The full title of the book is “How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence”. Michael Pollan is American author, journalist, and professor of journalism at UC Berkley. According to the book, he never tried psychedelics before the recent times, when he was already in his late fifties or early sixties. The book intrigued me as the topic is often a sensitive one among the liberal groups, who discuss the benefits and drawbacks of psychedelics legalization.
The books starts off very childish, with dithyrambs being sang to the wonders of psychedelics and the benefits they might bring to the people who take them, citing some very limited studies. However, after a couple of chapters, a more scientific and structured approach emerges, and the book starts being interesting as well as educational. The language becomes engaging, not too difficult, having a story or a collection of stories to engage the mind, as well as facts and references to research, to educate it.
The book proceeds to describe the modern history and “heroes” of psychedelics. It describes fascinating lives of the extremely unusual people such as Alfred Matthew Hubbard and Timothy Leary, and tells the stories of how they popularized LSD in particular throughout the sixties. It then describes how psychedelics fell out of favor in people’s minds, at large due to Timothy Leary’s unorthodox methods and extravagant nature, as well as his questionable methods of performing psychedelics research. This, in part, lead to the criminalization of the drugs.
Michael Pollan then touches on his own experiences of taking psychedelics, and the feelings he had when taking them are described very well. For some of them, he approached professional (underground) guides to help him experience the drugs: people who specialize in creating the atmosphere and guide the experience. Existence of such people and service was new to me, though it could probably be expected that such an activity is not particularly encouraged by the law enforcement authorities.
The book describes several studies, including those made on prison inmates for rehabilitation, as well as for treating anxiety, addiction, and PTSD. The studies were well described, and very engaging to read. Many of them show promise, though not drastic, in using psychedelics in treating these conditions; the author notices, however, that often the environment during the psychedelic session plays a drastic role. And as evident from the underground nature of the studies, it is hard to perform proper analysis in the environment where the drugs are heavily stigmatized, and there is no well-setup infrastructure to perform proper research.
Overall, the book improved very much from how it started, and I liked it a lot. It had a lot of factual information, well written engaging personal anecdotes and stories, and historical context. It’s a very good read on the topic.
