Michael Pollan, Author of “This Is Your Mind on Plants”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now, we are talk the drug policy, which is another area of potential government overreach into our private lives. So, even as the legal cannabis industry is booming, there were still more than a million marijuana arrests across the United States in 2019. In his new book, “This Is Your Mind on Plants,” author Michael Pollan, challenges the way we think about all drugs from psychedelics and opioids to tea and coffee. And here he is talking to Walter Isaacson, exploring the many ways we let plants affect our behavior.

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WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you, Christian. And Michael Pollan, welcome to the show.

MICHAEL POLLAN, AUTHOR, “THIS IS YOUR MIND ON PLANTS”: Thank you, Walter. Good to be here.

ISAACSON: Your great book, which I love, which is “How to Change a Mind” was about psychedelics. Now, you have got a new one, which is “This is Your Mind on Plants.” And in many ways, it’s reshaped the way we think of drugs, especially mind-enhancing or altering drugs. Do you think the war on drugs might be ending because of these new feelings we have?

POLLAN: I think there is a lot of evidence that it is fading. If not, ending right away. The voters have spoken. And they are suing for peace. You know, we saw last fall five traditionally red states voted to legalize marijuana. In the State of Oregon, they voted to decriminalize all drugs, which is remarkable. And specifically, to legalize therapy with psilocybin. And then you have this decriminalized nature about propositions and city council resolutions going through that would legalize what they call plant medicines or antiagens (ph). In other words, for psychedelics, it stresses their spiritual qualities. So, I think the voters have had it with the drug war and realize it’s been a failure. And, you know, I think the politicians will be catching up pretty soon.

ISAACSON: What will peace and the war on drugs look like?

POLLAN: It is a really good question. Because, you know, in a way, things were simpler when a drug was either legal or illegal. But as soon as you decriminalize it or legalize it, the culture has to figure out what is the safest way to fold it into our lives. And that is not at all obvious. In the case of the psychedelics, we have this medical path that we’re on. You know, the FDA is now considering approving psilocybin and MBMA or ecstasy. And pretty soon, like within the next five years, both those drugs formally illicit will be available to people with a prescription from a doctor. Although, you won’t go to the CVS to get them. It will be part of a treatment package with preparation and guiding and integration afterwards. But what about people who aren’t mentally ill, who don’t have a psychiatric diagnosis? How will they have access to these drugs? And that’s going to be very interesting to watch. I don’t know the answer. There are people who are dreaming of setting up these psychedelic clinics. Where you will go. It will be like a spa experience and there will be a doctor there to write the prescription, but it won’t be a medical procedure. And that may be in our future too.

ISAACSON: Well, let’s move on to opium-based drugs. How do you think they should be treated?

POLLAN: Well, they are a hard case because they have created such a tremendous problem. You know, we just saw a record overdoses in the last year, during the COVID year. More people died from opiate overdose than died from alcohol, which is not usually the case. But we also know that making them illegal has not worked it. It has not stemmed use or overdoses. And we have to understand that many of the harms we associate with opiates are the result of the fact that they are illegal. Overdoses are often the result of the fact that they are laced with fentanyl. You don’t know what you are getting in a street drug. The sharing of needles leads to disease because of the contamination. The crime that has occurred to get ahold of these drugs. So, I don’t know exactly how to deal with it. But I think we have to look at other countries that are experimenting with novel approaches. In Switzerland, for example, if you are an opiate addict, a heroin addict, they actually write you a prescription for heroin. They give you pure heroin in a proper dose so you won’t die from it. And then they go to work fixing your life. They work on your housing. Do you have good housing? Do you have a good job? Do you have therapeutic support? And once they have solved those issues, with heavy government support, then you get off the drug. And it is much easier. They understand something really important about addiction. Which is that addiction is not a disease. An addiction is, in most cases, an adaptation to the conditions of your life.

ISAACSON: In your new book, you know, the first start of it, you start off on poppies and opiates that you actually grew in your garden. And it is an old essay you wrote, and I think, in the 1990s for Harpers (ph), but you reprinted it with some of the stuff that you had left out for legal reasons.

POLLAN: Yes.

ISAACSON: You may say so though, back then, you kind of miss what was actually happening at the time which was oxycontin was coming along and Purdue Pharmacy was doing. So, tell me about why it was so illegal to grow poppies in your backyard and yet, we were allowing this to happen by pharmaceutical companies?

POLLAN: Yes. Well, I didn’t just miss it. I mean, I missed it as a journalist. It was a great case of why we need history not just journalism because there are all these things going on in any given moment that are invisible us to. And at the late 90s, at the height of the drug war under Clinton administration, the government was tracking down and arresting people in great numbers and including for the growing of opium poppies, which by the way, many, many people have in their gardens. They’re illegal to grow unless you have the knowledge, mens rea, that they are a scheduled substance. In fact, I have some right here. These are the heads of poppies that I’m growing. Perfectly legal. Until I — unless the government can prove I have the intent of turning them into opium. I have no such intent. So, it is a very —

ISAACSON: Well, (INAUDIBLE) Michelle are very glad that you are not doing anything illegal on this show.

POLLAN: So, the government was cracking down on people making opium at home and growing opium because it is actually remarkably easy but they did it in this very quiet way. And I got tangled up in this campaign in the late ’90s and wrote a piece. But on the advice of lawyers, I cut out two sections. One where I actually made poppy tea, which is this mild narcotic. I mean, very mild. And the other is, you know, the recipe for doing and it what it is like to take it. And I had to remove that, which I always felt bad, that act of self-censorship. So, now that the drug war is fading, I hope, I felt comfortable reprinting it with the missing pages. And also, I wanted to surround the piece with some context that I didn’t know then, which is, just as you say, the very summer, I was growing opium poppies in 1996 and getting tangled up in this crazy DEA campaign. I was never arrested, but people close to me were. They were — Purdue Pharma was introducing oxycontin and really launching the biggest public health crisis related to drugs during the drug war. Which is to say FDA approved drugs. And in a way, that irony, if we can call it that, has — I think has removed a lot of the authority of the drug war, that the biggest public health problem related to drugs came out of an FDA-approved substance being sold by a pharmaceutical company, not the elicit market. There were only 5,000 opiate addicts in 1996. There are hundreds of them thousands now. And most of them appear to start with a prescription for legal opiates. So, yes. We missed the boat. We completely missed the boat there. I did and certainly the government did.

ISAACSON: When against a really hard opium-based drugs like heroin, why in the world would we even want to allow anybody to use them?

POLLAN: Well, people are going to use it regardless of whether we allow them to or not. And so, the challenge is to make that as safe as possible. The approach is known as harm reduction. You look at how do you limit the harm to individuals and to society. And prohibition isn’t necessarily the best path to reducing harms, as we’ve seen. I don’t — I’m not arguing for legalization of heroin and certainly not commercialization. I don’t want to see a situation, as we have with cannabis, where you have capitalism pushing these drugs on people. But I’m really talking about taking away the criminal penalties, funneling people into drug treatment where appropriate and dealing with the conditions of their lives that are causing them to become dictated. There’s is a lot of mental health issues too with people who become addicted. A very high percentage of addicts have suffered trauma in their lives. That comes up over and over and over again. And so, you see the need for psychotherapy is really important. And, you know, it is just a different way of thinking about addiction. For me, the thing that opened my eyes about this is something called the rat park experiments. You know, much of what we know or think we know about addictive drugs comes from these experiments we’ve all heard about, where you put a rat in a cage and they have two levers. And one administers cocaine or morphine to their veins and the other administers sugar water, and they go for the cocaine or morphine until they are addicted or dead. And so, we assume that exposure to this chemical makes you an addict. It’s a disease you catch from a dangerous chemical. But then this psychologist in British Columbia named Bruce Alexander tested this idea. He created — he thought, maybe the problem is the cage. And so, he created a beautiful cage for rats that had lots of space, that had toys and that had good food and other rats to play with or have sex with. And he found in that situation, they did not choose the morphine over and over and over again. They sampled it but they stuck with their water. And the need to become addicted, he decided, was an adaptation to their conditions. So, we have to look at the conditions of the cage, not just the chemical.

ISAACSON: But aren’t there certain things in the chemical that cause it to be addictive?

POLLAN: Yes, there are. These chemicals have cooks in them. And if you take something that’s, you know, continually releasing dopamine into your system, overtime, you are likely — you are more likely to get addicted than you would be if you didn’t have it. But what’s odd and interesting is the overwhelming majority of people, even who use hard drugs don’t become addicted. So, it is not all the chemical. Or look at cigarettes. You know, you would think if it was simply a nicotine addiction, that if you gave someone a patch or gum, nicotine gum, they would be fine. But they are not. It only works on about 17 percent of people. So, there is something else going on too. And that as much as we have to pay attention to the fact that the drug has risks and without question it has serious risks. Another example. In Vietnam, 20 percent of American servicemen were addicted to heroin. They were using it in country. And everybody worried when they got back after the war that we’d have this epidemic of heroin addicts on our streets. But look what happened, 95 percent of them simply got off of it, even without treatment. It didn’t matter if they had treatment or not. What had happened? Well, the condition of their cage had changed. They were back in their old patterns of life. They were people who were not — didn’t have the circumstances that lead to addiction anymore. And they got better. They kicked it. So, I think that that’s a very strong argument that it is circumstantial.

ISAACSON: Let’s talk about psychedelic drugs, which was the subject of your last book and the last start of your current book. What are the benefits and then what are the downside of humans using plant-based psychedelic drugs, ranging from mushrooms to LSD, I guess?

POLLAN: Yes, and a bunch of others. Ayahuasca is another one. DMT. Well, this class of drugs, you know, was made illegal in 1970 with the Controlled Substances Act. President Nixon really went to war on psychedelic drugs. So, after banning the drugs and stigmatizing them heavily in society, it’s been very disruptive. A group of scientists, beginning around the year 2000, have been re-examining their potential as therapeutic tools. And they had been used that a way in the ’50s with some — with great success actually to treat the distress of people with terminal cancer diagnoses, to treat alcoholics. And they were getting good results. But after the backlash against psychedelics, all that research stopped in the early ’70s. It was revived around 2000 in a series of experiments done at Johns Hopkins, NYU, UCLA. And they found that these are very effective treatments for depression, for addiction, for the distress of people with a cancer diagnosis. And they got remarkable results. And MDMA, which is not exactly a psychedelic but it is also an illicit recreational drug so-called, it is ecstasy or molly, they found — they have found in papers just published in the last month or two that that is very effective in treating PTSD. So, this class of drugs is undergoing this transformation really in our understanding of them. What’s exciting about them is they don’t seem to just treat symptoms of mental illness but they seem to address causes. They actually seem to lead to cures. Now, these are only phase 2 trials. They still have to go through phase 3 trials, which are much larger, but that is under way now. And I think we are moving to a complete reclassification of some of these drugs as potentially therapeutic aids.

ISAACSON: The most lyrical section of your new book, “This Is Your Mind on Plants,” involves my favorite plant-based drug. And I saw you taking some sips this morning as well.

POLLAN: My tea, yes.

ISAACSON: Caffeine. Why is it that caffeine is so socially acceptable where as other plant-based drugs are not?

POLLAN: Yes. So, that is a really interesting question. There seems to be this great arbitrary sense of like this drug we demonize, this one we allow. I mean, you know, tobacco and alcohol are more dangerous than most of the illicit drugs. I think it has to do if whether a drug is perceived as lubricating the wheels of society or mucking them up. And caffeine par excellence (ph) is the drug that lubricates our world. Social life, capitalism, you know, you don’t need any bigger explanation or argument for that. Then just look at the institution of the coffee break. OK? This is a situation where our employers actually give us a free drug, caffeine in the form of coffee or tea. And then they give us paid time in which to enjoy it. Why are they doing that? They are doing it because caffeine makes us better workers. It makes us more efficient. It makes us more focused. It gives us greater endurance. It allows us to work long hours. It is, you know — I think it is one of the preconditions for the industrial revolution. You needed a workforce that was not drunk all the time. Which was — you know, before the introduction of caffeine to Europe, which happens in the 17th century, people drank morning, noon and night because alcohol was safer than water. Water was contaminated. And the fermentation in alcohol would kill microbes. Coffee and tea come along, and you basically, to an extent, displace alcohol as the everyday drink. And you are giving people a drink that allows them to work more effectively, be more rational, think in a more linear way. It actually ushers in a new form of consciousness to the west. And that form of consciousness contributes to things like the enlightenment, the age of reason in England and the industrial revolution. So, it is a huge deal. I mean, caffeine changed our world. And you can argue for the good or for the — well, for the good of civilization, certainly, our standard of living. But it also disconnected us with nature in a way. Before caffeine, we stopped work when the sun went down. You know, our circadian rhythms were tied to that of the seasons and the nature. So, whether it was better for the species or not is a different question but it was certainly bet for civilization.

ISAACSON: Well, Michael, stay safe, be careful and thank you for joining us.

POLLAN: Thank you, Walter. Great pleasure talking to you.