13 Critiques of How to Change Your Mind
Michael Pollan is a dweeb
Long ago when I taught college classes, I went through a phase when I used Omnivore’s Dilemma and even a chapter from Botany of Desire. Yes, dear reader, I too was a Michael Pollan apologist, but since the head of the dweebs turned his pen to psychedelics I’ve found myself increasingly irritated by his voice and by how many people take his word to be gospel.
My therapist who is studying to be a psychedelic integration coach was recently assigned How to Change Your Mind in a clinical-level class. It’s maddening that such a voice has collapsed the depiction of tripping and become the representation of the psychedelic experience today. At least Ken Kesey was weird and funny. Michael Pollan’s voice lacks the whimsy humor and sensuality that to me are hallmarks of the psychedelic experience.
I’ve read or tried to read How to Change Your Mind a few times and it’s just as boring as the first time I attempted it. No one can make using drugs sound as vanilla as Michael Pollan. But I plowed through it one last time just to be more specific about my critiques. I hope that after this I won’t have to waste my breath or my blog space on this book again.
Many of the critiques below have already been made in other places. Pollan has attempted to walk back some of the passages in the book(slightly) as a result. Here’s some reasons why you should be skeptical of How to Change Your Mind:
Ageism. Pollan suggests in How to Change Your Mind that maybe the psychedelic experience is best reserved for older people like him. “I’ve begun to wonder if perhaps these remarkable molecules might be wasted on the young, that they may have more to offer us later in life, after the cement of our mental habits and everyday behaviors has set,” he writes (7). Every indigenous psychedelic ceremonial practice I’m familiar with involves multi-generational participants, including coming-of-age experiences for young people. My best journeys have been with mixed generational groups. Elders alongside young people is the sweet spot. No one has expanded my mind as much as the young people I’ve taught over the years. Tripping with only old people sounds so tedious.
Pollan posits himself as a lay scientist and not a druggie, cleverly and continually drawing a line between himself and druggies in the book. But most people who use psychedelics or have mind-expanding experiences with drugs don’t use them like Michael Pollan or his dweeb friends. For most of us, it’s harder to draw a line between drug use and using psychedelics for mental health. While Pollan is good at making his source material seem expansive in part from long quotations, he’s no scientist and hardly scratches the surface of psychedelic science. The book’s breadth and source material is actually quite limited. This is due to the dearth of long-term studies on psychedelics, especially at the time he wrote the book, but also limited by Pollan’s choice of source material, which leans heavily upon white male psychedelics-as-science advocates. Call it the Rick Doblin problem: Advocates posing as scientists. Pollan caught it bad. In one 3-hour Chacruna class, I learned more than the many times I’ve tried to read How to Change Your Mind.
At times Pollan pretends to call out his subject position as a well-to-do older white male but How to Change Your Mind has no real self-reflection or critical examination of power, privilege or race. Here’s as far as he’ll go: “In telling the story of psychedelic research, past and present, I do not attempt to be comprehensive” (18). “Rather than try to introduce readers to the entire cast of characters responsible for the psychedelic renaissance, my narrative follows a small number of pioneers who constitute a particular scientific lineage, with the inevitable result that the contributions of many others have received short shrift.” If you want to read a more interesting and comprehensive history of psychedelics in American science that includes the contributions of women and minorities, check out this book instead: Tripping on Utopia.
How to Change Your Mind focuses on the experiences of older, wealthy white men almost exclusively, which might be why it’s so boring. The experiences of women and minorities are left out of the book and only briefly mentioned. On page 44, Pollan mentions Ann Shulgin, but then calls her husband the brilliant chemist. He interviews a few female study participants, but undermines their perspectives as mystical woo woo. Although he trips with his wife Judith in the book and claims to have been brought closer to her by the experience, he abandons her during a rough patch in a trip and barely mentions her experience thereafter. All in all, I could find less than five women discussed in the book, and no minority perspectives to speak of. This is so unfortunate when it comes to psychedelics because as I’ve written here before, more women and minorities in groups makes the psychedelic experience safer, more sensual and more fun. If you look around a group and there are only wealthy older white men, my advice is to run.
Pollan appears to be investigating major figures in psychedelics including Rick Doblin, Timothy Leary and Andrew Weil, but ends up being an apologist for all three men around whom there have now been numerous scandals. Doblin is a “great shaggy dog with a bone,” to Pollan, “disarmingly, perhaps helplessly, candid…Like Timothy Leary, Doblin is the happiest of warriors” (35). Here’s a post on Leary: Leary was a Creep, a post on problems surrounding Doblin: Maps is a MDMA Therapy Cult, and more information about problems in Doblin’s organization: Rick Doblin is a Creep Too.
Despite his reputation as prophet of plant consciousness, Pollan actually backs away from plant sentience in How to Change Your Mind, perhaps as consequence of his underwhelming trips. “(Stamets and McKenna) suggest that neurochemistry is the language in which nature communicates with us, and it’s trying to tell us something important by way of psilocybin,” Pollan writes, hopelessly unable to understand his cooler friends (121). “But this strikes me as more of a poetic conceit than a scientific theory.” Plants must find it harder to speak directly to the dweeb brain. If you want to read a book by a real scientist who studies plant consciousness, I recommend this book: Thus Spoke the Plant.
Pollan makes dangerous assumptions about the underground operating like “professionals,” nearly suggesting the scene is safe. “(I)t was reassuring to learn that the underground community of psychedelic guides, which I had assumed consisted of a bunch of individuals all doing pretty much their own thing, operated like professionals, working from a body of accumulated knowledge and experience in a set of traditions that had been handed down from psychedelic pioneers such as Al Hubbard, Timothy Leary, Myron Stolaroff, Stan Grof and Leo Zeff,” he writes (230), hopelessly naive about the diversity of practices and dangers in the psychedelic underground. Rich people generally have access to safer psychedelic groups and white men have less of a chance of being groomed or harmed in these groups than others. Plus, the intellectual lineage he discusses is full of creeps. Again, I’d refer you to Tripping on Utopia if you want to learn a more complete version of history.
Pollan mentions cultural appropriation only as a brief aside, and accepts appropriations as science or scientific fact, an all-too common elision of the contemporary psychedelic scene. Essentially, he doesn’t give the issue of cultural appropriation any serious consideration. Here’s as far as he goes, “Wasson was distorting a complex indigenous practice in order to fit a preconceived theory and conflating the historical significance of that practice with its contemporary meaning” (112). He then briefly discusses how attention put on an indigenous mushroom practice ruined the guide, Maria Sabina’s, life. This discussion takes up two pages of more than 400, but the incident he’s referring to still undergirds a great deal of unfortunate practice and thought. Here’s my post on Wasson: Psychedelic Renaissance Tropes. Of New Age appropriators, Pollan writes, “What I was tempted to dismiss as a smorgasbord of equal-opportunity New Age tchotchkes, I would eventually come to regard more sympathetically, as the material expression of the syncretism prevalent in the psychedelic community” (231). Syncretism is a funny word to use to describe white people who constantly say, “Aho,” and walk around fanning their smudge with feathers.
Pollan is an apologist for California Institute of Integral Studies-trained facilitators, although it was common practice for psychedelic guides in this community to sleep with their students/clients and affiliated guides have spawned many scandals. If you want to know more about these psychedelic guides, their intellectual lineage and track records, listen to this podcast: https://www.thecut.com/tags/power-trip/. The guide Pollan interviews who was trained at CIIS admits he was sued by a client who had a breakdown afterward and, taking no responsibility, says he no longer works with “crazies.” Apparently he now prefers to work with tech bros and dweebs instead.
Even as he claims to be investigating and deconstructing them, Pollan clings to dichotomies until the bitter end in How to Change Your Mind, leading me to believe the psychedelic experiment didn’t actually work that well for him. He appears to believe the mystical can be separated from scientific, and that consciousness belongs only to the human brain.
Ultimately Pollan privileges what he calls “normal waking consciousness” over altered states although his book claims to search for value in altered states. I think this is merely the backward thinking of a still-colonized mind. Altered states have more value, actually, it’s just very difficult to bring back what you learned there and apply it in normal waking consciousness in part because there are so many dweebs among us clinging to their versions of reality and identity.
Pollan dangerously suggests psychedelics are safe for the heart except MDMA. Just not true. All psychedelics that I know of have action on the heart, the heart rate and the breath. Whether they are safe or not depends on a person’s underlying health situation, the dosage and the substance.
His trips are lame. His trips are lame. Why would you take tripping advice from someone who can’t let his ego die?