How to Change Your Mind

by Michael Pollan

  CHANGING ONE’S MIND, or one’s subject as a writer, is never easy, and this book would never have been ventured, much less completed, if not for the support and encouragement of the people around me. Ann Godoff, my book editor for going on four decades now, didn’t blink or blanch when I told her I wanted to write a book about psychedelics; her enthusiasm and sure-footed editorial guidance through this, our eighth book together, has been a blessing. Amanda Urban, too, abetted this adventure in so many ways; my career-long debt to her is incalculable. Thanks, too, to the superb teams in their respective offices: Sarah Hutson, Casey Denis, and Karen Mayer, at Penguin; and, at ICM, Liz Farrell, Maris Dyer, Daisy Meyrick, Molly Atlas, and Ron Bernstein.

  The best thing about being a journalist is getting paid to learn whole new subjects as an adult. Yet the pursuit of such a continuing education would be impossible without the forbearance of the people we ask to be our teachers. I’m grateful to everyone—the scientists, the volunteers, the patients, the therapists, and the advocates—who endured the multiple, lengthy interviews and all the dumb questions. Special thanks to Bob Jesse, Roland Griffiths, Matthew Johnson, Mary Cosimano, Bill Richards, Katherine MacLean, Rick Doblin, Paul Stamets, James Fadiman, Stephen Ross, Tony Bossis, Jeffrey Guss, George Goldsmith, Ekaterina Malievskaia, Charles Grob, Teri Krebs, Robin Carhart-Harris, David Nutt, David Nichols, George Sarlo, Vicky Dulai, Judson Brewer, Bia Labate, Gabor Maté, Lisa Callaghan, and Andrew Weil. Though not everyone I interviewed is quoted here by name, all were excellent teachers, and I am deeply grateful for your patience with my questions and generosity with your answers. Several people took substantial risks in sharing their stories with me; although I can’t thank them publicly, I owe a tremendous debt to the many underground guides who gave so freely of their time, their experience, and their wisdom. It is a shame that at least for now their healing practice depends on acts of civil disobedience.

  I spent a productive and pleasurable year as a fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, which gave me the opportunity to research and write the history of psychedelic research in the city where an important chapter of it took place. The institute offered the perfect environment for pursuing a project that touches on so many different disciplines: I only had to walk down the hall to consult a brain scientist, a biologist, an anthropologist, and an investigative reporter. While at Radcliffe, I was blessed to work with a dogged undergraduate research assistant who helped me navigate the Harvard archives and turned up one hidden gem after another: thank you, Teddy Delwiche. I also owe a debt to Ed Wasserman, my dean at the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley, for granting me time off from teaching so that I could go to Cambridge and, later, complete the book.

  Back in Berkeley, Bridget Huber did brilliant work, first as a research assistant and then as a fact-checker; that this is the most thoroughly sourced of my books owes entirely to her diligence and skill. Several of my colleagues at Berkeley contributed hugely to my education in neuroscience and psychology: David Presti, Dacher Keltner, and Alison Gopnik enriched this book in more ways than they realize and, in the case of David and his partner, Kristi Panik, who read a draft of the neuroscience chapter, saved me from errors large and small. (Though they bear no responsibility for any errors that may remain.) Mark Edmundson supplied some crucial early advice that helped shape the narrative, and Mark Danner was, as ever, an invaluable sounding board on our walks at Inspiration Point. I count myself especially lucky to be close friends with an editor as astute and generous as Gerry Marzorati; his comments on the manuscript were invaluable and saved you, dear reader, from having to read several thousand unnecessary words.

  My first foray into the subject of psychedelics came in a 2015 piece in the New Yorker, “The Trip Treatment”; thanks to Alan Burdick, the gifted editor who assigned it, and David Remnick, for seeing it fit to publish; the piece opened all sorts of doors.

  For crucial research assistance along the way, as well as their indispensable online library, I’m deeply grateful to Earth and Fire, the proprietors of Erowid, which is the single most important resource on psychedelics there is. Check it out.

  For their wise, helpful, and reassuring legal counsel, I’m grateful to my dear friend Howard Sobel and his colleague Marvin Putnam at Latham & Watkins. I sleep much better knowing they have my back.

  A long book project has a way of inflecting the emotional weather in a family, this one perhaps more than most. Isaac, it has meant the world to me to be able to talk through my journeys with you; I always come away from our conversations with something smart, useful, and unexpected. Your support, curiosity, and encouragement have made all the difference.

  When I embarked on this long, strange trip, Judith wondered what it might mean for our thirty-year-plus collaboration. Would I return somehow changed? Never would I have imagined that after all that time anything could bring us closer together, but there it is. Thank you for pushing me to attempt something new, for the searching questions and insights along the way, for the close editing of every chapter—and, most of all, for going with me on the journey.

  Notes

  PROLOGUE A NEW DOOR

  The first of these molecules: Hofmann, LSD, My Problem Child, 40–47.

  The second molecule: Wasson and Wasson, Mushrooms, Russia, and History, vol. 2.

  a fifteen-page account: Wasson, “Seeking the Magic Mushroom.”

  LSD scrambled your chromosomes: Cohen, Hirschhorn, and Frosch, “In Vivo and In Vitro Chromosomal Damage Induced by LSD-25.”

  In the spring of 2010: Tierney, “Hallucinogens Have Doctors Tuning In Again.”

  For a peer-reviewed scientific paper: Griffiths et al., “Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance.”

  emergency room admissions involving psychedelics: Johansen and Krebs, “Psychedelics Not Linked to Mental Health Problems or Suicidal Behavior.”

  nearly a thousand volunteers: Personal correspondence with Matthew W. Johnson, PhD.

  the term “psychedelics”: Dyck, Psychedelic Psychiatry, 1–2.

  CHAPTER ONE A RENAISSANCE

  Entering his second century: Langlitz, Neuropsychedelia, 24–26.

  “the only joyous invention”: Hofmann, LSD, My Problem Child, 184–85.

  As a young chemist: Ibid., 36–45.

  And there it remained for five years: Ibid., 46–47.

  Now unfolds the world’s first bad acid trip: Ibid., 48–49.

  “My ego was suspended”: Quoted in Nichols, “LSD.”

  “everything glistened and sparkled”: Hofmann, LSD, My Problem Child, 51.

  “in the edifice of materialist rationality”: Jonathan Ott in translator’s preface to ibid., 25.

  “the feeling of co-creatureliness”: Langlitz, Neuropsychedelia, 25–26.

  The second watershed event of 2006: Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficente Uniao do Vegetal.

  “major therapeutic possibilities”: Kleber, “Commentary On: Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences,” 292.

  “hope that this landmark paper”: Schuster, “Commentary On: Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences,” 289.

  “that, when used appropriately”: Nichols, “Commentary On: Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences,” 284.

  “free oneself of the bounds”: Wit, “Towards a Science of Spiritual Experience.”

  the noetic quality: James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 370.

  “Dreams cannot stand this test”: Ibid., 389.

  more than a thousand scientific papers: See, for example, Grinspoon and Bakalar, Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered, 192.

  a PhD dissertation at Harvard: Walter Pahnke’s thesis, “Drugs and Mysticism: An Analysis of the Relationship Between Psychedelic Drugs and the Mystical Consciousness,” is available in PDF form at http://www.maps.
org/images/pdf/books/pahnke/walter_pahnke_drugs_and_mysticism.pdf.

  “Until the Good Friday Experiment”: Huston Smith, Huston Smith Reader, 73.

  a follow-up study of the Good Friday Experiment: Doblin, “Pahnke’s ‘Good Friday Experiment.’”

  a second review: Doblin, “Dr. Leary’s Concord Prison Experiment.”

  “would be for psychiatry”: Quoted in Nutt, “Brave New World for Psychology?,” 658.

  the first modern trial of psilocybin: Grob et al., “Pilot Study of Psilocybin Treatment for Anxiety in Patients with Advanced-Stage Cancer.”

  An internal memo: A cache of declassified CIA files related to Project Artichoke is available at http://www.paperlessarchives.com/FreeTitles/ARTICHOKECIAFiles.pdf.

  “my own constitution shuts me out”: James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 369.

  “The subject of it immediately says”: Ibid., 370.

  “Mystical states seem to those who experience them”: Ibid.

  “that deepened sense of the significance”: Ibid., 372.

  “and from one recurrence to another”: Ibid., 371.

  “The mystic feels as if his own will”: Ibid.

  led to lasting changes in their personalities: MacLean et al., “Mystical Experiences Occasioned by the Hallucinogen Psilocybin Lead to Increases in the Personality Domain of Openness.”

  “Doctors encounter this strange”: McHugh, review of The Harvard Psychedelic Club, by Don Lattin.

  “authoritative over the individuals”: James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 415.

  “The existence of mystical states”: Ibid., 419.

  “might, in spite of all the perplexity”: Ibid., 420.

  “ascend[s] to a more enveloping point of view”: Ibid.

  “It is as if the opposites of the world”: Ibid., 378.

  a pilot study in smoking cessation: Johnson et al., “Pilot Study of the 5-HT2AR Agonist Psilocybin in the Treatment of Tobacco Addiction.”

  CHAPTER TWO NATURAL HISTORY: BEMUSHROOMED

  The mycelia in a forest: Simard et al., “Net Transfer of Carbon Between Ectomycorrhizal Tree Species in the Field.”

  Humans have been using psilocybin mushrooms: Stamets, Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World, 11.

  “Psilocybe mushrooms and civilization”: Ibid., 16.

  “Mistakes in mushroom identification can be lethal”: Ibid., 30–32.

  “The Stametsian Rule”: Ibid., 53.

  had personal knowledge of psychedelic drugs: Lee and Shlain, Acid Dreams, 71.

  “through the eyes of a happy and gifted child”: Siff, Acid Hype, 93.

  Life gave him a generous contract: Ibid., 80.

  “description of your own sensations”: Ibid., 73.

  a circulation of 5.7 million: Ibid.

  “Seeking the Magic Mushroom”: All quotations appear in Wasson, “Seeking the Magic Mushroom.”

  “These they ate before dawn”: Wasson and Wasson, Mushrooms, Russia, and History, 223.

  “the devil that they worshipped”: Davis, One River, 95.

  “an act of superstition condemned”: Siff, Acid Hype, 69.

  “carry you there where god is”: Wasson, Hofmann, and Ruck, Road to Eleusis, 33.

  On the night of June 29–30, 1955: Wasson, “Seeking the Magic Mushroom.”

  “Before Wasson nobody took the mushrooms”: Estrada, María Sabina, 73.

  “To find God, Sabina”: Letcher, Shroom, 104.

  Person to Person: Siff, Acid Hype, 80.

  several other magazines: Ibid., 83.

  An exhibition on magic mushrooms: Ibid., 74.

  Hofmann isolated and named: Hofmann, LSD, My Problem Child, 128.

  “Thirty minutes after my taking”: Ibid., 126.

  In 1962, Hofmann joined Wasson: Ibid., 139–52.

  “unleash[ing] on lovely Huautla”: Wasson, “Drugs,” 21.

  “From the moment the foreigners arrived”: Estrada, María Sabina, 90–91.

  you can find him on YouTube: The video, The Stoned Ape Theory, by Terence McKenna, is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOtLJwK7kdk.

  “access to realms of supernatural power”: McKenna, Food of the Gods, 26.

  “catalyzed the emergence of human self-reflection”: Ibid., 24.

  “brought us out of the animal mind”: See McKenna’s talk on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOtLJwK7kdk.

  Samorini calls this a “depatterning factor”: Samorini, Animals and Psychedelics, 84–88.

  “Nature everywhere speaks to man”: Wulf, Invention of Nature, 54.

  “I myself am identical with nature”: Ibid., 128.

  “Everything,” Humboldt said, “is interaction and reciprocal”: Ibid., 59.

  “Nature always wears the colors”: Emerson, Nature, 14.

  another form of consciousness “parted from [us]”: James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 377.

  a spiritually “realized being”: Huston Smith, Cleansing the Doors of Perception, 76.

  “forbid[s] a premature closing”: James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 378.

  CHAPTER THREE HISTORY: THE FIRST WAVE

  When the federal authorities: Leary, Flashbacks, 232–42.

  Leary was called before a committee: Greenfield, Timothy Leary, 267–72.

  “Dreary Senate hearing and courtrooms”: Leary, Flashbacks, 251–52.

  “a tantalizing sense of portentousness”: Novak, “LSD Before Leary,” 91.

  “enter the illness and see with a madman’s eyes”: Osmond, “On Being Mad.”

  In the years following World War II: Dyck, Psychedelic Psychiatry, 17.

  the two researchers began to explore: Ibid.

  But it was a productive hypothesis: For an excellent overview of how this research contributed to the rise of neurochemistry, see Nichols, “Psychedelics,” 267.

  The Saskatchewan Mental Hospital: Weyburn would soon become the world’s most important hub of research into psychedelics. Dyck, Psychedelic Psychiatry, 26–28.

  “My 12 Hours as a Madman”: For a discussion of the article, see ibid., 31–33.

  Their focus on LSD: Ibid., 40–42.

  “seemed so bizarre that we laughed uproariously”: Ibid., 58–59.

  “From the first”: Ibid., 59.

  Based on this success: Ibid., 71.

  they seemed too good to be true: Ibid., 73.

  The idea that a drug could occasion: See Novak, “LSD Before Leary,” 97, and the anonymously published “Pass It On,” Kindle location 5372.

  Beginning in 1956, Bill W. had several LSD sessions: Eisner, “Remembrances of LSD Therapy Past,” 14, 26–45; Novak, “LSD Before Leary,” 97.

  Born in 1910 in New York City: Novak, “LSD Before Leary,” 88–89.

  “was taken by surprise”: Ibid., 92.

  “the problems and strivings”: Ibid.

  Cohen came to think of it: Betty Grover Eisner, draft of “Sidney Cohen, M.D.: A Remembrance,” box 7, folder 3, Betty Grover Eisner Papers, Stanford University Department of Special Collections and University Archives.

  “psycholytic” means “mind loosening”: Grinspoon and Bakalar, Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered, 7.

  Stanislav Grof, who trained as a psychoanalyst: For a detailed account of this work, see Grof, LSD.

  A 1967 review article: Grinspoon and Bakalar, Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered, 208.

  Anaïs Nin, Jack Nicholson, Stanley Kubrick: Lee and Shlain, Acid Dreams, 62.

  the most famous of these patients was Cary Grant: Siff, Acid Hype, 100.

  declared himself “born again”: Stevens, Storming Heaven, 64.

  “All the sadness and vanities”: Siff, Acid Hype, 100.

  “I’m no longer lonely”: Ibid.

  “Young wo
men have never before”: Novak, “LSD Before Leary,” 103.

  a surge in demand for LSD therapy: Ibid.

  “LSD became for us an intellectual fun drug”: Ibid., 99.

  Cohen was made uncomfortable: Ibid., 99–101.

  He remained deeply ambivalent: Ibid., 100.

  “under LSD the fondest theories”: Cohen, Beyond Within, 182.

  “any explanation of the patient’s problems”: Ibid.

  “therapy by self-transcendence”: Cohen, “LSD and the Anguish of Dying,” 71.

  “relish the possibility”: Dyck, Psychedelic Psychiatry, 1.

  “It was without question”: Huxley, Moksha, 42.

  “the folds of my gray flannel trousers”: Huxley, Doors of Perception, 33.

  “what Adam had seen on the morning”: Ibid., 17.

  “Words like ‘grace’ and ‘transfiguration’”: Ibid., 18.

  “a measly trickle”: Ibid., 23.

  “shining with their own inner light”: Ibid., 17.

  a common core of mystical experience: Huxley, Perennial Philosophy.

  “99 percent Aldous Huxley”: Novak, “LSD Before Leary,” 93.

  “It will give that elixir a bad name”: Ibid., 95.

  Clearly a new name for this class: Dyck, Psychedelic Psychiatry, 1–2.

  “had no particular connotation of madness”: Ibid., 2.

  “uncontaminated by other associations”: Osmond, “Review of the Clinical Effects of Psychotomimetic Agents,” 429.

  The goal was to create the conditions: Grinspoon and Bakalar, Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered, 194–95.

  his FBI file: Hubbard’s FBI file is available at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/AlHubbard.

  the best account we have of his life: Fahey, “Original Captain Trips.”

  the trail of Hubbard’s life: These facts, and their contradictions, are drawn from Lee and Shlain, Acid Dreams, and Fahey, “Original Captain Trips.”

  We know the government kept close tabs: Lee and Shlain, Acid Dreams, 45.

  “It was the deepest mystical thing”: Ibid.

  “a catalytic agent”: Ibid., 52.

  “if he could give the psychedelic experience”: Fahey, “Original Captain Trips.”