This is Your Mind on Plants by Michael Pollan

I’ve had a long-time interest in native plants of the Americas as food and medicine (there’s a well-thumbed 40 year-old copy of Schultes’ Plants of the Gods in my library). I received Pollan’s book as a Christmas gift and coincidentally, had heard positive comments on a previous book of his (How to Change Your Mind) from a fellow hiker.

The first two parts of the book, dedicated to opium and caffeine, are good…though the caffeine chapter rehashes a lot of material I’d read almost 20 years ago in The Devil’s Cup, by Stewart Lee Allen and that on opium is more about the craziness of the war on drugs (see Down by the River by Charles Bowden, for a better take on this) than on the plant and its derivatives.

Pollan goes over the edge in the last section of the book, on peyote , into the farther fields of “wokeness” (anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism and cultural appropriation) and New Age gobbledygook as he describes his COVID-hampered trips into mescaline land.

If you are seriously interested in psychoactive plants, whether from ethnobotanical, physiological or legal perspectives, I’d recommend the three books referenced above versus wasting your time on this bit of fluff.