Michael Pollan on psychedelia: ‘Everything I once was had been liquefied’

The writer Michael Pollan is best known for his advice, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” His bestselling books (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Cooked) have served up large helpings of food for thought — about the health claims of packaged meals, the iniquities of industrial farming, and the joy a home-cooked family dinner can bring. In his seventh decade, however, Pollan has become fascinated by a new subject — psychedelic drugs. So when I meet him at his home in Berkeley, California, we talk at length not about organic produce or slow-braised pork but his recent and first real experience of tripping on LSD and magic mushrooms.

Pollan has the vitality of someone who has followed his own food rules and the practised eloquence of a media-friendly professor. He describes himself as a “forward-moving person”, a “doer” and a “staunch materialist”. Though he defends the achievements of the 1960s (“I mean, Trump is a product of the backlash” against that decade), he is very far from a spaced-out hippie. And while his hillside Arts and Crafts house has a view across the bay to San Francisco, a city long associated with the Summer of Love, his interest in psychedelics has had more to do with new scientific findings than flower power and multicoloured swirls.

Yet when Pollan recently took acid for the first time, he found himself experiencing what he describes in his new book How to Change Your Mind as a “cascading dam break of love”. And under the influence of psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms), he felt that “everything I once was . . . had been liquefied . . . we can let go of so much — the desires, fears, and defences of a lifetime!”

During this same trip, he listened to a Bach cello suite, and knew that “never before has a piece of music pierced me as deeply . . . one might glean the very meaning of life . . . I became the cello”. A little earlier, he took a pee, and the “arc of water I sent forth was truly the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, a waterfall of diamonds cascading into a pool, breaking its surface into a billion clattering fractals of light”.

Pollan knows how these descriptions sound — “I definitely had to put away self-consciousness,” he tells me, “but that’s sort of the point.” The book’s title refers less to decision-making than to bringing about a lasting alteration in thinking, as well as to the mind-altering nature of psychedelic trips. Pollan tells the story of research into psychedelic drugs and it turns out to be longer than we might think — it begins in the 1940s, well before “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, and opens out on to their current medical renaissance.

In 1959 Cary Grant gave an interview in which he extolled the benefits of LSD therapy. After dozens of sessions, he declared himself “born again”: “All the sadness and vanities were torn away.” Psychedelic drugs had a “respectable” 1950s: they were legal and considered miracle cures for addiction and depression. Then the counterculture changed everything. The “high priest” of LSD, Timothy Leary, called on young people to “turn on, tune in, drop out” and was eventually dubbed the most dangerous man in America. By the end of the 1960s, psychedelics were outlawed, and had become synonymous with bad trips, suicides and psychosis.

But after “decades in the shadows”, Pollan writes, psychedelic therapy is becoming respectable again. Indeed, it suddenly seems to be everywhere — featuring in innumerable articles and a clutch of high-profile books. Not only has “microdosing” become popular in Silicon Valley and beyond, but serious medical trials sanctioned by the relevant authorities in the US and Europe have confirmed that LSD and psilocybin taken in controlled environments can be successful in helping to treat various mental disorders, and as part of end-of-life palliative care. Having talked to patients who were volunteers in such trials, and who claimed to have had deeply meaningful and mystical experiences on the drugs, Pollan decided, as any thorough writer should, to embark on first-hand research.

“There is a reason this book came into my life at this time,” he says. The author was turning 60, and felt the need to break mental habits, to “shake up the snow globe”: “taking the drugs and writing the book came from the same impulse: to try something new”. What’s more, his father faced a terminal cancer diagnosis, so mortality was on Pollan’s mind. He was intrigued by the way last-stage cancer patients, thanks to psychedelic therapy sessions, talked of meeting death with equanimity, finding “the plane of existence of love”, and being at one with humanity and nature.

While being aware that many such hippie-ish insights exist on a knife edge between “the profound and the banal”, Pollan tells me he was impressed by how psychedelic “journeys” appear to take such “Hallmark card sentiments and actually infuse them with the power of a deeply held conviction”. The drugs represent “awe in a pill”, and at the very least offered him the chance “to learn something about my mind”.

Having decided to take them, he had to confront his fear. “It’s not a role I slipped into easily,” he says. Aged 10 in 1965, he was “a child of the moral panic about LSD. I grew up believing that horrible things would happen.” Even though his research revealed it to be nigh-on impossible to overdose, and that the worst thing he was likely to suffer was a panic attack, “every journey was preceded by an incredible anxiety about what I was about to do . . . I would think: ‘Are you crazy? Your heart could give out . . . You could uncover some deep insanity or trauma.’ ” He knew he had to “overcome those voices” — it helped that he had a book to write.

Pollan didn’t qualify for a medical trial, so he had to go underground. I ask him what this entailed. Not only did he check the legal situation — “as far as I know, there is no case of someone being prosecuted based on describing his own experiences of the drugs” — he was careful to find “guides” to create a suitable environment and the right mindset for the trips. He is amusing in the book about “New Age drivel” and the guides he rejected as having too much of a dark side (for one, “death is just another experience”). Those he chose provided a positive atmosphere and a quiet space, administered whatever dose seemed appropriate, and were on hand afterwards to discuss the “journey”. On different occasions, Pollan took LSD, psilocybin, ayahuasca, and the smoked venom of the Sonoran Desert toad (this, his only bad trip, “was absolutely terrifying, though there was bliss afterwards in realising that reality still existed and I still had a body”).

The highlight was going through “ego-dissolution”. Ego is, in many ways, the villain of Pollan’s book — a vigilant, tyrannical force that gets things done and looks after one’s interests, but is fearful and prevents “a fusion of the personal self into a larger whole”. As he writes in How to Change Your Mind, on mushrooms Pollan felt “a merging with other people, with nature . . . I realised that the ground of your ego is not the only ground on which you can stand. And that was a mind-blowing idea.” Channelling Aldous Huxley, he felt that “a door . . . opened for me on to a realm of human experience that for 60 years had been closed”.

Neuroscientists who are exploring the effect of psychedelics with brain-imaging tools identify such ego-dissolution with a decrease in blood flow to a part of the brain known as the default mode network. In conversation, Pollan’s excitement about such research is palpable: what happens in a brain during a trip is similar to what happens during meditation. The ego recedes and an unusual connectivity takes its place. Comparisons can be made to religious experiences and the free thinking of young children — and insights can be gained into the mysteries of consciousness (“the great uncharted territory”).

Finding the material cause of altered states of mind makes them no less curious or astonishing. He knows the history of psychedelics is full of “people who believe they have found the key to the universe”, and that it’s “hard to say this without sounding crazy . . . two of the most serious problems we face as a civilisation are the environmental crisis and tribalism. These drugs address both at the individual level: you feel at one with nature; and you feel commonality with people. Of course” — as the wry, pragmatic writer takes over again from the fledgling hippie — “ it’s utopian and naive to think that it could ever happen.”

The smoked venom of the Sonoran Desert toad was his only bad trip: ‘absolutely terrifying, though there was bliss afterwards in realising that reality still existed’

Does he advocate legalisation? “It was careless use that got us into trouble with these drugs in the 1960s,” he points out. “They are powerful, and if you look at other cultures that use them, they have always regulated or governed the experience through ritual, or by having an elder present. I think that’s a good lesson for us . . . So simple legalisation doesn’t strike me as the best idea. Yet I also think that to limit their use to people with pathologies would be a shame . . . To the extent that I’m advocating for anything, it’s to do more research.” Far from irrelevant is the tendency of psychedelics to “threaten hierarchies and create nonconformists”: as Pollan points out, it’s an “endlessly interesting topic why societies smile on some drugs, caffeine, for instance, and frown on others”.

He hasn’t tried the drugs again since taking the half-dozen trips recounted in his book (“I only really dipped in to get a sense of things”), but though Pollan says he is “pretty much back to my baseline self”, traces of his experiences linger. His wife Judith Belzer, an artist, tells him he “was more open and emotionally available” when his father died in January, thanks to his “journeys”, and he treasures the idea of remaining a little more “undefended”. But, as Pollan says, he is lucky enough not to need psychedelics to help confront his own death or disease. He was merely looking for a “reboot” to enrich his life as a happy and healthy sixtysomething. (He hikes, runs and grows vegetables and herbs in his Mediterranean-style garden — huge bowls of green and flageolet beans stand in the kitchen ready for a party he and Judith are giving that evening.)

This is an entertaining and engrossing account of the science of psychedelics, which is perhaps even better for not being straightforwardly evangelical — “if there was a conversion experience,” he laughs, “it was getting away from writing about food.” Yet without question his mind has been changed.

How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics, by Michael Pollan, Allen Lane, RRP£20, 480 pages

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