handedly destroyed the scientific research into psychedelics with his flamboyant advocacy to an entire generation that they use LSD to “Turn On. Tune In. Drop Out.” The reputation of LSD and other psychedelic substances was transformed into the kind of thing John Lennon used in order to write trippy songs like “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” Tom Wolfe had a merry time describing the antics of these psychedelic adventurers in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Trip. By the early 1970s, everyone knew LSD was bad. Bad for you; bad for society.

That is not the end of the story. LSD is making a comeback! Pollan reports on a growing number of people who are picking up the scientific literature from the point where it was before Leary came along. It turns out there are quite a few clinical trials going on looking at how to use psychedelic drugs to treat things like PTSD. It’s science! If Pollan is right, you may be visiting your local hospital sometime in the next decade for your LSD treatment.

There is quite the cast of characters in this story. There is the woman who literally drilled a hole in her own head because (shockingly enough) no medical professional would do it for her. There is the guy who roams around State Parks finding psychedelic mushrooms. There are the people who really do ingest toad venom. And Pollan wants to convince you that while these people may be odd, the psychedelic treatment really works.

What is it about psychedelics that helps so much in treating psychological problems? This is where the book gets, well, trippy. Pollan interviews a bunch of people who have taken psychedelic substances and relates what they discovered while they were under the influence. The stories are…weird. So, he decides we will all be better off if he gives us some first-hand stories. Three times, he takes a psychedelic drug and then he gives us a lengthy report of what happened next. These stories are…weird. As Pollan notes:

It embarrasses me to write these words; they sound so thin, so banal. This is a failure of my language, no doubt, but perhaps it is not only that. Psychedelic experiences are notoriously hard to render in words; to try is necessarily to do violence to what has been seen and felt, which is in some fundamental way pre- or post-linguistic or, as students of mysticism say, ineffable. Emotions arrive in all their newborn nakedness, unprotected from the harsh light of scrutiny and, especially, the pitiless glare of irony. Platitudes that wouldn’t seem out of place on a Hallmark card glow with the force revealed truth.
Love is everything.
Okay, but what else did you learn?
No—you must not have heard me: it’s everything!

Yep, that is exactly what all the stories in this book sound like. Does it make you want to indulge?

But, Pollan keeps insisting, this is not just a tale of weird trips. Not at all. Pollan has discovered something in his research, both in the second-hand and first-hand research. Consciousness is bigger than you thought. Indeed, consciousness lies outside your skull. Consciousness is part of a vaster realm of being. When you use psychedelic drugs, you discover a deeper and larger and greater and lovelier world than the one in which you currently live. You take LSD and your mind wanders in this other word and you see a door and you go through the door (always go through the door!) and it is all…amazing.

And there again, it all sounds so meaningless. So, Pollan tries again. And again. And again. He is screaming at you, “Don’t you see?”

And what does he want you to see? You have a soul.

As he notes, he is not the first person to discover a soul. Religious writings are full of discussions of a soul. Transcendentalists are full of discussion about a soul. But, Pollan never believed there was a soul, a part of you that is beyond this mortal coil. Now he knows better. Now, he says, he perfectly understands Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

Who knew the key to thinking Emerson was deep was taking LSD?

This is a book that defies easy analysis. It is one part insane rants about weird mystical trips. It is one part a fascinating historical survey of scientific research into psychedelic drugs. It is one part bizarre tales of bizarre people. It is one part a glimpse into the possible future uses of psychedelic drugs to treat PTSD and addiction. It is one part an argument for a nontangible soul. It is a thoroughly bizarre book full of wonder and madness and tedium.

Should you read it? I honestly have no idea.