By Sarah McCammon, National Public Radio, July 4, 2021
SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST:
Bestselling author Michael Pollan has made a career of asking big questions about the natural world and our relationship to it. In his latest book, he's turning his attention to three psychoactive plants - opium, caffeine and mescaline. The book is called "This Is Your Mind On Plants." In it, Pollan experiments with each mind altering substance and writes about what their classifications as drugs - legal or not - tell us about ourselves. When we spoke, I began by asking what drew him to these three substances.
MICHAEL POLLAN: I chose these three because they represent three big categories of plants. There's, I mean, to use the colloquial classification, there's an upper, caffeine - a downer, opiates or opium - and what I think of as an outer, a psychedelic, and that was mescaline, which I hadn't dealt with in my last book and was very curious to learn about because it's a very important psychoactive plant in the form of peyote for Native Americans.
MCCAMMON: In the section about mescaline, you talk about the religious and spiritual use of that plant. It's one people may be less familiar with. It is a psychedelic that's found in a certain species of cactus. And it's only legal for that use, right? Why is that?
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