This Is Your Mind On Plants is definitely going on my list of best books I have read this year. It was educational, extremely interesting, and insightful. It is exactly the type of non fiction book that I like to read, a book that is written in such a manner that it is entertaining so much so that you forget that you are learning. I loved the mixture of historical stories and facts blended together with the real life experiences of the author as he researched and ingested three different plants in order to provide the best possible insight. He wanted to give the reader an understanding of what is a downer, an upper, and an outer, and he did an amazing job.
The first part of the book is about downers, in this case, opium. This may be naive of me, but considering the fact that I do not use recreational drugs and I only rarely get prescribed a painkiller for medical reasons, I did not know that OxyContin, a famous opioid, was a downer. I also did not know that overdose and addiction to this prescription drug led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of individuals. Deaths did not only occur from the very drug itself, but from those who turned to illegal forms of the drug after they could no longer get them legally. A disturbingly large number of new heroin users have turned to illegal drugs after becoming addicted to prescription painkillers. This is frightening, and I’ve gotten a little off track, but I was really moved by the above facts. The form of opium that the author explores for research purposes in this book is poppy, a plant that anyone can grow in their backyard gardens. The back and forth between what is currently legal and illegal, right and wrong, when it comes to growing poppies, was absolutely enthralling. I especially loved getting to read the original piece on the author’s experience growing poppy and drinking the tea which he wrote decades ago. At the time he was unable to publish for legal reasons, and the piece itself was lost for years before it was found and finally deemed safe to publish.
Part two was about uppers. The easiest upper to get in the world, considering that it is legal everywhere, is caffeine in the form of coffee or tea. I learned a lot about a substance that I consume almost everyday, yet knew very little about until reading this chapter. There is an interesting bit about why we associate coffee with sobering us up after ingesting too much alcohol, why coffee is associated with masculinity and tea with femininity, and the relationship between coffee and opium and the terrible impact it had on Chinese culture. Although the chapter on opium was amazing, I became completely engrossed with this chapter probably because caffeine is a substance I use regularly. It both made me want to try and take a break from caffeine, if you read you will see why, and also continue to use it so that I can be at maximum potential and productivity.
The final part was about the substance I knew the least about, mescaline, or the outer, and the plants that produce this substance. Illegal to everyone in the United States, with the exception of those who are active members of the Native American Church, the plants have become endangered due to people poaching. This is a huge concern for followers of the church, as the plants are used for religious ceremonies and healing purposes, not to get high. They don’t consider these plants as drugs, and they find the term offensive. The plants are thought of as holy and sacred, and the individuals who are poaching the plants do not have the respect and reverence for them that members of the Native American Church do. You really need to read this chapter to even begin to get an understanding of what these plants mean to these people as a whole. Honestly, from the way the author described it, unless you have grown up within this religion or you join it and devote your whole heart to it, you will never really understand.
If anyone made it through that incredibly long review, thank you. I will try to keep my next one shorter, I don’t think it will be a challenge actually because I don’t think the next book I read will come close to this. I can only hope that I read one or two more books that are this good by the end of the year.
Nonfiction and Nonsense 